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1,"In the Washington of 2016, even when the policy can be bipartisan, the politics cannot. And in that sense, this year shows little sign of ending on Dec. 31. When President Obama moved to sanction Russia over its alleged interference in the U. S. election just concluded, some Republicans who had long called for similar or more severe measures could scarcely bring themselves to approve. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the Obama measures ”appropriate” but also ”overdue” and ”a prime example of this administration’s ineffective foreign policy that has left America weaker in the eyes of the world.” Other GOP leaders sounded much the same theme. ”[We have] been urging President Obama for years to take strong action to deter Russia’s worldwide aggression, including its   operations,” wrote Rep. Devin Nunes,  . chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. ”Now with just a few weeks left in office, the president has suddenly decided that some stronger measures are indeed warranted.” Appearing on CNN, frequent Obama critic Trent Franks,  . called for ”much tougher” actions and said three times that Obama had ”finally found his tongue.” Meanwhile, at    and on Fox News, various spokesmen for   Trump said Obama’s real target was not the Russians at all but the man poised to take over the White House in less than three weeks. They spoke of Obama trying to ”tie Trump’s hands” or ”box him in,” meaning the   would be forced either to keep the sanctions or be at odds with Republicans who want to be tougher still on Moscow. Throughout 2016, Trump has repeatedly called not for sanctions but for closer ties with Russia, including cooperation in the fight against ISIS. Russia has battled ISIS in Syria on behalf of that country’s embattled dictator, Bashar Assad, bombing the besieged   city of Aleppo that fell to Assad’s forces this week. During the campaign, Trump even urged Russia to ”find” missing emails from the private server of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. He has exchanged public encomiums with Russian President Vladimir Putin on several occasions and added his doubts about the current U. S. levels of support for NATO  —   Putin’s longtime nemesis. There have also been suggestions that Trump’s extensive business dealings with various Russians are the reason he refuses to release his tax returns. All those issues have been disquieting to some Republicans for many months. Sens. John McCain,  . and Lindsay Graham,  . C. prominent senior members of the Armed Services Committee, have accepted the assessment of 17 U. S. intelligence agencies regarding the role of Russia in the hacking of various Democratic committees last year. That includes the FBI and CIA consensus that the Russian goal was not just to discredit American democracy but to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. They say the great majority of their Senate colleagues agree with them, and McCain has slated an Armed Services hearing on cyberthreats for Jan. 5. But the politicizing of the Russian actions  —   the idea that they helped Trump win  —   has also made the issue difficult for Republican leaders. It has allowed Trump supporters to push back on the intelligence agencies and say the entire issue is designed to undermine Trump’s legitimacy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has so far resisted calls for a select committee to look into the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. He has said it is enough for Sen. Richard Burr,  . C. to look into it as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Typically, Republican leaders and spokesmen say there is no evidence that the actual voting or tallying on Nov. 8 was compromised, and that is true. But it is also a red herring, as interference in those functions has not been alleged and is not the focus of the U. S. intelligence agencies’ concern. For his part, Trump has shown little interest in delving into what happened. He has cast doubt on the U. S. intelligence reports to date and suggested ”no one really knows what happened.” He also has suggested that computers make it very difficult to know who is using them. This week, Trump said it was time to ”get on with our lives and do more important things.” However, at week’s end he did agree to have an intelligence briefing on the subject next week. The   has not wanted the daily intelligence briefings available to him in recent weeks, preferring that they be given to the men he has chosen as his vice president (Mike Pence) and national security adviser (Mike Flynn) with Trump taking them only occasionally. The irony of this controversy arising at the eleventh hour of the Obama presidency can scarcely be overstated, and it defines the dilemma facing both the outgoing president and the incoming party in control. Obama appears to have been reluctant to retaliate against the Russian hacking before the election for fear of seeming to interfere with the election himself. The Republicans, meanwhile, have for years called for greater confrontation with the Russians, with Obama usually resisting. Obama did join with NATO in punishing the Russians with economic sanctions over the annexation of Crimea. Those sanctions may have been painful, coming as they did alongside falling prices for oil  —   the commodity that keeps the Russian economy afloat. On other occasions, despite Russian provocations through surrogates in Syria and elsewhere, Obama did not make overt moves to force Russia’s hand. That includes occasions when Russia was believed to be hacking critical computer systems in neighboring Ukraine, Estonia and Poland. But this week, following a chorus of confirmation from the U. S. intelligence community regarding the Russian role in computer hacking in the political campaign, Obama acted. He imposed a set of mostly diplomatic actions such as sanctioning some Russian officials, closing two diplomatic compounds and expelling 35 Russian diplomats. There may have been more damaging measures taken covertly, and some Russophobes in Washington held out hope for that. But the visible portion of the program scarcely amounted to major retribution. And Putin saw fit to diminish the Obama sanctions further by declining to respond. Although his government has steadfastly denied any interference in the U. S. election, Putin rejected his own foreign minister’s recommended package of    responses. (He even sent an invitation for U. S. diplomats to send their children to a holiday party in Moscow.) That allowed Putin to appear for the moment to be ”the bigger man,” even as he spurned Obama and kept up what has looked like a public bromance with Trump, who tweeted: ”Great move on delay (by V. Putin)   I always knew he was very smart!” At the moment it may seem that the overall Russia question amounts to the first crisis facing the Trump presidency. Whether forced by this campaign interference issue or not, Trump must grasp the nettle of a relationship Mitt Romney once called the greatest threat to U. S. security in the world. To be sure, Trump needs to dispel doubts about his ability to stand up to Putin, who has bullied and cajoled his way to center stage in recent world affairs. But Trump also seems determined to turn the page on past U. S. commitments, from free trade philosophy to funding of NATO and the United Nations. And if his Twitter account is any guide, Trump shows little concern about the conundrum others perceive to be facing him. Above all, Trump has shown himself determined to play by his own rules. A year ago, many were confident that would not work for him in the world of presidential politics. We are about to find out whether it works for him in the Oval Office."
2,"  Donald Trump has used Twitter  —   his preferred means of communication  —   to weigh in on a swath of foreign policy issues over the past few weeks. His comments give a glimpse into how his incoming administration will deal with pressing foreign matters  —   but also highlight how reactionary comments on social media can immediately spur international concern and attention. And his staff has indicated that taking to Twitter to air his concerns or, often, grievances, won’t end once he enters the Oval Office. On Wednesday, Trump blasted the U. S.’s abstention from the U. N. Security Council vote on Israeli settlements earlier this month. The tweets came just hours before Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech defending the decision and calling the continued building of settlements on Palestinian territory in the West Bank a threat to the   solution in the region. Trump’s support for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  —   who has had a fraught relationship with President Obama  —   may be the biggest forthcoming shift in immediate foreign policy between the outgoing and incoming administrations. Throughout the campaign, he pledged that his administration would be a steadfast ally of Israel. To underscore that, Netanyahu replied to one of Trump’s morning tweets, thanking him  —   and also his children Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who are close advisers  —   for their support. Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married her husband, Jared Kushner. An Israeli official told CNN the government will give the Trump administration ”detailed, sensitive information” proving that the U. S. worked to push through the resolution. The Obama administration has denied those claims. Last week, after the U. S. decided not to veto the resolution, Trump also tweeted that ”things will be different” come his inauguration, and then on Monday he again blasted the U. N. as ineffective. The Israeli settlement issue has been at the forefront in recent days, but last week Trump also weighed in on nuclear issues. In a tweet, Trump called for the U. S. to strengthen its nuclear arsenal. MSNBC’s Morning Joe reported that the   told them he wanted an ”arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass.” As the Washington Post’s Dan Zak told NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered last Friday, Trump was inconsistent in his statements about nuclear weapons during the campaign. ”Trump said, you know, he’d be the last to use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a horror. He seemed to understand what they’re capable of doing,” Zak said. ”At the same time, he said it was only a matter of time until countries like South Korea and Japan get nuclear weapons. He seemed to tacitly or not so tacitly endorse proliferation, again going against decades of international policy.” Trump also slammed China for its seizure of an unmanned U. S. Navy underwater drone, calling it ”unpresidented” in a tweet before correcting the typo in a new tweet. After talks with the Pentagon, China agreed to return the drone, but then Trump later said the country should keep it. It’s not the first time Trump has stoked tensions with China. In a stark break with protocol, Trump spoke on the phone with Taiwanese President Tsai   earlier this month. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a renegade province and doesn’t recognize it, and most other countries don’t either. The U. S. has operated under a ”one China” policy for more than four decades. Throughout the campaign, Trump blasted China for taking away U. S. jobs and claimed it was intentionally devaluing its currency to boost exports. He has blasted U. S. companies that manufacture goods in China, but as a New York Times story noted Wednesday morning, many of his daughter Ivanka’s clothing and shoe lines are made in China much of Trump’s own apparel line is also made overseas, including in China."
3,"  Donald Trump is unabashedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, a day after outgoing President Obama issued tough sanctions against the country in response to alleged cyberattacks intended to influence the U. S. elections. In a tweet Friday afternoon, Trump responded to Putin’s decision not to expel U. S. diplomats from Russia in kind after Obama ordered 35 Russian diplomats to leave the country  —   admiring the Russian leader’s strategic approach over President Obama, which is the theme of Trump’s ongoing praise of Putin. Earlier Friday, Putin instead signaled he would wait to decide how to move forward until Trump takes office, giving him someone in the Oval Office who has been much friendlier and quite generous with his praise  —   a stark break from decades of U. S. foreign policy. The Russian Embassy in the U. S. also retweeted Trump’s post, which he pinned to his Twitter timeline so it would remain at the top. Trump also posted it to Instagram. On Thursday, President Obama issued a stinging rebuke to Russia after U. S. intelligence officials concluded the country had directed hacks into Democratic National Committee emails and the personal email account of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. In a statement, Obama said ”all Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions.” Trump’s praise of Putin stands in stark contrast not just with the outgoing administration, but with top leaders of his own party. GOP congressional leaders backed Obama’s actions on Thursday, albeit criticizing the president for being too late in taking a strong stance against Russia. House Speaker Paul Ryan called the sanctions ”overdue” but ”appropriate” and said that ”Russia does not share America’s interests.” ”The Russians are not our friends,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement, calling the sanctions a ”good initial step.” Obama has pointed to the impact of past sanctions by the U. S. and Europe in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, maintaining that his approach has damaged Russia’s economy and isolated the country on the world stage. Trump released a brief statement Thursday evening in response to the latest actions by Obama against Russia simply stating that, ”It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” He said he would meet with U. S. intelligence officials regarding the cyberhacking, though Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on their findings and throughout the campaign dismissed reports that Russia was behind the attacks. Trump raised eyebrows throughout the campaign with his praise of Putin. ”He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said in an interview with MSNBC in December 2015. He was pressed by host Joe Scarborough on the killings of political figures and journalists critical of Putin and deflected. That interview came just after Putin praised Trump as ”talented.” Later in the campaign, Trump suggested Russia should find emails missing from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, which his aides later said was a joke. At the time, Trump tried distancing himself from Putin. ”I never met Putin. I don’t know who Putin is. He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius. I said, ’Thank you very much’ to the newspaper, and that was the end of it,” Trump said. But not long after, Trump was heavily criticized for saying Putin wasn’t going into Ukraine, even though his country had already annexed Crimea. The Republican nominee also repeated his praise of Putin as ”a leader far more than our president has been” at a national security town hall in early September. One of the most memorable clashes in Trump’s debates with Hillary Clinton was when the Democratic nominee accused him of being a ”puppet” of Russia. Trump shot back: ”No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet.” He often criticizes the   ”reset” with Russia that Clinton led in the early days of the Obama administration, even as Trump himself repeatedly has called for friendlier relations with Moscow. With three weeks until Inauguration Day, Trump has increasingly used his Twitter feed to weigh in on foreign policy  —   violating usual protocols where the winner of an election avoids interfering in the foreign policy actions of the sitting president. Trump’s staff has said such use of Twitter to weigh in on foreign policy won’t end once he’s in the Oval Office. So far, he’s outlined his opposition to the United States’ abstention from the U. N. Security Council vote on Israeli settlements earlier this month. Trump has also criticized China for its seizure of an unmanned U. S. Navy underwater drone, before saying the country that he’s often criticized should keep the drone. And Trump has also called for the U. S. to strengthen its nuclear arsenal and recently seemed to encourage a nuclear arms race with Russia  —   perhaps because he believes his strategic approach to Putin will work better than Obama’s."
4,"Updated at 2:50 p. m. ET, Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russia won’t be expelling U. S. diplomats in a    response to U. S. sanctions, as his foreign minister had suggested earlier Friday. Instead, he says he will decide how to move forward depending on the actions of   Donald Trump’s administration. Trump took to Twitter on Friday afternoon to praise Putin’s decision, calling it a ”great move.” On Thursday, the White House announced sanctions against Russia in response to what it called ”a   campaign of   operations” against the U. S.  —   including actions meant to interfere with the U. S. presidential election. On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went on state TV and called the sanctions ”antics” that Russia can’t leave unanswered. He said the U. S. provided no evidence for its claims of Russian cyber operations, NPR’s Lucian Kim reports. ”The Kremlin has consistently denied accusations that its hackers had broken into the Democratic National Committee or tried to sway the U. S. election,” Lucian notes. And he proposed specific counteractions Russia could take. As we reported Thursday, President Obama’s executive order calls for 35 Russian diplomats  —   described by the White House as ”intelligence operatives”  —   to be expelled from the U. S. and for two Russian facilities in the U. S. to be closed. Sanctions will also be imposed on several Russian individuals and organizations, and Obama’s statement says more actions will be taken, ”some of which will not be publicized.” Lavrov announced plans for Russia to respond in kind, as Lucian reported from Moscow. Lavrov’s plan, which needed Putin’s approval, called for 35 American diplomats to be expelled and for U. S. diplomats to ”lose access to two buildings, just as Russian diplomats will no longer be able to use two retreats in Maryland and New York,” Lucian reports. But just two hours after Lavrov’s comments, Putin announced that nothing of the sort was happening. Putin called the Obama administration’s actions provocative and said Russia had grounds for a response. He said the Kremlin would reserve the right to a countermeasure  —   but that it would not ”stoop to the level of irresponsible diplomacy,” as Lucian translated it. At least for now, no diplomats will be expelled or barred from using facilities in Moscow, he said. Any actions will wait until Trump takes office. ”It is regrettable that the Obama administration is ending its term in this manner,” Putin said. ”Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family. ”My season’s greetings also to   Donald Trump and the American people. I wish all of you happiness and prosperity.”"
5,"From photography, illustration and video, to data visualizations and immersive experiences, visuals are an important part of our storytelling at NPR. Interwoven with the written and the spoken word, images  —   another visual language  —   can create deeper understanding and empathy for the struggles and triumphs we face together. We told a lot of stories in 2016  —   far more than we can list here. So, instead, here’s a small selection of our favorite pieces, highlighting some of the work we’re most proud of, some of the biggest stories we reported, and some of the stories we had the most fun telling. Transport yourself to Rocky Mountain National Park, with all its sights and sounds, in an immersive geology lesson with Oregon State University geology professor Eric Kirby, who discusses the geologic history of the Rockies in   video. ”Today, Indians use much less energy per person than Americans or Chinese people. Many of its 1. 2   population live on roughly $2 a day. But what if all of those people had electricity at night, a refrigerator, a car? ”With ambitious goals to improve the standard of living, and 400 million people lacking reliable electricity, ’This means we need to enhance the energy supply by four to five times what it is now,’ says Ajay Mathur, a climate expert who runs the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi. He says that no matter how fast India increases its clean energy, like solar and wind, the country will probably also double its use of coal between now and 2030. ”Todd Stern, who served till last month as the top U. S. envoy on climate change, says India has a steeper hill to climb than any other country. ’There is no country, probably, with a bigger challenge  —   looking at the number of people, the level of their economic growth, the number of people who don’t have access to electricity,’ he says.” Can India’s Sacred But ’Dead’ Yamuna River Be Saved? India’s Big Battle: Development Vs. Pollution, In India’s Sundarbans, People And Tigers Try To Coexist In A Shrinking Space, ”Trying to understand the Trump Organization is a daunting task.   Donald Trump has not released his tax returns, so the best clues about his privately held business interests come from a financial disclosure form he released in May. ”The document covers scores of pages with small type, and suggests he is financially involved with hundreds of companies, including some that simply license his name. ”A dive into that disclosure form, submitted to the Office of Government Ethics, shows his largest sources of revenue are golf courses and   rents. But his interests are far flung, and include media, retail, entertainment and much more. ”Those business interests are affected by government agencies and policies. NPR scoured this document to create an overview of some of his business assets and operations (excluding debts) and the possible areas where conflicts may arise.” The protests at the Standing Rock Reservation, which started in early 2016, had small roots but grew into the thousands, drawing support from Native Americans from across the country, as well as activists who joined in solidarity against the proposed route of the   Dakota Access Pipeline just north of the reservation. In December, those protests won a concession from the federal government: The Army Corps of Engineers announced it would deny the permit necessary to build the oil pipeline in that area. In Their Own Words: The ’Water Protectors’ Of Standing Rock, Protesters Mark A Solemn Thanksgiving Day At Standing Rock, Protesters, Police Still Clashing Over Disputed North Dakota Pipeline, N. D. Pipeline Protester: ’It’s About Our Rights As Native People’ ”Up to 1 in 5 kids living in the U. S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year. So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse. And yet most children  —   nearly 80 percent  —   who need mental health services won’t get them. ”Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out. ”Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it’s a role many schools are not prepared for.” ”Grapefruit’s bitterness can make it hard to love. Indeed, people often smother it in sugar just to get it down. And yet Americans were once urged to sweeten it with salt. ”Ad campaigns from the first and second world wars tried to convince us that ’Grapefruit Tastes Sweeter With Salt!’ as one 1946 ad for Morton’s in Life magazine put it. The pairing, these ads swore, enhanced the flavor. ”In our   world, these curious culinary time capsules raise the question: Does salt really make grapefruit taste sweeter? And if this practice was once common, why do few people seem to eat grapefruit this way today?” Rio de Janeiro hosted the world’s elite athletes in an Olympics that promised transcendent moments in sports  —   and potential controversies outside of the competition. The Summer Games began Aug. 5, and more than 10, 000 athletes from 206 countries participated. From concerns over the Zika virus and Russian athletes banned on doping charges to incredible wins by the U. S. women’s gymnastics team and sweet moments of   support, the 2016 Olympics was one of the biggest events  —   and biggest stories  —   of the year. ’A Fantasy Of A Fantasy’: U. S. Fencer Jason Pryor On Reaching The Olympics, In Rio’s Favelas,   Benefits From Olympics Have Yet To Materialize, How The Olympic Medal Tables Explain The World, ”Philando Castile spent his driving career trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of traffic stops, fines, court appearances, revocations and reinstatements, raising questions about bias, race and luck. ”Castile’s trouble with traffic stops began when he still had his learner’s permit. He was stopped a day before his 19th birthday. From there, he descended into a seemingly endless cycle of traffic stops, fines, court appearances, late fees, revocations and reinstatements in various jurisdictions. ”Court records raise big questions: Was Castile targeted by police? Or was he just a careless or unlucky driver? ”An NPR analysis of those records shows that the    cafeteria worker who was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minn. suburb, was stopped by police 46 times and racked up more than $6, 000 in fines. Another curious statistic: Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car  —   things like speeding or having a broken muffler.” During a week in Cleveland, photographer Gabriella Demczuk explored the ways that people embraced and challenged the Republican Party’s mission in this election  —   both from inside and outside the party. Then in Philadelphia, Demczuk continued her exploration of the fractures in America’s political system, examining the Democratic Party’s attempt to make itself ”stronger together.” True Believers, Protesters And Trump: Scenes From Cleveland, Dissent, Drama And Unity At The Democratic Convention, ” ’With recent events and political environment, these weapons will be harder to get a hold of.’ ’This is what your   dreams it could be when it grows up.’ ’I can meet . .. near the FL Mall in Orlando or any other time.” ”Cash is king.’ ”These classified advertisements for   weapons were listed on Armslist, a website where anyone can advertise a firearm they’d like to sell, and anyone can contact a seller with an offer to buy. The site is legal. But there’s no way to know whether buyers and sellers who meet through Armslist are following federal, state or local background check rules. ”We wanted to see how many   firearms  —   defined here as handguns and rifles able to rapidly fire a large number of bullets, one shot per trigger pull, without having to reload  —   can be currently found on Armslist, and how quickly new listings appear. This provides a window into the difficulty of regulating access to a type of weapon frequently used in mass shootings.” Our favorite albums of the year draw from all of the genres we cover at NPR Music, from rock, pop and   to classical, jazz, electronic and international artists. These are the records NPR Music couldn’t stop playing  —   albums that speak to a moment and a lifetime, that party, and that exist in their own worlds. Our list of the year’s best songs may begin with Beyoncé and end with Drake, but between those two stars you’ll find a   mix that celebrates all of the music we love. These are the pop anthems, rallying cries, party jams, riff rockers, perfumed piano pieces and emotional exorcisms that we loved to share this year. ”Across the country, private organizations,   groups and individuals quietly have been working to ease the plight of Syrian refugees. More than 11, 000 have arrived in the U. S. this year, fulfilling a pledge by the Obama administration. That figure far exceeds the number of Syrian refugees accepted during the previous four years of the Syrian war, and the White House is calling for a big bump in the overall number of refugees next year. ”It had been a long journey for Osama and Ghada and their four kids, who are among the nearly 5 million Syrians who have fled their homeland since the war began in 2011. They survived the war in Syria and had struggled for three years as refugees in Jordan when they were notified by the U. N. refugee agency, UNHCR, that they had been accepted for resettlement in the U. S.” ”There are huge gaps in school funding between affluent and   districts. And, with evidence that money matters, especially for disadvantaged kids, something has to change. ”School Money is a   nationwide collaboration between NPR’s Ed Team and 20 member station reporters exploring how states pay for their public schools and why many are failing to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students.” Is There A Better Way To Pay For America’s Schools? Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem, President Obama spoke to NPR as he prepared to leave Washington for the holidays, reflecting on the year that was, the 2016 campaign and other news, plus revealing what he’s hearing from citizens. In the   exit interview, NPR’s Steve Inskeep asked Obama about Russian interference in the U. S. election, executive power, the future of the Democratic party and his future role."
6,"I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those   beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up like a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure. But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up. I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t, either. So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the   of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly. I like the bridge pose, where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt. I purely hate the eagle pose, where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot I drop like a sprayed mosquito. The teacher is forgiving: ”Yogi’s choice,” she says, meaning that I’m now a yogi and I can do what I want. She says we’re not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere. I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs. I’m not going to wring out my internal organs. Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts  —   a phrase that gives me   creeps. The best is the sponge or corpse pose, which is what it sounds like. I’m fully competent at being a sponge, except you’re supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains. I just breathe on both sides. Then we sit on some     blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed. The teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it’s no such thing. So I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi’s choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough. I’m OK with all this, even the pretend science which I’m free to ignore or better yet, to subject to my fellow Last Word on Nothing blogger Michelle Nijhuis’ stellar B******* Prevention Protocol (BPP) which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven’t read, clipped out and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony. Some b. s. you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain. But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive. Does yoga work? I’d answer this, but working through the full BPP takes time. So I took three shortcuts. One, I searched for yoga and efficacy in PubMed, the database of the National Library of Medicine, and skimmed the titles of review articles. No answer, or rather, too many answers: yoga for cancer, chronic low back pain, diabetes, cystitis, sleep disorders, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, multiple sclerosis. And that was just on the first page. The second shortcut was no better. I searched the website of the National Academies Press, which publishes independent scientific analyses for the government. Yoga showed up in studies on pain management, alternative medicine, improving bus operators’ health and teens’ sleep habits, obesity, fitness, Gulf War syndrome, astronaut care and PTSD. The third shortcut was the Cochrane Reviews, independent reviews of medical information: same thing  —   yoga for asthma, cardiovascular disease, epilepsy. Bill Broad has probably answered all these questions in his book The Science of Yoga, but I’m not going to read it. My rule for any one thing that affects so many different diseases and functions is that it affects none of them and completely fails the BPP. Or else it affects something huge and general like mood or immune function that in turn affects everything else. What with lots of kinds of yogas, lots of different diseases, lots of different kinds of studies and    entities like mood or immune function, I’m giving up. I haven’t a clue whether yoga helps at all, let alone how. You’re on your own here. For myself, I’ll keep going, not because it’s not b. s. but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains. Besides, I’m finally getting competent at the infant version of the sun salute and I’ve learned never to look at the other people in the class. But I have no plans to advance to Beginning Yoga. Ann Finkbeiner is a science writer whose books include After the Death of a Child and The Jasons. She is   of the blog The Last Word on Nothing, where this essay first appeared. "
7,"With a   who has publicly supported the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, suggested that climate change is a hoax dreamed up by the Chinese, and appointed to his Cabinet a retired neurosurgeon who doesn’t buy the theory of evolution, things might look grim for science. Yet watching Patti Smith sing ”A Hard Rain’s   Fall” live streamed from the Nobel Prize ceremony in early December to a room full of physicists, chemists and physicians  —   watching her twice choke up, each time stopping the song altogether, only to push on through all seven wordy minutes of one of Bob Dylan’s most beloved songs  —   left me optimistic. Taking nothing away from the very real anxieties about future funding and support for science, neuroscience in particular has had plenty of promising leads that could help fulfill Alfred Nobel’s mission to better humanity. In the spirit of optimism, and with input from the Society for Neuroscience, here are a few of the noteworthy neuroscientific achievements of 2016. One of the more fascinating fields of neuroscience of late entails mapping the crosstalk between our biomes, brains and immune systems. In July, a group from the University of Virginia published a study in Nature showing that the immune system, in addition to protecting us from a daily barrage of potentially infectious microbes, can also influence social behavior. The researchers had previously shown that a type of white blood cells called T cells influence learning behavior in mice by communicating with the brain. Now they’ve shown that blocking T cell access to the brain influences rodent social preferences. It appears that interferon, an immune system factor released from T cells, is at least partly responsible for the findings. A single injection of interferon into the mice’s cerebrospinal fluid, the clear, protective fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord, was enough to restore social behaviors. Lead author Jonathan Kipnis from the University of Virginia speculates that there might be an evolutionary linkage here  —   one protecting us from the increased pathogen exposure that comes with socializing. He also says the findings could help improve our understanding and treatment of brain disorders. Of course these findings were in rodents, but earlier work by Kipnis suggests that the brain and immune system communicate in similar ways in humans. Major advances were also made this year in joining human with machine. In October 2015, Hanneke de Bruijne, a    Dutch woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease, received a brain implant that would allow her to communicate simply by thinking. Eighty percent of patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, as the condition is also known, ultimately have trouble communicating because of muscle paralysis. At its extreme, this paralysis results in a tragic state called   syndrome, in which patients remain fully aware but can’t express themselves they become locked inside their own bodies. The new therapy, which comes on the heels of similar work out of East Tennessee State University, was developed by a team from the University Medical Center Utrecht in collaboration with Medtronic. It consists of four electrodes implanted over the motor region of the brain that connect to a wireless transmitter implanted in the chest. After 28 weeks of training, the device was able to recognize brain activity patterns that occur with thinking about typing a particular letter. Though de Bruijne’s muscles still can’t move, this   interface can now translate her brain waves  —   or her ”thoughts”  —   into text. Among the biggest neuroscience drug advances of the year was the Food and Drug Administration’s Dec. 23 approval of Biogen’s Spinraza, or nusinersen, the first treatment for spinal muscular atrophy. Spinal muscular atrophy is the No. 1 genetic cause of death in infants. Those affected by the devastating disorder carry a gene mutation that renders them unable to produce a protein essential to survival of neurons in the spinal cord. Gradually stripped of their abilities to walk, eat and breathe, most children struck with the disease don’t make it past 2 years old. Spinraza is a gene therapy that boosts the production of the essential protein. Despite possible side effects, which include bleeding complications, kidney toxicity and infection, the drug appears to work so well that two recent clinical trials were stopped early, as it was deemed unethical to withhold treatment from babies assigned to placebo groups. As with many other drugs for rare diseases, the price of Spinraza is expected to be high to help recoup research costs  —   perhaps as high as $250, 000 per year. The Alzheimer’s disease community also received welcome news this year. After hundreds of failed trials of potential treatments over the past couple of decades, the experimental drug aducanumab, also produced by Biogen, was found in early trials to slow the cognitive decline that comes with Alzheimer’s. And then there was the ongoing resurgence of psychedelic medicine. It’s been pretty well established that the hallucinogenic anesthetic ketamine may be an effective antidepressant. Now we have some potentially groundbreaking findings for psilocybin, the active compound in ”magic mushrooms.” Two clinical trials found that just a single high dose of the drug is effective at treating symptoms of both depression and anxiety in    patients. Scientists are unsure just how psilocybin works to relieve mental duress. But one theory holds that it disrupts   thought and fixation  —   common in those suffering from depression  —   allowing selfless cognition and experience to occur. In both trials the intensity of the patients’ ”mystical experiences” correlated with the decrease in symptoms. Both research groups strongly caution against recreational use or   with magic mushrooms, but the findings have many experts and institutions reconsidering the   of negative counterculture stigma surrounding psilocybin. The list of neuroscientific advances from the past 12 months goes on: The Human Connectome Project gave us the most complete map of the cerebral cortex to date a Canadian group revealed in part how fear memories are formed scientists at Mount Sinai charted the neurocircuitry behind social aggression. Still, the field of neuroscience remains, at best, in adolescence. As British novelist Matt Haig wrote in The Telegraph in 2015, ”Neuroscience is a baby science. . .. We know more about the moons of Jupiter than what is inside of our skulls.” As the year’s abundant advances attest, there is plenty of room left for discoveries in the coming year and beyond  —   and plenty of creative, eager researchers to make them. Bret Stetka is a writer based in New York and an editorial director at Medscape. His work has appeared in Wired, Scientific American and on The Atlantic. com. He graduated from University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2005. He’s also on Twitter: @BretStetka"
8,"I was standing by the airport exit, debating whether to get a snack, when a young man with a round face approached me. I focused hard to decipher his words. In a thick accent, he asked me to help him find his suitcase. As we walked to baggage claim, I learned his name: Edward Murinzi. This was his very first plane trip. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he’d just arrived to begin his American life. Beside the luggage carousel at Washington’s Reagan Airport, he looked out at the two lanes of traffic and the concrete wall beyond. ”So this is America?” he said. From finding his bag to finding his apartment and finding a job, there was a lot for Edward to learn. Later, he acknowledged that while he was standing in the airport looking for his luggage, he felt the magnitude of the task before him. He says questions were zipping around his head: ”How will I start? You get scared. How will I manage?” After he found his bag and I called his caseworker to come and pick him up, we parted ways. He thanked me for being his ”Airport Teacher.” But, it seemed to me, he needed a teacher for the rest of America. That might as well be Claire Mukundente’s job description  —   not in Edward’s case but for many other refugees. Halfway across the country, in Chicago, Mukundente works for the   Association, a   nonprofit, and spends her days visiting new refugees and helping them adapt to a new country. How Does The Stove Work? Today, she’s headed into a   apartment building on the city’s north side. On the second floor, Alexia Mukambalaga and six of her family members share a   apartment. They arrived two weeks ago from Congo  —   by way of Rwanda and Niger. The family crowds around a folding table for lunch  —   some standing, others sitting. Within minutes of meeting them, they ask Mukundente why the food in America tastes like pineapples. It’s so sweet, they tell her. Mukundente says food is always one of the first lessons: How to get it, how to cook it and what’s healthy. She helps the family figure out what goes in the freezer and fridge, and how to use a stove. Mukundente says many Congolese have spent more than a decade in refugee camps, so a lot of the stuff in a kitchen is brand new to them. Grocery stores, too. ”Shopping can be a big deal, especially for your own food,” says Claire Mukundente. She often accompanies new arrivals to the grocery store, explaining how to evaluate dozens of different cereal brands and why it’s important to avoid the sugary drinks. Then she moves on to other lessons: the banking system and bus routes, social norms and gender dynamics. Mukundente says they talk about ”almost everything.” She says these families have learned a lot shuttling between countries and refugee camps, but when they come to a place like Chicago, many of those skills don’t translate. But Mukundente insists that she’s not their teacher. Instead she says, ”I see them as myself. Like me, when I came.” Claire Mukundente fled Rwanda in the 1990s during the genocide. And after traveling through seven countries, she arrived in Chicago. She cleaned hotel rooms, tried to learn English and scrambled to find daycare for her three kids. Ten years ago, she decided to start teaching other refugees what she’d learned. But not all refugees have someone like Claire Mukundente. Three months after I met Edward at the airport, I visited his   apartment. It was about 30 minutes outside Washington, and he shared it with several other refugees. (He has since moved to Louisville, Ky.) Sitting in the living room that doubled as his bedroom, he told me that soon after arriving he realized he needed to be his own teacher. So, he started observing everything. ”I tried to observe very silently,” he said in the room that functions as his living room, bedroom, kitchen and dining room. He learned to read a map and a bank statement. But Edward says there was more he called them ”invisible lessons  —   ideas.” The biggest one? ”Time was paramount to every success in America.” Edward said that, during his 20 years in a refugee camp in Uganda, time had never before been linked to money. Just being a person meant you got a food ration, he said. But here, he got a job  —   as a line worker  —   and he was paid hourly. ”Time was important. Important!” He told me that things have been hard during his first three months  —   America hadn’t quite been the Promised Land he expected. ”I remember the story in the Bible: The Exodus.” Back in the refugee camp, Edward said, he always thought life would be easy in America, akin to the Biblical land of milk and honey. But now, he finds himself having to remember that the Israelites struggled, as refugees and newcomers. Eventually though, they learned to adapt to life in a new land. Edward says he hopes he will too."
9,"If movies were trying to be more realistic, perhaps the way to summon Batman shouldn’t have been the    —   it should have been the bat squeak. New research from the Bat Lab for   at Tel Aviv University found that bats are ”vocalizing” more information than many researchers previously thought. And researchers were able to decipher what the bats were squeaking to each other about  —   often they were bickering over things like food, sleep and mating. ”It’s not as if now we can understand everything. It’s not as if we have a    dictionary,” says Dr. Yossi Yovel, a   at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Bat Lab. ”But what we’ve found is that this cacophony that you could hear . .. actually contains much more information than previously believed. So, all of [this] shouting, all of these vocalizations that were previously all categorized as aggressive vocalizations, we can now divide them,” Yovel tells NPR’s Scott Simon. ”For example, we can classify whether the bats are arguing over food or over mating or over sleeping position or over other contexts,” he says. ”We can recognize the individuals vocalizing and we can even, to some extent, say who they are vocalizing to.” In a recent study, Yovel, along with researchers Yosef Prat and Mor Taub, monitored groups of Egyptian fruit bats with   audio and video recording for two and a half months. They say they analyzed almost 15, 000 bat vocalizations. Egyptian fruit bats are one of a small number of animal species to communicate    within their species, instead of ”broadcasting” their message. Bats do more than argue, Yovel says. But Egyptian fruit bats spend a lot of time arguing. ”Nearly all of the communication calls of the Egyptian fruit bat in the roost are emitted during aggressive pairwise interactions, involving squabbling over food or perching locations and protesting against mating attempts,” the researchers write. ”What they’re saying is stuff like: Why did you wake me up? Get out of my way,” Yovel says. ”In the case of mating, it’s usually the female protesting against a male who is trying to mate with her.” Context in bat communication was one focus of the study. If we humans say the word ”apple,” we imagine certain characteristics just from that word alone: a red color, a round shape, a certain taste, Yovel explains. ”This is something that is [a] very very important factor in human communication.” He says animals almost never demonstrate this ability. But their research shows that vocalizations between bats have more of this type of context than researchers knew about before. One goal of the research on bats is to apply it toward general knowledge of how different animals  —   including humans  —   communicate. ”It’s all part of a big question: How complex is animal communication?” Yovel says. ”Identifying context specific calls can be a first step toward the recovering of meaning in animal communication,” the researchers write. ”Understanding the encapsulated information in animal vocalizations is central to the study of sociality, communication, and language evolution.” So is there a   translator in the works? ”Step by step we are getting closer to deciphering their communication,” Yovel says. ”I don’t think we will  —   not in my time, at least  —   be able to really talk with them.”"
10,"Eighteen years ago, on New Year’s Eve, David Fisher visited an old farm in western Massachusetts, near the small town of Conway. No one was farming there at the time, and that’s what had drawn Fisher to the place. He was scouting for farmland. ”I remember walking out [to the fallow fields] at some point,” Fisher recalls. ”And in the moonlight  —   it was all snowy  —   it was like a blank canvas.” On that blank canvas, Fisher’s mind painted a picture of what could be there alongside the South River. He could see horses tilling the land  —   no tractors, no big machinery  —   and vegetable fields, and children running around. This is David Fisher’s American Dream. It may not be the conventional American Dream of upward economic mobility. But dreams like his have a long tradition in this country. Think of the Puritans and the Shakers and the Amish. These American dreams are the uncompromising pursuit of a difficult ideal. The scene that David Fisher imagined, on the New Year’s Eve almost two decades ago, has turned into reality. It’s called Natural Roots Farm. To get to the farm, you have to leave the motorized world behind. Cross the South River on a swinging footbridge, and there in front of you are seven acres of growing vegetables, neatly laid out in rows. It’s early in the fall, on this day the hillside beyond the fields is glowing with red and yellow leaves. It’s idyllic, almost magical. Anna Maclay is out checking on the fields. ”I came originally as an apprentice in 2002,” she tells me. ”Totally fell in love with the land. I just thought, ’I want to live here!” Her wish came true in a way she hadn’t expected. She and David Fisher fell in love and got married. They now have two   children: Leora and Gabriel. It’s a harvest day on the farm and David and Anna have some help. They’re joined by Emmet Van Driesche, who lives nearby on his own farm, and two apprentices, Kyle Farr and Calixta Killander, who are living and working on the farm for a year. Together, they’ll need to fill a wagon with spinach, beets, broccoli and a host of other vegetables and herbs. About two hundred customers have bought shares in the farm’s harvest. Among them is Maggie Potter. She arrives with her children to pick up her produce. ”It’s not only having the vegetables  —   the nourishment for our own bodies. It’s creating community, making friends along the way,” she says. If this all sounds like a vision of peace and contentment, take a closer look. Watch David Fisher at work. While the apprentices stick together in the fields, chatting as they work, Fisher works by himself, cutting greens off just above the soil, hacking out heads of broccoli. He moves quickly, with purpose in every step, almost never stopping, from daybreak until dusk. And when you talk with him, it becomes even clearer: He’s a very driven man. He’s driven, in fact, by a kind of desperation. And to understand it, you need to know his life story. David Fisher grew up in the suburbs north of New York City, in the village of Pleasantville, in Westchester County. He spent summers at a rustic camp in the Adirondacks. ”You could only get there by boat, you couldn’t drive there,” Fisher says. ”No electricity, bathe in the lake, live all summer in a tent.” Then, at the end of every summer, he’d get on a train back to Grand Central Station and it would hit him. ”Noise, steel and concrete and lights everywhere,” he recalls. It was an overwhelming sensory experience, and for young David, it wasn’t a pleasant one. When he was 15, that    paradigm shift was more than he could take. He was overtaken by despair over the environmental fate of the earth. ”I was like   this is craziness. The whole thing. Civilization as I’m seeing it is absurd. The way that humans are living on, consuming, destroying the earth is absurd,” he says. ”The only thing I could see to do was pack up and flee.” He determined to drop out of high school his parents forced him to get a diploma, graduating early. Then, Fisher got as far as he possibly could from houses and highways and smokestacks. He hung out in the west, skiing and backpacking, immersing himself in nature to ”soothe his soul,” as he puts it. He loved it, but he still knew, in the back of his mind, that it was just an escape. It wasn’t an enduring path out of his despair about the world. One day, when Fisher was 20 years old, he was back on the East Coast, visiting a friend at Hampshire College, here in western Massachusetts, and he wandered into the college’s small organic farm. It was another overwhelming sensory experience, but the opposite of Grand Central Station: ”Autumn leaves raining down, and the lush fields of vegetables and cover crops. Open the barn door, and the tables are lined with this abundance of earthy, healthy, vital produce. And I was like, ’Wow! ’” He felt like he was seeing, for the first time, a way to live immersed in the natural world, and also be productive. To make a living. He started learning to farm, from other farmers. And then he found this land near the town of Conway. You can call this farm utopian, if utopia is the kind of place where you work extra hard and live very frugally so that you can grow food in a way that’s more in harmony with nature. For instance: Half of the land on this farm is always devoted to ”cover crops” that don’t produce any food that customers will buy. The purpose of these crops is simply to protect and nourish the soil. His most defining choice, though, is to rely on horses as the primary source of power on the farm. Two of them, Pat and Lady, pull a wagon full of vegetables from the fields across the river and up a hill to a small barn beside the road where families come to pick up their produce. Kyle Farr, one of the apprentices, holds the reins and directs the horses with cryptic words and sucking sounds. David Fisher is committed to horses partly because it makes the farm more  . ”It’s so direct,” he says. He doesn’t have to rely on fossil fuels. ”The fuel is there in the grass. The power is right there, in the form of these live animals.” Also, he says, horses force you to work at a more natural rhythm. But there’s a cost, in the form of time. Horses need care and feeding every day, whether they’re pulling a wagon that day or not. Fisher learned this past year that two former apprentices at Natural Roots Farm who had learned to work with horses here and then adopted this method on their own farms, recently went back to farming with tractors. It bothers him. But he’s not giving up. Because for him, working with horses is one small answer to the despair that led him here. ”The environmental crisis is heavy. It’s a heavy, heavy situation. And to find any hope of effecting some sort of change, or examples [of change] is critical to my emotional, psychological ” he says. Over breakfast that day, I ask David, ”Are you a perfectionist?” He starts to deny it, but Anna cuts in. ”Yes!” she says. He and Anna both tell me that David’s driving ambition to build a better farm  —   constantly working, always starting some new project  —   has led to conflict between them. ”This is the   disagreement,” Anna says softly. ”I always think that we need to take on less, you know?” They’ve managed to keep this farm afloat for almost two decades now, but ”it’s still a serious struggle to make the economics of it work out,” David says. And apart from worries about money, they have to manage the logistics of a complicated life  —   200 families depending on a steady supply of produce from their farm, children in school and playing soccer, and their car parked on the other side of the river, a   walk from their rustic home. ”There’s not a lot that’s easy about living this way,” she says. ”But most of it feels pretty right. And I guess that’s turned out to be more important, for me.” Those are the words they often use, talking about their choices. This small, alternative American Dream, for them, just feels right."
11,"For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. I played the game through the first time in something like a perfect state of awe and terror. Enraptured is, I think, the word that best describes it. Carried away completely into this ruined, beautiful world and the story of Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us. Normally such a completionist  —   so obsessed with exploring every hide and hollow in these imaginary worlds I throw myself into  —   in this instance I simply rolled with the narrative. Ran when running was proper. Slogged through dark and rain and snow and sunshine. Stood my bloody ground when left with no other options. Joel came to love Ellie, his surrogate daughter, and Ellie came to love Joel, the only father she’d ever known. And I (a father, with a daughter roughly Ellie’s age, with Ellie’s   vocabulary and Ellie’s strange, discordant humor) loved Ellie, too. So when I reached the endgame and was presented with a terrible choice (no spoilers . .. yet) I drew my guns and slaughtered my way to the end credits, alight with fury and sure knowledge that I’d made the only choice I could. Second run: The beats are all the same, the story a known thing. Joel and Ellie fight zombies and soldiers and bandits and madmen. They lose friends and see sunrises and, this time, I play with an awful wisdom. Cassandra’s curse. I know how this story ends and I have made up my mind that, this time, I will make the other choice. The right one (morally, mathematically, humanistically) and so I walk with ghosts the whole way, right up to the end, and then . .. And then I make the exact same choice again. I can’t make the other. It hurts too much. Because that is how good the storytelling is in The Last Of Us. It makes you care so deeply for a   bunch of pixels in the shape of a teenage girl that you will damn the whole world twice just for her. (OK, so now we’re gonna get spoilery. Fair warning.) The Last Of Us is a zombie story. It is incredibly derivative, borrows liberally from a hundred different books and movies, is structurally simplistic,   melodramatic, viscerally violent, and despite all this (or, arguably, because of all this) tells one of the most moving, affecting and satisfying stories you’ll find anywhere. At its heart, it is the story of Joel  —   a broken and   thief and smuggler living 20 years deep into a zombie apocalypse. He and his partner, Tess, are forced into a job that requires them to smuggle a young girl out of the Boston quarantine zone and deliver her to an army of revolutionaries because, of course, this girl is The One  —   the only person ever to be immune to the   that turns infected people into gross, murderous mushroom zombies. That young girl is Ellie. And, unsurprisingly, the job does not exactly go as planned. If this all sounds familiar, that’s fine because it is familiar. The   is a stock frame  —   tested and dependable. It is a road trip story in the same way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is, or Mad Max: Fury Road. Go from point A to point B, survive the journey, get there whole. And there’s nothing at all wrong with a simple narrative architecture when it is being used to support complex character arcs, as it is here. The Last Of Us is a simple road trip story underneath, existing in service to the complex and rich redemption story on top. All the stakes and ruination are laid out in the first 10 minutes, in a prologue so powerful that it’ll break your heart even if you don’t have one. Joel loses his daughter on the night the world ends, his little girl dying in his arms, under the gun of a panicked soldier trying to hold back the infected. When Ellie floats into his life two decades later, the jaded gamer in you says, Oh, so here’s where he learns to love again. . .. And you’re right. But then you watch it happen  —   in tiny moments like when Ellie, blowing off caution, walks a rickety plank between two buildings and Joel glances briefly down at the watch he wears, a gift from his daughter that he’s been wearing for 20 years  —   and you participate in it happening (protecting her, defending her, eventually becoming her for an extended chunk of the game in a brilliant bit of perspective switching) and it all just clicks. This is a love story  —   one of the best    narratives ever told. Which is when that ending comes and you are presented with the ultimate parental nightmare scenario: Will you sacrifice the life of your child to save the world? Not a stranger, a friend or even a spouse, but your own daughter (which is what Ellie is now  —   Joel’s daughter, blood or no). Because in Ellie lives the cure to the mushroom zombie plague. But in order to create it, she has to die. I started a third playthrough before writing this piece. I am walking slow, taking my time, listening to Ellie read from her joke book, watching her swarmed by fireflies on the outskirts of Boston and admiring the natural beauty and deep environmental storytelling of the game. Nature has reclaimed most of this abandoned world, giving us an unusual apocalypse run riot with wildflowers. And while I have not made it to the end yet, I know it’s coming. I know the choice I’m going to have to make. And I know exactly what I’m going to do. Jason Sheehan is an   a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book."
12,"For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re starting an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. In the beginning, I breathed only methane. Seeded onto a pinkish and poisoned world of scouring winds, I stumbled from my broken spaceship, unsure of my footing or anything else. I saw strange plants moving, the stalagmite spikes of ore deposits like plutonium fangs, the wreckage of my crash, dust. When I moved, I heard nothing but the crunch of my heavy boots and the occasional chime from my spacesuit  —   followed, always, by the weirdly autotuned computer voice in my ear saying, ”Environmental protection falling . ..” And hers was the only human voice left to speak in the whole of this impossible universe. And I was hooked. No Man’s Sky (released in its original form in August of 2016 by indie studio Hello Games, and updated just a couple weeks ago) is a bauble, an amazement that borders on magical in its opening hours, becomes almost hypnotically comfortable at a certain point, then simply majestic in its scope and incomprehensible size. It is, at its most elemental, a procedurally generated universe in a box  —   one containing 18 quintillion planets, all unique, all created, sculpted and populated by nothing more than random numbers and some math. Because of this hugeness, it is a lonely game. Land on a planet and it is yours alone. Land on ten, twenty, a hundred, and you will likely never see anything more than the traces left behind by other amateur spacemen who came this way before you. But the loneliness is part of the point of it. It is a game created to make you feel small in the face of the (nearly) infinite. So as I play, I do so in a universe empty of man. Or at least so close to empty that the difference between truth and the fiction I am building in my head is statistically null. No Man’s Sky comes in at polar ends of a long narrative spectrum. On the one side, there’s the   story of the game, which is just terrible. At worst, it is incomprehensible   gibberish about ancient civilizations and lost artifacts. And at it’s best, it ain’t much better  —   failing on many basic levels to tell a   about the   universe being a simulation (which, you know, it is) where the player (also called ”the Traveler”) is tasked by its creator to explore his way to the center of everything, essentially making the player a kind of   landlord checking in on all the tenants. But on the other hand, it is also the best game I have ever experienced for   storytelling. To crack the hissing cockpit of my spaceship and peek out through the trees of an alien forest, to run from robots or watch herds of galloping slugs running across the plains of a   desert  —   these are experiences made for children of the Dark Ages who gobbled pulp   like candy and lay back on cold hills, staring up into the   sky and dreaming of what was out there for   geeks who’ve never wanted for anything so much as they have for a spaceship, a jetpack, a ray gun and unlimited horizons. The only human in the universe, I played in a silence that was nearly complete, and loved No Man’s Sky precisely for its emptiness and for the way that even the few aliens I ran into spoke no language I knew. Granted, this changes. You learn words. You upgrade your stuff. If you’re me, you ignore the skeleton construct of the game’s story and simply roam. With the new update, I was suddenly granted the ability to build bases, to run freighters between stars, but that almost felt like work and I just shrugged and ignored most of it for the joys of simply romping around the ’verse, telling myself stories that were better than anything that lived within the construct of the game’s narrative. I could spend days hunting for just the right beach, the right view, or playing alien zoologist, meticulously cataloguing the   space dinosaurs on one world, then scare myself half to death by stumbling upon sea monsters at the bottom of a shallow, purple sea, jump into my ship, blast off, run from some pirates, and be bounding through the snows of an ice planet ten minutes later. The quest for the center of the universe, for the   of No Man’s Sky’s story, was far less interesting than the small, quiet, private stories that lived over every hill and horizon on every new world I discovered. No Man’s Sky does not tell a great story, but it contains multitudes of them. And any time it begins to grow dull or rote or predictable, all I have to do is look up, into the starry sky, and wonder what else might be out there. And then go find out for myself. Jason Sheehan is an   a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book."
13,"The Colorado River is like a giant bank account for seven different states. Now it’s running short. For decades, the river has fed growing cities from Denver to Los Angeles. A lot of the produce in supermarkets across the country was grown with Colorado River water. But with climate change, and severe drought, the river is reaching a crisis point, and communities at each end of it are reacting very differently. Just outside Boulder, Colo. surrounded by an evergreen forest, is Gross Reservoir. Beverly Kurtz and Tim Guenthner live just out of eyesight from the giant   dam. And that’s on purpose. ”I could have built a house that overlooked the reservoir,” Kurtz says. But, she says, ”It’s choking off a wild river, which in my opinion is never a good thing.” Kurtz and Guenthner have a newfound job in retirement: fighting a proposed expansion to Gross Reservoir’s dam. The utility that owns it, Denver Water, wants to raise the concrete dam 131 feet. ”It doesn’t make any sense to build a   dam and disrupt the environment here when down the line, that’s not going to solve the problem,” Kurtz says. The problem is that Colorado’s population will nearly double by 2050. Future residents will need more water. Denver Water CEO Jim Lochhead says more storage is part of the solution. It’s also an insurance policy against future drought. ”From Denver Water’s perspective, if we can’t provide clean, reliable, sustainable water 100 years from now to our customers, we’re not doing our job,” Lochhead says. Demand for Colorado River water is already stretched thin. So it may sound crazy that places like Colorado and Wyoming want to develop more water projects. Legally, that’s something they are entitled to do. Wyoming is studying whether to store more water from a Colorado River tributary. ”We feel we have some room to grow, but we understand that growth comes with risk,” says Pat Tyrrell, who oversees Wyoming’s water rights. Risk because in 10 or 20 years there may not be enough water to fill up expanded reservoirs. A   drought has dramatically decreased water supply even as demand keeps growing. And climate change could make this picture worse. It makes Tyrrell’s job feel impossible. ”You understand the reality today of a low water supply,” he says. ”You also know that you’re going to have permit applications coming in to develop more water. What do you do?” Tyrrell says that as long as water is available, Wyoming will very likely keep finding new ways to store it. But a future with less water is coming. In California, that future of cutbacks has already arrived. The water that started in Colorado flows more than 1, 000 miles to greater Los Angeles. So even in the sixth year of California’s drought, some lawns are still green. ”Slowly but surely, the entire supply on Colorado River has become less reliable,” says Jeffrey Kightlinger, who manages the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California. He notes that the water level in Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir on the river, has been plummeting. An official shortage could be declared next winter. ”And that’ll be a historic moment,” Kightlinger says. It’s never happened before. Arizona and Nevada would be forced to cut back on how much water they draw from the river. California would be spared that fate, because it has senior water rights. So you wouldn’t expect to hear what Kightlinger says next. ”We are having voluntary discussions with Arizona and Nevada about what we would do proactively to help,” he says. California could help by giving up water before it has to, between 5 percent and 8 percent of its supply. Kightlinger isn’t offering this out of the goodness of his heart if Lake Mead drops too low, the federal government could step in and reallocate all the water, including California’s. ”We all realize if we model the future and we build in climate change, we could be in a world of hurt if we do nothing,” Kightlinger says. This idea of cooperation is somewhat revolutionary after years of lawsuits and bad blood. Recently, farmer Steve Benson was checking on one of his alfalfa fields near the Mexican border. ”We know there’s a target on our back in the Imperial Valley for the amount of water we use,” he says. This valley produces   of the country’s vegetables in the winter  —   with water from the Colorado River. In fact, for decades, California used more than its legal share of the river and had to cut back in 2003. This area, the Imperial Irrigation District, took the painful step of transferring some of its water to cities like San Diego. Bruce Kuhn voted on that water transfer as a board member of the district. ”It was the single hardest decision I have ever made in my life,” he says. Kuhn ended up casting the deciding vote to share water, which meant some farmers have had to fallow their land. ”It cost me some friends,” he says. ”I mean, we still talk but it isn’t the same.” Soon, Kuhn may have to make another painful decision about whether California should give up water to Arizona and Nevada. With an emergency shortage looming, Kuhn may have no choice. Grace Hood is a reporter with Colorado Public Radio. Lauren Sommer reports for KQED."
14,"For the last installment of NPR’s holiday recipe series, NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg lays out her special New Year’s Eve recipe for caviar pie. Here it is, so you can make it yourself. 6   egges, chopped3 tbs mayonnaise1 cup red onion, minced   cream   cup sour cream, Mix the eggs with the mayonnaise. Spread on bottom of oiled   spring pan or pie pan. Sprinkle with the minced onion. Soften with the cream cheese. Blend the mixture with the sour cream until smooth. Spread over minced onion with wet spatula. (Smooth it out with your fingers.) Cover with wax paper. Chill three hours or overnight. To serve: Spread and cover top with black caviar. Knife around sides of pan. Lift off the spring belt or just cut into wedges and lift out with pie knife. Serve with lemon slices and good crackers. I like eating it with a fork, like pie. Others spread it on crackers. Makes about 10 servings."
15,"Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too. A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the   Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D. C. He didn’t start out studying what people ate. Instead, he was interested in learning more about the hippocampus, a part of the brain that’s heavily involved in memory. He was trying to figure out which parts of the hippocampus do what. He did that by studying rats that had very specific types of hippocampal damage and seeing what happened to them. In the process, Davidson noticed something strange. The rats with the hippocampal damage would go to pick up food more often than the other rats, but they would eat a little bit, then drop it. Davidson realized these rats didn’t know they were full. He says something similar may happen in human brains when people eat a diet high in fat and sugar. Davidson says there’s a vicious cycle of bad diets and brain changes. He points to a 2015 study in the Journal of Pediatrics that found obese children performed more poorly on memory tasks that test the hippocampus compared with kids who weren’t overweight. He says if our brain system is impaired by that kind of diet, ”that makes it more difficult for us to stop eating that diet. . .. I think the evidence is fairly substantial that you have an effect of these diets and obesity on brain function and cognitive function.” The evidence is growing. Research from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience published in July found that obese people have less white matter in their brains than their lean peers  —   as if their brains were 10 years older. A more recent study from researchers at the University of Arizona supports one of the leading theories, that high body mass is linked to inflammation, which affects the brain. But if we understand how obesity affects the brain and memory, then maybe we could use that relationship to prevent people from becoming obese in the first place. Lucy Cheke, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, says her study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology this November gives her some idea of how to do that. Her researchers asked obese and lean people to do a memory task that’s a virtual treasure hunt. The subjects had to hide something in a scene across various computer sessions, then they were asked what they hid, where they hid it and in which session. The obese people were 15 to 20 percent worse than lean ones in all aspects of the experiment. The finding confirmed what other researchers had already seen in rodents. ”This really picks apart spatial, item and temporal memory, as well as, crucially, the ability to integrate them,” which Cheke says is ”one of the most fundamental aspects of memory.” If you’re obese, she says, you might just be ”10 to 15 to 20 percent more likely to not quite remember where you put your keys.” Diet isn’t necessarily destiny. People can compensate. As American University’s Davidson puts it, ”Let’s say I had a kid and I gave him a   diet and he showed hippocampal dysfunction. That kid may not do worse in school.” But, Davidson adds, the processes that help the kid do well in school may be impaired. When that happens, the kid would have to work harder and be more motivated and would ”have a tougher go of it.” Cheke says with the link between obesity and the brain growing as a field of research, we could see more ways of targeting obesity. For example, if the issue is that the diet of obese people degrades their memory and makes them more likely to overeat, then maybe making their meals more memorable would help them eat less of the bad stuff. Cheke says there’s already some research showing that if you watch TV while you eat lunch, you’ll eat more and also be more likely to get hungry in the afternoon and later to eat more at dinner. She says not watching TV while you eat is one of the ”small easy changes that people can make that don’t involve a lot of   and that don’t involve a lot of sacrifices, but that can still make a significant difference into how much you’re eating.” However, even though we are beginning to understand that obesity affects the brain, we don’t exactly know how, says John Gunstad, professor and director of the Applied Psychology Center at Kent State University in Ohio. He points out that obesity changes a lot about the body: blood sugar levels, the cardiovascular system, inflammation levels throughout the body. Any one of those things could affect the brain. ”Most likely, the effect of obesity on the brain is related to not just one cause but a combination of causes,” Gunstad says. Davidson is also moving forward by studying how to break the vicious cycle of a Western diet, obesity and brain changes. But he says the underlying idea that obesity affects the brain is clear. ”It’s surprising to me that people would question that obesity would have a negative effect on the brain, because it has a negative effect on so many other bodily systems,” he says, adding, why would ”the brain would be spared?” Alan Yu is a freelance reporter who also contributes to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. You can follow him on Twitter: @Alan_Yu039."
16,"Who’s the YouTube star of 2016? Adele singing carpool karaoke and the Japanese comic who made the viral     video were among the top 10 videos of the year. But there was lots of competition around the world. This month, YouTube Rewind released its list of the top 10 most popular YouTube videos in nearly 40 countries and regions, based on how many people viewed and shared them. Here’s a sampling from some of the places we cover in our blog. With nearly 6. 7 million views, Nigeria’s top video of the year features a comedic faceoff between    Emanuella Samuel and a gang of bullies nearly twice her size. ”You’re not afraid of me right?” she shouts (even though she is clearly afraid of them). The video, titled ”I’ll Beat You,” is also ranked among the top 10 most popular videos in South Africa and Uganda. Last year, a new dance  —   the na goore  —   brought out the moves in Senegal. This year, something old is new again: sabar, a traditional Senegalese dance set to energetic drumbeats and characterized by ”  lifts and springing jumps,” as a New York Times dance critic put it. Abandoned during the French colonization of the 1800s, sabar   between the 1960s and 1980s under the country’s first president in the   period as a point of national pride. The video has picked up close to 1. 4 million YouTube views. It’s the old game ”Truth or Dare” played between a dad and his son  —   part of an infomercial from India’s first furniture rental company in an attempt to woo millennial shoppers. The   ad garnered 1. 5 million views in just four days and is among the top 10 most popular videos in the country, with more than 6 million views. Dad starts off with innocent questions ”What is the capital of Nagaland” and then goes in for the kill: ”You have alcohol bottles hidden in your flat?” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Trevor Noah’s skewering of South African president Jacob Zuma was the top video of 2016 in The Daily Show host’s home country. Zuma has been facing calls to resign after having been accused of corruption and political mismanagement. In the clip, Noah pokes fun at Zuma’s use of $15 million in state funds to ”renovate his house”  —   including the installation of a pool, which Zuma said was actually a ”fire pool” whose water would be used to put out any fires. And then there’s his inability to read aloud the numeral ”769, 870.” A video of a   talk show that ponders the future of the Arabic language has racked up 9. 1 million views. The host asks some kids to name different animals. They know the English words ”giraffe,” ”crocodile” and ”owl” but go blank when asked to say the names in Arabic. And it’s not just a joke: The National, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, reports that experts are increasingly concerned about young Arabs speaking a hybrid language  —   usually Arabic laced with English  —   to sound more sophisticated and modern. The trailer for Disney’s Queen of Katwe  —   a movie based on a true story about a young chess champion rising out of the slums  —   was the fourth   video in the East African country, with 1. 8 million views. As NPR previously reported, this is possibly the first Disney movie to be set in the Africa with all black actors. One of the top videos of 2016 from Mexico come from the second most subscribed YouTuber in the world. A native Chilean who likes to rant, he’s known mainly by his stage name HolaSoyGerman  —   Spanish for ”hello, I am German,” which is his first name, pronounced Herman. He has over 30 million subscribers and 2. 9 billion views. His most popular video this year, in which he enthusiastically spews out a string of thoughts on food, has reached 24 million viewers. He dramatizes, for example, his frustration of opening a bag of chips only to find filled mostly with air. The original     video didn’t break Indonesia’s top 10 list, but the song itself clearly struck a chord. The   popular video in that country, with 8. 3 million views, is a version of the song by comedian Andre Taulany on an Indonesian talk show. The bit is just one of many imitations of the viral but   routine, showing that sometimes all it takes is a catchy beat and a silly dance to bring the world together."
17,"Here’s a quick roundup of some of the   you may have missed on this week’s Morning Edition. Clean that screen, It’s time to talk about germs. Yes, germs. In a somewhat startling announcement your smartphone may have five times more germs than a toilet seat. It’s OK, I just looked at my beloved little iPhone in disgust, too. All of this is according to the Japanese mobile company NIT, which seems to be exploiting the grossness that is your handheld device. As Morning Edition host David Greene said Monday, the company has installed special rolls of paper in bathrooms at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. The rolls look like toilet paper, except they have some writing on it, which says ”Welcome to Japan. ..wipe your smartphone with this.” The toilet paper then encourages you to log on to NIT’s wifi network and enjoy some quality web surfing. It’s probably a good idea to wipe your phone down now that you’re done reading. In cold coffee, It’s common knowledge that journalists follow the money to uncover stories. Just ask David Fahrenthold. But when it comes to the police officers, well, they follow the   coffee cups and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At least that’s what happened with some police officers in Cheyenne, Wyo. As Morning Edition host David Greene said Tuesday, the officers have accused Zachary Munoz of burglary. They say he targeted a business called 4 Rivers Equipment and a JCPenney store. Police used DNA to connect the crimes. Apparently, Munoz left his coffee cup at JCPenney and a half eaten PBJ sandwich at the equipment store. So remember what your mother told you, DNA is evidence that can be traced, and it’s important to clean up after yourself. No one likes a messy burglar. Home for the holidays, Stuffed animals have all the fun these days. And this definitely stands true for    Eleanor Dewald’s stuffed bear, Teddy. As Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said Tuesday, Dewald was flying from Dallas to Detroit with Teddy by her side. But when she got off the plane, Teddy somehow managed to stay behind. Dewald’s mom sounded the call on social media and airline agent, or should we say modern day hero, Steven Laudeman, located the bear, who was unfortunately on top of a trash can. Before sending Teddy back, Laudeman took the fluffy fella on a tour of the plane cockpit, the tarmac and into the gift shop. Teddy snapped some pictures alongside the other stuffed animals there. Needless to say Teddy gets some major street cred and bragging rights for his holiday adventure. Raise a glass cup, What would parties and   be without some hearty libations? Sad! And what would hold the liquid courage we drink if red Solo cups weren’t there? Good question. Well New Year’s Eve parties tend to have plenty of drinks, which means there will be plenty of those red Solo cups floating around, but this year you need to raise your plastic cup to the oncoming 2017 and Robert Hulseman. Hulseman invented the red Solo cup and as Morning Edition host David Greene said Friday, the inventor died at age 84. His family told the Chicago Tribune that Hulseman knew every employee’s name and went to Catholic Mass on Sundays. Beyond his success of creating the cup, he also inspired a Toby Keith party song. So this weekend, we’ll fill them up and lift them up to Hulseman."
18,"Ben Johnston doesn’t follow the rules of music. Sure, he’s got degrees from two colleges and a conservatory. But from an early age, Johnston heard music differently. When he was growing up in Georgia, he questioned the standard scales he was taught in school. ”I played by ear and I invented my own chords,” he says. In Western music, we’re taught that there are set notes in scales, but there is actually an infinite number of pitches in between those notes. They’re called microtones, and those are the notes Johnston likes to work with. ”String Quartet No. 4,” Johnston’s take on ”Amazing Grace,” is probably his   and   work. At his home in Madison, Wis. surrounded by a flock of peacocks and a herd of barn cats, the    composer says the work has its roots in his childhood, in slavery and in his desire to hear what the song might have sounded like if Beethoven had covered it late in his career. It was actually Johnston’s love of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Broadway show tunes that made him want to be a composer. Then, during World War II, he heard Stan Kenton’s band. ”It was the first time I heard real jazz improvisation,” Johnston says. ”Immediately, I could get it by ear. It changed my whole approach to harmony.” After the war, he apprenticed with the iconoclastic American composer and   Harry Partch and studied with composers Darius Milhaud and John Cage. All of them encouraged him to follow his own path. Johnston later became a mentor himself  —   he taught at the University of Illinois for over three decades. Composer Larry Polansky, who studied under Johnston there, says Johnston’s work is groundbreaking and necessary. ”We need Jackson Pollock, we need John Ashbery, we need James Joyce and we need Ben Johnston,” he says, ”because they do question something that generally goes unquestioned.” Polansky, who went on to become a professor himself, says Johnston taught him there was more to music than the standard Western scale. ”To enforce and entrain a very specific set of pitches and reify them as somehow natural . .. just doesn’t make any sense,” he says. Johnston has used all of the notes he can wrangle in dance music, percussion pieces and orchestral work, but he spent the bulk of his career  —   almost four decades  —   composing 10 unique string quartets. Johnston, who celebrated his 90th birthday this year, recently received a special present: the completion of a more than   effort to record them all. The Kepler Quartet formed in 2002 with the specific intention to record these compositions  —   and it took 14 years of rehearsing and recording to get them all down. Eric Segnitz, the group’s second violinist, says the rehearsal process required both learning and unlearning. ”There was a fair amount of invention and learning curve and getting rid of any preconception of what a chord actually sounds like,” he says. Segnitz says what struck him even more than the complexity of the music was the way Johnston has never veered from his vision. ”There are all sorts of pressures on modern composers to reach an audience, to be popular  —   it’s like high school, basically,” he says. ”So the fact that someone has cut through all that is very meaningful.” That doesn’t mean the composer can’t be playful. In his ”String Quartet No. 10,” Johnston subtly teases a traditional tune through four movements. ”You build up this enormous expectation until finally you get to the end and . .. we reveal the tune,” he says. ”It turns out to be ’Danny Boy!’ ” Johnston now wants musicians to take his ideas into the future. He sees his string quartets as a foundation, and he wants others to build upon his tunings  —   and keep making what he calls the ”sounds that people never thought they wanted to hear.”"
19,"David Bowie, Prince and George Michael are all pop icons who died in 2016. But there is something else that connects them: They all helped to redefine the concept of masculinity in pop culture. Cultural critic Wesley Morris has been thinking about how these artists performed gender and sexuality. He recently wrote in The New York Times that in today’s climate, ”The Princes and the George Michaels seem as radical as ever.” Morris joined NPR’s Ari Shapiro to discuss how Bowie, Prince and Michael called upon their audiences to reimagine what it is to be a man. Hear their full conversation at the audio link and read an edited transcript below. Ari Shapiro: Let’s start with David Bowie. He was the oldest of the three, and he kind of paved the way in the 1970s. How do you think he changed our view of manliness? Wesley Morris: Sort of by suggesting that it didn’t exist, for at least the first 10 or 11 years of his career. He was part of a wave of artists who were interested in  —   and I don’t know how conscious it was  —   but it definitely was a reaction against a kind of standard notion [of what] men are supposed to do, any sort of male cliché. So paint a picture of what he did  —   how he performed his version of what it meant to be a man. For one thing, he was limber. He seemed very loose. He was what I imagine the people who might have tormented him, or tormented kids like him, would have called a ”sissy”  —   on the nicer end, I guess, the less mean end. I think that he was really interested in his femininity more than he was interested in his masculinity. He spent a lot of time creating these personae that were androgynous  —   they weren’t from this planet. Right. As much as he dissolved the border between male and female, he also kind of dissolved the border between human and alien. I mean, he made every aspect of what was normal about being human seem foreign. I think that Ziggy Stardust period was probably the most obviously queer period that he performed in. He was interested in this makeup and these platforms and this hair, and it was neither male nor female, and I think that was what was so disconcerting about him. But also, if you were a kid, it was kind of weirdly exciting, because these ideas of gender and masculinity and femininity are these acquired notions. I think that if you’re ignorant of what they signify, you see this person signifying none of it and it kind of blows your mind. Prince was 12 years younger he took what David Bowie did and ran with it. How would you describe the way he evolved from the version of masculinity that Bowie presented? It was incredibly sexual. Not only was he interested in acquiring it  —   he liked having it. He liked making sure the person he was having it with was happy. And yet he sang about it in his very falsetto voice that doesn’t sound typically masculine at all. No, no. And it has a tradition in popular music, obviously: He’s doing what people like Little Richard do. I mean, he was a seducer, [but] he wasn’t doing the thing that a lot of RB artists were doing  —   like ”Yeah, baby, you and me. We got something so special.” He doesn’t turn the lights low. And he he’s also doing it while wearing boas, high heels, eyeliner, makeup. And if not being a man in the way that we think of men was something that didn’t hurt your art or hurt your sales, then why not continue to pursue it? The thing about the ’80s in particular was just how   we had become. There was the burgeoning of the American action movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as an action hero began. Sylvester Stallone moving from Rocky not just to Rambo, but to things like Cobra and Over The Top. This was a time when Michael Douglas was the sexiest man alive. And people who were gay, defying gender norms, were dying of AIDS. Yes. And so you have this tension between straight culture  —   and you have, in somebody like Prince, this person who is really queering the difference between these two. He was singing about heterosexual sex while looking anything but conventionally heterosexual. How do you explain the success of Bowie and Prince and these other   pop stars in an era of such  ? Their songs were good. [Laughs] Let’s get to the third member of this trifecta of musicians who exploded masculinity and who died in 2016  —   and that is George Michael. What was he doing that was different from Bowie or Prince? He seemed to be the person who was most clearly gay. Well, he was. I mean, unlike the other two, he was gay. Right, but at the height of his popularity, he wasn’t out. But he was the person who, more than anybody else, if you had a gaydar, he set it off. That shot in the video for ”Faith” that’s focused on the seat of his jeans, just swinging back and forth. Yeah, there’s that. I think that by the time the ”Faith” video came around  —   it was his first solo album  —   he wanted to have a look that separated him from Wham! And this very sort of butch, rockabilly thing that he went for was so different than the other George Michael that it was arresting. That video just completely eroticized him: I mean, the camera is rising up his body as moving around this contraption that’s spinning. It’s great. How standard was it at that time for a male body like that to be the object of the camera’s gaze? Because it’s so much more common for the camera to gaze upon a gorgeous woman, especially in a music video. Right, like the express train to Elvis is immediate. And the express train to James Brown it goes there, too. I think the thing is that it’s immediate and it’s unmediated. You are allowed to look at this body in a way that you weren’t allowed to look at Elvis’ while he danced. It’s obviously a tragedy  —   a coincidence of the calendar  —   that all three of these artists died in 2016. But do you think that when you put the three of them together, you see something about the evolution, or maybe devolution, of masculinity in pop music? Yeah. I mean, to have that happen in a year in which we were   the propriety of maleness with regard to women, and excusing it as just the thing that men do? You’re talking about the presidential race talk about sexual assault, things like that. Yes, yes. And I think that just looking at what the coming administration is going to look like, it’s gonna be full of generals, full of men who have exerted power in this very traditional way. I think that we go through these waves, these periods. It’s gonna be really interesting to see what the next three or four years turns up  —   in terms of how you might be able to trace some   from people like your Princes and David Bowies and George Michaels to whatever is happening in music in two years."
20,"In November, the typically straitlaced Office of Government Ethics surprised observers with a series of tweets mimicking Donald Trump’s bombastic style, exclamation points and all: ”Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, good for America!” The controversy was  : (1) The OGE doesn’t typically air its positions publicly, advising White House transition teams behind the scenes. (2) Trump hadn’t promised the total divestitures of business interests implied by the tweets. New records shared with NPR on Friday show that behind the curious tweets was the head of the OGE himself, Director Walter Shaub Jr. In two emails, dated Nov. 30, just several minutes apart, Shaub sent to OGE Chief of Staff Shelley Finlayson the nine tweets that took the Internet by storm that day. He then followed up with a link to a legal document referenced in one of the tweets and writes: ”Get all of these tweets posted as soon as humanly possible.” The emails were part of a   document shared with NPR in response to disclosure requests under the Freedom of Information Act. OGE is generally tasked with overseeing ethics in the executive branch of the government, and so it’s one of the agencies looking into Trump’s   business interests and the conflicts of interest they create for the   as he takes over the reins of the country in January. As NPR’s Jim Zarroli has reported: ”With his vast network of licensing deals, golf courses and commercial real estate, Trump and his family stand to profit from his presidency to an unprecedented degree. Virtually any decision Trump makes could affect part of his domestic or international business empire.” Several OGE officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. It’s still unclear why  —   if Shaub’s tweets were deliberate  —   they were temporarily deleted on the day they were posted. At the time, an OGE spokesman said the agency was enthused by Trump’s indicated interest (on Twitter) in avoiding conflicts of interest. Despite the stylistic peculiarity of OGE’s tweets, Shaub’s position on Trump’s conflicts of interest is not secret. He appears to be on a campaign to get Trump to divest, as shown by his lengthy letter released earlier this month. ”I think that there’s a uniform consensus among everybody who does government ethics for a living . .. that Donald Trump must divest  —   he’s got to sell his holdings or use a blind trust or the equivalent, as every president has done for 40 years,” says Norm Eisen, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”So I took the tweets as an expression of that   view,” says Eisen, who has served as special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama White House. ”This is an undebatable position in our profession.” NPR had requested, under FOIA, that the agency share all emails related to the Twitter postings on Nov. 30 and related to Donald Trump. Only one exchange appeared to involve a member of the Trump team. On the day of the tweetstorm, Shaub emailed ”D. McGahn”  —   presumably Donald McGahn, the former chief of the Federal Election Commission whom Trump picked to be White House counsel  —   to notify him of the press inquiries and the OGE’s response. OGE redacted about 15 pages among a week’s worth of emails, describing them as ”draft” or ”internal notes” or ”draft communications plan.” The vast majority of the disclosures were media inquiries from the month of November  —   but also troves of messages from members of the public received around the time of the tweets. There are dozens and dozens of emails, letters and even a postcard (of Alexander Hamilton with a black eye?) expressing concerns about Trump’s business holdings and conflicts of interest. Many writers criticized OGE’s tweetstorm others welcomed its candid commentary. Most writers encouraged OGE to hold up the ethics law and standards. NPR’s Jim Zarroli contributed to this report."
21,"This is the time of year when everybody is making predictions for next year, and everybody is making resolutions for the things they plan to do. But it’s a Pop Culture Happy Hour tradition that while we do these things too, we also revisit the ones from last year to see whether we have any ability to know what’s going to happen (rarely!) and any tendency to follow through on our own plans (sometimes! ). As she has for the last two years, Kat Chow of NPR’s Code Switch team sits down with us to check in. What will the Oscars bring? Did Kat get her dad using Netflix? Just how much is Stephen promising to write? What habit is Glen trying to break? All this and lots, lots more on this special New Year’s edition of Pop Culture Happy Hour. Here’s Glen’s chart, by the way. As always, we close with what’s making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about sharing a new show with his kid, Glen is happy about a film that ”aches for you to be charmed by it,” Kat is happy about an upcoming book you’re sure to hear more about, and I’m happy about a feature Glen recently completed and the return of a favorite reality franchise. Thank you for listening this year, and follow us on Twitter to get good stuff in 2017: me, Stephen, Glen, Kat, producer Jessica, and producer     Mike."
22,"Terrorist attacks, hurricanes, a divisive U. S. election, Brexit  —   2016 has not been easy. With the year coming to an end, we thought it was time to get some serious perspective  —   from the scale of the entire universe. We’re tackling big questions: what scientists know, and what they have yet to learn. So before you ring in another year, take a moment to contemplate the billions of years that led to 2017 and the billions more yet to come. ”That happens to be my absolute favorite question,” says Chuck Bennett, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University. He points out that the   theory says the universe started out dense and hot, and that it has been expanding and cooling for 13. 8 billion years, but, he says, ”the   theory doesn’t actually say what happened right at the beginning.” You can follow our laws of physics back in time, he says, but they break down close to the start, when things were unspeakably fiery and close together. Still, there may be clues from the weird world of quantum physics. In that world, strange stuff can happen, like particles can just appear out of nowhere. ”Even if you take something that’s a complete vacuum, you’ve gotten all of the particles and dust and everything out of the way, in quantum mechanics you still have particles popping in and out of existence all the time,” explains Bennett. So maybe the kernel that became our universe just randomly and spontaneously appeared. ”It seems bizarre, but that is kind of the going thinking about this,” Bennett says. And if you want to think about something even more bizarre, consider this point made by Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. If the big bang was the first moment in time, that creates a conundrum: ”There’s no verbs before time itself exists, right? There’s no popping into existence, there’s no fluctuating, there’s no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing,” says Carroll. You might be tempted to try to answer this question by stepping outside the universe so you can take a gander. But, obviously, that’s impossible. ”There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell,” says Carroll. Even though the universe has been expanding for about 14 billion years, that doesn’t mean it’s ballooning out into some other realm. ”I know it’s difficult to wrap our minds around,” says Carroll, ”but it’s just getting more and more of it, even though it’s not expanding into anything at all.” So if we can’t leave the universe, all we can do is look around inside. Let’s say you flew off the Earth, out of our solar system, out of the Milky Way galaxy, out of our cluster of galaxies, and flew on and on. How far could you go? ”We don’t 100 percent know,” says Janna Levin, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University. ”What we see of the universe is vast. We know that the universe is something like 90 billion   across.” But that’s just the part we can see. Anything beyond that has to remain a mystery, because stuff out there is so far away, its light will never be able to reach us. ”It makes logical sense to assume the universe goes on beyond that boundary. It would be kind of magical if we were just happening to be able to see right to some boundary and then something crazy happened beyond that, like galaxies ceased to exist,” says Levin. ”I mean, that just seems nuts.” So the universe goes on, but is it infinite? ”It is somewhat unimaginable but quite possible that our universe simply goes on forever,” says Bennett. To us, the universe seems flat, so maybe it’s like an endless sheet of paper. But on the other hand, people used to think the Earth was flat, too, because people saw flat land stretching to a horizon, beyond which they could not see. These days, the idea of a flat Earth seems silly  —   we know it’s really a huge sphere. ”Our universe might be like that,” says Bennett, noting that the universe might be curved and might even curve back on itself like a sphere, ”but on a scale that is truly enormous.” If so, and you headed off into the universe, going straight in one direction, you would eventually find yourself right back where you started. You might think this is one of the easier questions about the universe to answer. But you would be wrong. ”All the stuff we’ve ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe,” says Carroll. Five percent! So what is the rest of the universe made of? Well, one biggie is something called dark matter. About 25 percent of the universe is dark matter, which is quite literally dark. ”It just doesn’t interact with light at all,” says Bennett. ”It doesn’t give off any light it doesn’t absorb light it doesn’t scatter light there’s no way to see it. The only way we know that it’s there is because it has gravitational effects.” Scientists discovered dark matter when they looked at the motion of galaxies and realized that something unseen had to be exerting a gravitational pull. Dark matter may be some kind of particle that we just haven’t detected yet. The rest of the universe  —   70 percent  —   is something even more crazy, called dark energy. It appears to be some kind of energy that’s inherent to empty space, and it acts to push the universe apart, speeding up its expansion. Like dark matter, dark energy is another big mystery. ”Other than the fact that we don’t quite understand 95 percent of the universe, we’re doing really well,” jokes Bennett. All of the world’s leading theoreticians, who write whole books about the universe, just have to live with this state of affairs. ”You’re entitled to say, if you’re so smart, why don’t you tell me what that dark matter is? And I’ll have to confess I don’t know,” says Jim Peebles, Albert Einstein professor of science, emeritus and professor of physics, emeritus at Princeton University. He’s not depressed, however, that so much of the universe remains unknown. ”I think I’d be depressed if everything were nearly all known,” says Peebles, ”but I don’t feel any danger of that happening.” Let’s face it people tend to be pretty  . ”If you look back at the history of astronomy, you know, we used to think that the Earth was the center of the solar system. Everything was about us,” says Bennett. Even when we figured out that Earth went around the sun, and the sun was part of the Milky Way galaxy, we thought our galaxy was the center of the universe. ”Then we learned no, it’s just one galaxy out of hundreds of billions of galaxies out there,” he notes. With that track record in mind, it’s natural to wonder whether our whole universe isn’t so special  —   if it’s just one among many. ”We don’t know yet,” says Bennett, ”but it’s very possible.” Given that scientists believe the seed that started our universe may have spontaneously popped into existence through a kind of quantum weirdness, that presents an obvious question: If that could happen once, why not more than once? ”So then you have this kind of array of universes in which ours is not unique,” says Bennett. How many universes could there be? ”A really, really big number,” says Carroll. But since everything we can observe and poke and prod is, by definition, part of our universe, it’s unclear how we could ever detect some other universe. This is why some thinkers worry that pondering the   multiverse is more like philosophy than science. It’s sort of fun to think about whether our universe is solitary, and it’s a legitimate question, says Peebles, ”but since we’ll never be able to answer it, I can’t get very excited.” But maybe this idea could be testable. Imagine if you had two universes that were expanding and ran into each other, says Bennett. If another universe bumped into ours, there could be ways to tell. In fact, there have been efforts to search the skies for evidence of that kind of impact, but there’s no sign it ever happened. Which might be a good thing, since that kind of event ”would be very dangerous at least for people in one of the universes or the other because one of them would probably be destroyed,” Bennett says. ”Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost in his famous poem Fire and Ice. He favored fire but, hedging his bet, added that: I think I know enough of hate  To say that for destruction ice  Is also great  And would suffice. These days, most astrophysicists are guessing the universe will end as cold as ice. The universe, which started out hot and dense, has been expanding and cooling for nearly 14 billion years. We now know it’s actually expanding faster and faster. ”This is like hyperdrive on the cooling,” says Bennett. ”So it’s the ice solution. Everything would grow dimmer and dimmer you would stop seeing things in the sky everything would grow dark and cold.” As everything gets farther and farther apart, each particle of the universe will eventually end up completely alone. It all sounds bleak. But, cheer up! Ending with fire is still possible. Since dark energy is pushing the universe to expand faster and faster, and physicists don’t know what dark energy is, it’s possible that it might just decay or go away, making our expanding universe slow down. ”Maybe even reverse its course for all we know, and then what? Then we go back to kind of a fiery end,” says Levin. She explains that everything would fly back together toward a big crunch, which is like the big bang happening in reverse. Fire or ice, either way, the end is coming. But not for a long while. ”We think it will be at least a quadrillion years before the last star burns out,” says Carroll, noting that this is 1, 000 trillion years. Our own sun will burn out way sooner, in about 5 billion years. Though Carroll says that’s kind of a parochial concern, when you consider that our Milky Way galaxy has around 100 billion stars and is just one of trillions of galaxies. ”So we are not significant on the cosmic scale. We are not important to the universe. That’s the bad news,” says Carroll. The good news is that, even with our puny brains, we’ve managed to figure that out."
23,"We all experience stress at work, no matter the job. But for teachers, the work seems to be getting harder and the stress harder to shake. A new report out this month pulls together some stark numbers on this:   percent of teachers say they feel high daily stress. That’s on par with nurses and physicians. And roughly half of teachers agree with this statement: ”The stress and disappointments involved in teaching at this school aren’t really worth it.” It’s a problem for all of us  —   not just these unhappy teachers. Here’s why: ”Between 30 and 40 percent of teachers leave the profession in their first five years,” says Mark Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Penn State. And that turnover, he says, costs schools  —   and taxpayers  —   billions of dollars a year, while research (like this and this) suggests teacher burnout hurts student achievement, too. Greenberg has studied America’s schools for more than 40 years, and, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (also an NPR funder) he helped author the new brief exploring teacher stress. He says teachers feel frazzled for many reasons, including   testing and the fact that many students are themselves coming to school stressed. As for the fixes, Greenberg recommends a few. New teachers who receive steady mentoring are less likely to quit. Workplace wellness programs can also help. But both require schoolwide, even districtwide  . If that’s not realistic, Greenberg suggests a fix that is well within every teacher’s control, one that just might surprise you . .. Mindfulness, That’s right, mindfulness. For teachers. Patricia Jennings wrote the book on it (literally). It’s called Mindfulness For Teachers. Jennings was a teacher herself for two decades and now studies stress in the classroom as a professor and researcher at the University of Virginia. The Journal of Educational Psychology will soon publish a study of her work in New York City, teaching mindfulness to more than 200 educators in   schools. Jennings says the teachers who received mindfulness training ”showed reduced psychological distress and time urgency  —   which is this feeling like you don’t have enough time. And then improvements in mindfulness and emotion regulation.” Translation: These teachers were better able to cope with classroom challenges and manage their feelings, which made it easier for them to manage their students’ big feelings. And that, says Jennings, helps students learn. What is mindfulness? Definitions vary, but Jennings likes to think of it this way: attending to things in the moment with curiosity and acceptance. If this all sounds a bit . .. squishy, rest assured, there’s even research on how mindfulness can help reduce stress in U. S. Marines preparing for deployment. Meria Carstarphen is not a teacher but knows a thing or two about classroom stress. She has run a couple of big city school systems and is now superintendent in Atlanta. Carstarphen says she advises new teachers: You can’t take care of your students if you don’t take care of yourself. ”Put your oxygen mask on first,” she tells her rookies. ”Then we’ll talk about everybody else.”"
24,"When John Fahey recorded The New Possibility in 1968 to make a few bucks off Christmas sales every year, his album title turned out to be emblematic of the solo guitar’s potential. The music grows decades later, rung out in steel vibration and wrung out from tradition. In 2016, there was an incredible bounty of guitar music across Americana, jazz, ambient, psychedelic, experimental music and what Fahey labeled American Primitive. For sake of focus, these 10 unranked records (and a few honorable mentions) were all primarily made by one person with the guitar as the primary instrument. That’s why you don’t see the stellar records made by Chris Forsyth, Mary Halvorson, William Tyler or Cian Nugent this year, as they were backed by bands that understand their singular approaches to the instrument. Instead, these records celebrate new possibilities in the solo exploration of six and 12 strings."
25,"This year was one of   hacks, exploding smartphones, months of debating encryption and the proliferation of augmented reality, VR,   cars and fake news. But there were lots of other stories  —   some of them off the beaten path  —   that illustrated the constantly evolving and hugely influential relationship that we have with technology around us. Can you remember (or guess) some of the numbers and facts gleaned from 10 of NPR’s tech stories of 2016?"
26,"From West Virginia to Wyoming, coal country overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump and his message that he will bring coal jobs back. Now, those same voters are eyeing his incoming administration closely, careful to see if he will keep his promises to revive the coal industry and get miners back to work. These hopes have become increasingly desperate as the industry has floundered. U. S. coal production in 2016 is projected to be at its lowest level since 1978, and over the past few years, the country has lost about 30, 000 coal jobs. That means hard times for places like Wyoming’s   Powder River Basin. Three of the region’s four main coal producers were in bankruptcy in 2016. Two of them laid off hundreds of miners at once. Still, the community of Gillette, Wyo.  —     as the Energy Capital of the Nation  —   is breathing a sigh of relief lately. Production has ticked back up past where it was at this time last year, and some mines are even hiring workers back. ”I do believe that my friends and   are safe for now,” says coal miner Stacey Moeller. She believes that ”for one more year, we’re going to be coal miners.” And Trump’s win has buoyed her hopes, as well as those of investors. The day after the election, coal stock prices leaped and many in coal communities celebrated. For Moeller, a single mom and lifelong Democrat, the decision was complicated. ”I did vote for Donald Trump,” Moeller says. ”It’s really hard to even say that because I so dislike his rhetoric. But I voted for him on one singular issue, and that was coal.” She’s not alone. Dave Hathaway of Pennsylvania will be watching Trump, as well. Since the coal mine he worked in closed a year ago, he spent much of 2016 looking for work. The search gained urgency when his son Deacon was born in August. On Election Day, Hathaway made a choice he hopes will help his   job prospects. ”I voted for Trump  —   I mean, a coal miner would be stupid not to,” Hathaway says. He says he’s had a hard time finding a job to replace the $80, 000 he made working in the coal mines under Greene County, Pa. a few miles from the West Virginia border. Hathaway recently found a job at a nearby mine. While he thinks Trump’s election means he’ll have a better shot at keeping his new job, he didn’t like a lot of things Trump said during the campaign. ”He is a whacko he’s never going to stop being a whacko,” Hathaway says. ”But I mean, the things he did say  —   the good stuff  —   was good for the coal mining community. But we’ll see what happens.” That message clearly resonated in Greene County, where over the last four years a third of the coal mining jobs  —   like Dave Hathaway’s  —   disappeared. Trump won the county by 40 points, eight years after Barack Obama basically tied John McCain there. Tom Crooks, vice president at R. G. Johnson, a construction company that builds mine shafts, witnessed the decline of the coal industry firsthand. ”Two years ago this week we had 145 employees,” Crooks says. ”Right now, we have 22.” Crooks doesn’t use the phrase ”war on coal,” but he does think federal regulations mounted by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama have weighed down his industry. One example is the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. That rule, which Trump has pledged to eliminate, limits the amount of carbon dioxide from   power plants. Instead, Crooks wants to see more government research into making coal as clean as possible. ”Really, what’s happened over the last eight years is the smart people stopped working on coal, in part because of the way the federal government and the state governments looked at us,” Crooks says. ”We just want them to start looking to coal as an option.” Leigh Paterson is a reporter with Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues. Reid Frazier is a reporter for The Allegheny Front, a public radio program based in Pittsburgh that covers the environment. "
27,"Updated Jan. 1 at 9:56 a. m. ET, At least 39 people were killed and 69 others wounded during New Year’s celebrations Saturday after a gunman opened fire at an Istanbul nightclub. At least 16 of those killed were foreign nationals. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters that the attacker entered the Reina nightclub and began shooting at random, NPR’s Peter Kenyon tells our newscast. The killer then changed clothes and left, says the minister. The manhunt for the attacker, who has not yet been identified, is still underway, Soylu adds, as police believe he carried out the attack alone. Provincial Gov. Vasip Sahin has described the incident as a terrorist attack. ”A terrorist with a   weapon . .. brutally and savagely carried out this incident by firing bullets on innocent people who were there solely to celebrate the New Year and have fun,” Sahin told reporters. At Reina, one of the city’s most popular nightclubs, it’s believed some 500 to 600 revelers were celebrating the start of the new year. Reuters reports that the attacker shot at a police officer and at civilians before entering the nightclub. Many inside were said to have jumped into the neighboring Bosphorus waterway in an attempt to save themselves from the gunfire. A Turkish cabinet minister told the   Anatolia News Agency that citizens of Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya and Lebanon are among the dead, Peter reports. In addition, the Israeli Foreign Ministry says a young   woman was killed in the attack. Peter adds: ”The interior minister named several possible culprits, including Islamic State, Kurdish militants or   groups.” According to the Associated Press, several ambulances and police vehicles were dispatched to the scene, an area described as ”on the shore of the Bosphorus Strait in the Ortakoy district.” The cosmopolitan neighborhood is home to many clubs, restaurants and art galleries. Says Reuters: ”Security measures had been heightened in major Turkish cities, with police barring traffic leading up to key squares in Istanbul and the capital Ankara. In Istanbul, 17, 000 police officers were put on duty, some camouflaged as Santa Claus and others as street vendors, state news agency Anadolu reported.” This latest attack comes just two weeks after Russian ambassador, Andrei Karlov, was shot dead by   Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas and three weeks after a bomb attack killed 44 people at a football stadium in Istanbul. A Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for the latter. Turkey, which is part of the U. S.  coalition against Islamic State, has faced numerous security threats. In all, there were at least six attacks in Turkey in 2016, claiming more than 200 lives. Meantime, the White House is condemning the attack, calling it a ”horrific terrorist attack” and offering to assist Turkey. According to the AP, White House spokesman Eric Schultz says President Obama  —   who is vacationing with his family in Hawaii  —   ”was briefed on the attack by his national security team and asked to be updated as the situation develops.” The AP adds: ”White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price says the attack on ’innocent revelers’ celebrating New Year’s shows the attackers’ savagery. He says the U. S. sends thoughts and prayers to the relatives of those killed. ”Price says the U. S. supports its NATO ally Turkey as both countries fight terrorism.” Turkey’s Bloody Year, ”It was a horrible year,” journalist Mustafa Akyol told NPR’s Ailsa Chang on Sunday morning. ”We had a bloody coup attempt . .. almost 300 people were killed, then a very brutal crackdown began after that and thousands of people found themselves in jail with, I think, exaggerated charges in my view  —   at least some of them. ”Then, the terror attacks, both the PKK  —   which is a Kurdist, separatist group with a   secular ideology, and ISIS. They both organized major attacks inside Turkey.” Akyol’s latest column, published just hours before the attack, enumerated the many tragic events of 2016, calling it Turkey’s ”worst year ever.” ”And you know what is the worst?” he writes. ”There is no guarantee that the future will be any better. There is no assurance that all this will prove to be a temporary crisis rather than the new normal.” ”What we need at this time is not more conspiracy theories,” Akyol told NPR. ”Not a more authoritarian government. But really, national unity based on understanding and tolerance and reconciliation. We’re not there though, unfortunately yet.”"
28,"On the morning of Jan. 1, Los Angeles residents and visitors alike awoke to see the iconic Hollywood sign had been altered overnight. Some were delighted. A number of posts on Instagram Sunday are captioned things like, ”I love this city!” and ”Let’s keep it!” Police were, perhaps, less amused: They were investigating the vandalism Sunday, and said the male prankster was recorded by security cameras wearing all black at around 3 a. m. He could face a misdemeanor trespassing charge if caught. This actually isn’t the first time this has happened. Whether it was a tribute, or an accident, the vandal mimicked a similar prank that was done 41 years ago today by Daniel Finegood, on Jan. 1, 1976: The day California’s relaxed marijuana law took effect. According to the LA Times, Finegood did a number of similar stunts, changing the sign to read ”Ollywood” to protest the worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the   hearings in 1987, and ”Oil War” in 1990 as a political statement about the Persian Gulf War. The ”Hollyweed” prank, however, seems more like a celebration than a protest. The AP suggests it might be a gesture to the approval of Proposition 64 in November, which legalized recreational use of marijuana."
29,"In September, reproductive endocrinologist John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City captured the world’s attention when they announced the birth of a child to a mother carrying a fatal genetic defect. Using a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy, the researchers combined DNA from two women and one man to bypass the defect and produce a healthy baby boy  —   one with, quite literally, three genetic parents. It was heralded as a stunning technological leap for in vitro fertilization, albeit one that the team was forced to perform in Mexico, because the technique has not been approved in the United States. The technique is spreading quickly, gaining official approval this month from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority in the U. K. The move will allow clinics to apply for permission there to carry out the treatment, with the first patients expected to be seen as early as next year. But for all the accolades, the method also has scientists concerned that the fatally flawed mitochondria can resurface to threaten a child’s health. Earlier this month, a study published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, head of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, suggested that in roughly 15 percent of cases, the mitochondrial replacement could fail and allow fatal defects to return, or even increase a child’s vulnerability to new ailments. The findings confirmed the suspicions of many researchers, and the conclusions drawn by Mitalipov and his team were unequivocal: The potential for conflicts between transplanted and original mitochondrial genomes is real, and more sophisticated matching of donor and recipient eggs  —   pairing mothers whose mitochondria share genetic similarities, for example  —   is needed to avoid potential tragedies. ”This study shows the potential as well as the risks of gene therapy in the germline,” Mitalipov says. This is especially true of mitochondria, because its genomes are so different than the genomes in the nucleus of cells. Slight variations between mitochondrial genomes, he adds, ”turn out to matter a great deal.” Mitochondria are the energy powerhouses inside our cells, and they carry their own DNA, separate from our nuclear genome. The danger lies in the fact that mitochondria are in some ways like aliens inside our cells. Two billion years ago they were   bacteria basking in the primordial soup. Then one such microbe merged with another   bacterium, and over evolutionary time, the two formed a complete cell. The bacteria eventually evolved into mitochondria, migrating most of their genes to the cell nucleus and keeping just a few dozen, largely to help them produce energy. Today, our nuclear genome contains around 20, 000 genes, while a scant 37 genes reside in the mitochondria. And yet the two genomes are intensely symbiotic: 99 percent of mitochondrial proteins are incorporated from the nucleus. Mitochondria also still divide and replicate like the bacteria they once were, and that constant replication means that mutations arise 10 to 30 times more often in mitochondrial genes than in the nucleus. If too many mitochondria become dysfunctional, the entire cell suffers and serious health problems can result. Faulty mitochondria are implicated in genetic diseases, as well as many chronic conditions from infertility to cancer, cardiac disease and neurodegenerative diseases. That’s because when mitochondria falter, the energy system of the cell itself is compromised. A   baby could solve the problem by overriding faulty mitochondria, but it also raises the stakes, because the procedure does not completely replace the defective mitochondria with healthy ones. When the mother’s nucleus is transferred, it’s like a plant dug up out of ground  —   a bit of the original soil (in this case, the mother’s mitochondria) is still clinging to the roots. That creates a situation that never happens in nature: Two different mitochondrial genomes from two different women are forced to live inside the same cell. In most cases, a tiny percentage (usually less than 2 percent) of the diseased mitochondria remain  —   but that tiny percentage can really matter. In his new study, Mitalipov crafted   embryos from the eggs of three mothers carrying mutant mitochondrial DNA and from the eggs of 11 healthy women. The embryos were then tweaked to become embryonic stem cells that could live forever, so they could be multiplied and studied. In three cases, the original maternal mitochondrial DNA returned. ”That original, maternal mitochondrial DNA took over,” Mitalipov says, ”and it was pretty drastic. There was less than 1 percent of the original maternal mitochondrial DNA present after replacement with donor DNA and before fertilization, and yet it took over the whole cell later.” Mitalipov warns that this reversal might not only occur in the embryonic stem cells it could also occur in the womb at some point during the development of a baby. Complicating things further, Mitalipov found that some mitochondrial DNA stimulates cells to divide more rapidly, which would mean that a cells containing the maternal mitochondrial DNA could eventually dominate as the embryo developed. Some mitochondrial genomes replicate much faster than others, says University of California molecular biologist Patrick O’Farrell, who called Mitalipov’s research both impressive and in keeping with his own thinking on the matter. A diseased mitochondrial genome could behave like a   bully, O’Farrell says,   and having a large impact on the   baby at any time. It could also affect that child’s future offspring. ”The diseased genome might stage a sneak comeback to afflict subsequent generations,” O’Farrell says. On the other hand, he says, the   could act as ”superheroes,” if they carry healthy, fit DNA that is able to   a mutant genome. The nuclear genes donated by a father could also influence the behavior of the mitochondria in ways we cannot yet predict, O’Farrell says. For example, the father might introduce new genes that favor the replication rate of a defective bully genome. Or the father might introduce genes that help a ”wimpy” healthy genome survive and thrive. Mitalipov’s proposed solution to the problem is to match the mitochondria of the mother and the donor, since not all mitochondria are alike. Human mitochondria all over the earth are in a sense a billion or more clones of their original mother, passed down in endless biblical begats from mother to child. Yet, even as clones, they have diverged over time into lineages with different characteristics. These are called haplotypes. O’Farrell mentions blood types as a comparison. Just as you would not want to transfuse blood type A into someone with blood type B, you might not want to mix different lineages. And while he says he thinks the idea of matching lineages is brilliant, he suggests going a step further. ”I say let’s . .. try to get a match with the dominating genome so that the defective genome will ultimately be completely displaced.” In fact, he adds, the ideal would be to look for one superhero genome, the fastest replicator of all  —   one that could displace any diseased genome. To find out which branches are super replicators, O’Farrell hopes to collaborate with other laboratories and test the competitive strength of different haplotypes. Earlier this year, O’Farrell’s laboratory published work showing that competition between closely related genomes tends to favor the most beneficial, while matchups between distantly related genomes favor super replicators with negative or even lethal consequences. There are, he says, at least 10 major lineages that would be distinct enough to be highly relevant. Mitalipov says that most of the time, matching haplotypes should ensure successful mitochondrial transfers. However, he cautions that even then, tiny differences in the region of the mitochondrial genome that controls replication speed could cause an unexpected surprise. Even in mitochondria from the same haplotype, there could be a single change in a gene that could cause a conflict, he says. In his study, Mitalipov zeroes in on the region that appears responsible for replication speed. In order to find out a mother’s haplotype, he says, full sequencing is necessary, and this region from the donor’s egg should also be looked at to be sure it matches the mother’s. Today, it costs a few hundred dollars to sequence a woman’s mitochondrial genome. But battles between mitochondrial genomes are only one part of the emerging story. Some research suggests that nuclear genes evolve to sync well with a mitochondrial haplotype, and that when the pairing is suddenly switched, health might be compromised. Research in fruit flies and in tiny sea creatures called cephalopods shows that when the ”mitonuclear” partnership diverges too much, infertility and poor health can result. In some cases, however, the divergent pairs are above average and can actually lead to better health. Swapping as little as 0. 2 percent of mitochondrial DNA in laboratory animals ”can have profound effects on the function of cells, organs, and even the whole organism, and these effects manifest late in life,” according to mitochondrial biologist Patrick Chinnery of the University of Cambridge, writing in November in The New England Journal of Medicine. Because of all these unknowns, a U. S. panel recommended last February that mitochondrial replacement therapy, if approved, implant only male embryos so that the   mitochondrial germline would not be passed down through the generations. Most scientists approve of this advice, but biologist Damian Dowling of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has reservations about even this solution. His own research in fruit flies shows that males may actually be more vulnerable than females to impaired health from mitochondrial replacement. Since females pass on mitochondria, natural selection will help daughters sift out any mutations that might be harmful to them, and keep their nuclear and mitochondrial genes well matched. Males aren’t so lucky: If mutations don’t harm females but do harm males, the males may have to suffer impaired fertility and go to their graves earlier. This is known as the ”mother’s curse”  —   a term coined by geneticist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago in New Zealand to describe the biological baggage that mothers unwittingly pass down to their male babies. The bottom line, according to biologist David Rand of Brown University, who studies mitochondrial genomes, is that when you swap mitochondria, the reaction is ”highly unpredictable.” And that’s why many experts are calling for caution even amid all the excitement following the   Mexico trial  —   though there is reason to believe they aren’t being heard. A   baby has now been born in China, and two more may soon be born in Ukraine, according to Nature News. Zhang, meanwhile, continues to encourage potential patients in Mexico: ”We have received interest both locally and abroad,” he says, ”and we invite people to learn more about the treatment.” Doug Wallace, head of the Center for Mitochondrial and Epigenomic Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is among those calling for a more methodical approach to the technique, though he says he doesn’t think there’s any way to put the brakes on now. ”I think what’s happened is we’re going to see more and more trials and some families are going to be exceedingly fortunate  —   and perhaps some will be an unfortunate part of the learning set.” Research on mitochondria has to catch up, Wallace says, and while matching haplotypes is a good idea, it isn’t so easy to do in practice. ”Finding women to be egg donors is going to be a major limitation,” he says  —   especially when you’d first have to survey a large group to find compatible mitochondrial DNA. Still, for women desperate to conceive a healthy child this may seem reasonable. Wallace adds that mitochondrial replacement therapy might find favor even outside those seeking to avoid passing on fatal genetic mutations  —   such as older women simply facing reduced fertility. ”There’s no proof that’s the case,” he says, but if it came to pass, that could mean a therapy that might change the DNA of tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of babies conceived by this method. That would have a real impact on the   future of society, Wallace adds, and we don’t yet fully understand all of the implications. ”I think it’s an exciting possibility,” he says, ”but also a little disconcerting.” Jill Neimark is an   science journalist and an author of adult and children’s books. Her most recent book is ”The Hugging Tree: A Story About Resilience.” A version of this article originally appeared at Undark, a digital science magazine published by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT."
30,"In an effort to take advantage of the intimate relationships between stylists and their clients, a new law in Illinois will require salon professionals to receive training in domestic   as part of their licensing process. The law, which goes into effect Sunday, aims to educate beauty professionals to recognize signs of abuse. But stylists won’t be required to report violence, and are protected from any liability. The legislation was introduced by state Rep. Fran Hurley, who told the Chicago Tribune, ”There’s an openness, a freeness, a relationship that last years or decades between the client and the cosmetologist. They’re in a position to see something that may or may not be right.” Joan Rowan is a hair stylist who owns two salons  —   one on the South Side of Chicago, and the other in Oak Lawn, Ill. She says that for many years now she’s been providing training for her own staff about what to do if they think someone is in trouble. Rowan says that clients do sometimes talk to her about what is going on in their lives. ”And sometimes they tell you so much they never come back again, because they’re afraid, or they’re embarrassed, they don’t know what to do.” ”I’ve had women, you know, when you’re washing their hair, they have bumps on their head, you know, they ’ran into a door again,’ ” Rowan says. ”I’ve been a hairdresser for 41 years. One in three women have violence in their lives. So yes, I have talked to women.” The training that the stylists will receive is an hourlong ”awareness and education” program called Listen. Support. Connect. It was designed by Chicago Says No More, a coalition of domestic violence advocacy groups, in partnership with Cosmetologists Chicago. Kristie Paskvan, the founder of Chicago Says No More, says she knows that an hourlong training isn’t going to make anyone an expert. ”We’re not asking the salon professionals to intervene. We’re just asking them to have the tools in case the clients ask for information,” she says. ”There’s something like 88, 000 salon professionals that will be trained in the next two years,” Paskvan says. ”That’s 88, 000 more individuals that will be able to have conversations with family and friends and clients, and that raises awareness about domestic violence and sexual assault.”"
31,"Much has been said about the physical and psychological injuries of war, like traumatic brain injury or   stress disorder. But what we talk about less is how these conditions affect the sexual relationships of service members after they return from combat. Since 2000, service members who were deployed received at least 138, 000 diagnoses of PTSD. More than 350, 000 have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury since 2000. Evidence suggests the numbers are actually higher because many don’t seek treatment. These conditions cause their own sexual side effects, such as emotional numbness, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. And the long list of medications used to treat PTSD, TBI and other medical conditions can worsen those side effects. ’He would sleep for days’ Chuck and Liz Rotenberry of Baltimore struggled with their own challenges when Chuck returned from Afghanistan in 2011. He’s a former Marine gunnery sergeant who trained military working dogs. He left active duty in 2012. She is an Elizabeth Dole caregiver fellow, a spokesperson on issues chosen by the military caregiving foundation. For Liz and Chuck, sex had never been a problem. They’ve been married for 14 years and they’re still very much in love. Liz says she fell for Chuck in high school. He was that guy who could always make her laugh, who always had a   ready and never seemed sad. But when Chuck returned from Afghanistan, their relationship would soon face its greatest challenge. Baby No. 4 was just two weeks away for sure, it was a chaotic time. But Liz noticed pretty quickly something was terribly wrong with her husband. ”I wouldn’t be able to find him in the house and he wouldn’t be outside, and I’d find him in a separate bedroom just crying,” Liz says. ”He would sleep for days. He would have a hoodie on and be just tucked away in the bed, and he wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. He would have migraines that were so debilitating that it kept him in the bed.” When Chuck was in Afghanistan, an IED  —   improvised explosive device  —   exploded 3 feet behind him. Shrapnel lodged into his neck and back. It would take three years for someone at the Department of Veterans Affairs to explicitly lay out for Liz that Chuck had developed severe   stress and suffered a traumatic brain injury  —   and that she would need to be his caregiver. The Marine   During that   period, there were times Chuck estimates he was taking 15 to 16 different medications twice a day. Sex was usually the furthest thing from his mind. ”I didn’t think about it. I wanted to be with Liz, I wanted to be near her,” he says. ”When the desire was there, it was unique. It was rare, as opposed to the way it was before. And a lot of times, with the mountains of medication I was on, you know, in my head [it was] all systems go, but that message didn’t go anywhere else.” Liz noticed that Chuck stopped initiating physical affection. ”The thought of him reaching out to me to give me a hug wasn’t existent. It was like I had to give him the hug. I now had to step in and show him love,” she says. Sometimes months would go by before they would have sex. ”It started off as being pretty embarrassing, pretty emasculating,” Chuck says. ”It was like, ’Really? This too doesn’t work?’ You blame it on, ’Oh, it’s just the medication,’ or ’You’re tired,’ or whatever initially, and you don’t realize it’s stress or my brain just doesn’t work like it used to.” Liz and Chuck had never really talked about sex in any serious way before. So they kept avoiding the conversation  —   until this year. That’s when Chuck finally asked his primary care provider for help. The doctor prescribed four doses of Viagra a month. Liz and Chuck say the medication has improved things substantially  —   though they joke about how few doses the VA allots them every month. But asking for just those four doses took Chuck three or four visits to the doctor before he could work up the nerve. He says it can be especially hard for a Marine to admit he’s having problems with sex because it contradicts a   so many Marines have. ”You know, as a Marine, you can do anything. You believe you can do anything, you’ve been trained to do nearly anything,” he says. ”You’re physically fit. You’re mentally sound. Those are just the basics about being a Marine.” If he has any advice for a Marine going through the same thing he and his wife are facing, he says you need to talk about it. Bring it up with your spouse. Bring it up with your doctors. ”Marines always jokingly hand out straws. You got to suck it up. You got to do what you need to do to get it done,” Chuck says. ”It’s just a different mission. . .. Don’t let your pride ruin what you worked so hard for.”"
32,"Editor’s note: This post includes language that some readers will find offensive. A rift has surfaced within the   the movement closely associated with white supremacism that has been celebrating Donald Trump’s election as president. In fact, they are planning a big event around Trump’s inauguration  ” the ”DeploraBall.” Organizers of the event, which plays off Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s ”basket of deplorables” swipe at some Trump supporters, have rescinded the invitation of a prominent social media personality with the   movement, Tim Treadstone, better known by his Twitter handle @bakedalaska. He tweeted on Monday   and racist comments that included ”it’s a common fact the media is run in majority by Jewish people, it’s similar to observing blacks are good at basketball.”"
33,"The   movement, which has been associated with white nationalism, is receiving new attention. The debate about the movement is also focusing on what is the best term to describe it."
34,"On New Year’s Day, Portland restaurant Ava Gene’s will be serving brunch to the hungry and   masses. And amidst the frittatas, French toast, and grits, there will be Chef Josh McFadden’s own favorite: pasta carbonara. McFadden, who has cooked carbonara at New York Italian restaurants, fell in love with it for breakfast while living at the American Academy in Rome. A plate of spaghetti doesn’t look anything like your local greasy spoon’s    special, but McFadden says the dish is a whole lot more familiar than you might think. ”It’s literally the same thing as taking toast, putting an egg on the toast, and then putting said toast in your mouth. And with coffee? Amazing.” Yes, the refined starch takes the form of noodles. But the other basic breakfast building blocks  —   including a dose of something in the bacon family  —   are the same. Hot pasta (most often spaghetti) is drained and tossed with beaten eggs, cheese (Parmigiano or pecorino Romano) and cooked pork (guanciale, pancetta, and bacon all make appearances). The hot noodles cook the eggs, which set with the pork fat and residual cooking liquid to create a lusciously rich sauce, not too different from a hollandaise. So how did a dish that hits these   notes come out of Italy? According to food historian Anthony Buccini, recipes for pasta dressed with fat, eggs and cheese (cacio e uova) go back well into the 19th century. But mentions of carbonara  —   the dish that adds cured pork to the mix  —   don’t show up until after World War II. And, according to one popular theory, this might not be a coincidence. ”In effect,” says Buccini, ”the claim is that there was a joining together of American taste for  —   and supplies of  —   bacon and powdered eggs [thanks to military rations] with the local Roman love of pasta asciutta [a simple sauced dish] Roman cooks came up with the recipe to make use of the American supplies and to satisfy the foreign troops, perhaps with some prodding from those troops who missed their familiar bacon and egg combination.” It’s a beautiful story of food traditions melding and evolving. But is it true? Buccini is skeptical, noting there is ”little in the way of compelling evidence” that carbonara was inspired by American GIs, rather than being a simple variation to a large family of traditional pasta dishes. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food also rejects the WWII theory, stating: ”The absurdity of this at a time of hardship and intolerable shortages calls for no comment.” But others, like Jeremy Parzen, a food historian and translator who teaches at Italy’s University of Gastronomic Sciences, think it’s not so   to conceive of American tastes shaping Italian cuisine. ”American culture played a huge role in how Italy developed after the war,” Parzen explains. ”Essentially after the war, with the Marshall Plan, we rebuilt Europe. And whereas the French became snobbish, the Italians embraced American culture. They embraced American film, American music. .. They love their own food, but they also love food from all over the world.”  Until the definitive source of the carbonara is unearthed, the debate will continue. But there’s one thing almost all Italian chefs agree on  —   do not include cream. While this is a creamy dish, its lusciousness should come from the emulsion you get when you toss the eggs with the hot pasta and pork fat. This does require a delicate touch to get right, but it’s not much more than navigating tossing and temperature. Even with a hangover, it should be doable. And in a true nod to American palates, Chef McFadden admits that it’s not with bad with a little shake of a nice hot sauce, especially when you serve it as a   breakfast."
35,"U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts praised the   work of federal district judges in his   report on the federal judiciary, avoiding any talk of politics in regards to the country’s judicial system. Incoming president Donald Trump will have more than a 100 vacancies to fill at the district and appellate court level nationwide. He’ll also be able to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The   Congress has refused to hold a hearing on President Obama’s nominee for that empty seat. The future of those judicial vacancies was a key issue in the presidential election. Roberts’ focus, however, was on the work of lower court judges, who he called ”selfless, patriotic and brave individuals.” Congress has authorized 637 district court judgeships across the country. And the people working in those positions do so largely out of the public eye, Roberts wrote. ”You might be asking at this point why any lawyer would want a job that requires long hours, exacting skill, and intense devotion —  while promising high stress, solitary confinement, and guaranteed criticism. There are many easier and more lucrative ways for a good lawyer to earn a living. The answer lies in the rewards of public service. District judges make a difference every day, and leave a lasting legacy, by making our society more fair and just,” he wrote. The report also looked at    differences in the filings brought to the federal judiciary. The most striking difference was the number of cases in which the United States was the defendant, which increased 55 percent. Roberts wrote that the increase was due to the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Welch v. United States, which provided a new basis for certain prisoners convicted under the Armed Career Criminal Act to challenge their sentences. Bankruptcy petitions fell to their lowest number since 2007 and the number of defendants charged with drug and immigration crimes both showed slight decreases. Roberts wrote that the most difficult part of a judge’s job is sentencing an individual who is found guilty of a crime. He wrote: ”The judge must consider the perspectives of the prosecutor, the defendant, and the victim, and impose a penalty that, by design and necessity, will alter the direction of the defendant’s life.”"
36,"When Octavia Spencer first read the script for Hidden Figures  —   based on a book about the African American women who did the math for our early space launches  —   she thought it was fiction because it seemed too good to be true. Her disbelief reveals how conditioned we are to think that only white men make notable contributions to science, technology, engineering and math  —   and how important it is that we celebrate stories of the women who do. Big Hollywood movies based on true stories are an excellent way to do this. Narrative has a role to play as well, especially when it comes to another form of popular media: Romance novels, the second largest category of fiction in the U. S. Long derided as mere smut, these days romance novels feature heroines in the STEM fields  —   and the prejudices and obstacles they face on the way to a personal and professional happy ever after. The romance in Courtney Milan’s Hold Me is off to a rocky start when the hero, Jay na Thalang, assumes the heroine must be a lab supply salesperson when she shows up at his graduate studies lab. Not only is Maria Lopez a woman, she’s a pretty, ”done up” woman with an interest in shoes and planning her brother’s wedding. She cannot possibly be smart enough to be worthy of his time and attention. But unbeknownst to both Jay and Maria, they are already friends online  —   or at least their avatars are. When they meet as just minds (enabling Jay to imagine that she is a frumpy, nerdy girl) they are friends and trusted confidants who discuss problems both scientific and, eventually, personal. As long as she isn’t an undeniably sexy female body, Jay can respect her intelligence. Much of the conflict between the hero and heroine in this book stems from the hero’s assumptions about a woman’s brains based merely on her appearance what Jay comes to realize is that the problem lies with him. Even Odds by Elia Winters continues with the theme of a woman’s body getting in the way of her brain  —   not for her, but for the men in the room. Isabel Suarez, a design manager at a gaming firm, just wants to focus on the work. Whereas Maria flaunts her femininity, Isabel learned she must hide hers in order to succeed professionally, so she wears baggy clothes, pulls her hair back and smiles tightly when one coworker’s comments make her uncomfortable: ”His words were teasing, but Isabel bristled. This is what she’d wanted, though. It was better just to be sexless and professional, treated like another one of the guys, if she wanted to be taken seriously.”  Complications ensue when romance blossoms with her new coworker. Being open about their relationship means owning that she is more than just a sexless work automaton and opening herself up to judgment. Isabel only gets her happy ever after when she can allow both sides of herself to flourish  —   with the love and support of her enlightened hero (and an equally enlightened HR department). In Beginner’s Guide: Love And Other Chemical Reactions by Six de los Reyes, Kaya Rubio is happy being all brain: she lives and breathes her work as a molecular biologist and has optimized her life so she can focus on it completely. While the plot of her story is familiar  —   single girl seeks date for family wedding  —   the approach she takes is novel. When it comes to finding love, Kaya devises ”The Boyfriend Experiment” which draws on scientific principles and peer reviewed papers. Her hero is her negative control, a man so wrong he can’t possibly be right. He introduces her to romance  —   spontaneous, messy, emotional, pleasurable, utterly confounding logic and reason  —   and to another side of her herself, showing that needn’t sacrifice her heart for her brain. Being romance novels, these stories do end happily: The heroines get to be brilliant and beautiful. They can be smart and sexy and loved for it. It’s a message repeated in so many romances, whether these titles or my own historical novel, Lady Claire Is All That, which features a heroine based on Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer. Professional success doesn’t have to come at the expense of personal happiness. It’s a message that matters, especially with regard to women and heroines in STEM. Those who develop technology we use are creating the world we live in, and having women build it is the best way to ensure that the sexism and misogyny that have held us back so far isn’t baked into our future. Stories have an important task to do here: They show all the different ways smart women can succeed personally and professionally, without having to hide their brains or their bodies in order to live happily ever after. Maya Rodale is a bestselling romance author. "
37,"If you find yourself at a loss to name even one Native American food dish, you’re not alone. But a growing number of Native chefs are trying to change that. Freddie Bitsoie is one of those chefs, working to bring back indigenous foods from centuries ago, and adapting them for today’s palate so people can learn not just about their cuisines, but their cultures too. Bitsoie found his way to the kitchen of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D. C. in August after finishing a stint as the chef at an Indian reservation casino in New Mexico. NPR met up with Bitsoie in the museum’s bustling basement kitchen. Bitsoie has lectured on Native cuisine before, and occasionally he has put together menus for some Native American museums  —   but this is his first gig as a chef whose work is entirely devoted to preparing and spreading awareness about indigenous dishes. Bitsoie is also the first Native American chef at Mitsitam Native Foods Café. He’s a member of the Navajo tribe, and grew up in Arizona and New Mexico. As a kid, his parents spoke fluent Navajo, he says, but it wasn’t until adulthood that he grasped the impact his Native American culture had on his life. ”When you’re growing up, you’re really not aware of what your parents are trying to teach you you just want to do the things that your parents don’t want you to do,” Bitsoie says. ”Back in the ’80s when I grew up, being Native wasn’t cool, it just wasn’t the thing to do. I was lucky enough to live off of the reservation and then on the reservation, and then move back off the reservation. I had that ability to see from the inside and see from the outside.” That tug of war between native versus   insider versus outsider, might explain why Bitsoie loves bridging the old and new in his cooking. One of his signature dishes is a simple soup that has evolved across regions and across centuries  —   and then Bitsoie decided add his own twist. ”This particular clam soup is pretty much the definition of my work,” he says. ”Because with this clam soup, indigenous people from Nova Scotia to down on to Maine,   Massachusetts, had a soup that was only made with three ingredients: It was sunchoke, clam and seawater.” ”I can’t picture myself gulping seawater down voluntarily,” confesses NPR reporter Ailsa Chang. ”But at the same time, in Italian cooking people say when you cook your pasta, make sure it’s salty like the sea,” Freddie Bitsoie says. But when he cooked with NPR, Bitsoie used a substitute. ”When I look out at that ocean, I’m like, I don’t even swim in the ocean,” he laughs. Bitsoie understands that to make some traditional dishes palatable to more people, you have to tweak them. ”In developing this recipe, I wanted to still have a connection to the tribes who used to eat this dish,” he says. ”At at the same time, this was made 500, 600 years ago. So my palate is completely different from my grandmother’s palate which is even further from my grandmother’s grandmother’s palate.” So to appeal to today’s palate, he took the three original ingredients  —   clams, sunchokes and salt water  —   and added some   soup basics: leeks, onions, garlic, thyme and bay leaf. It’s a balancing act, accommodating mainstream tastes while being confident enough to hold fast to Native traditions. In the culinary world, Bitsoie says, that can difficult. ”I worked for a French chef where, when I would cook something native, all he would say is, ’You did that wrong,’ ” Bitsoie says. He adds: ”The biggest example is potatoes. When people think about potatoes, in the French style of cooking, potatoes have a bite  —   we call it ’al dente’ in the food world. But with native food, we sauté them, and we allow them to cook, but we cover them with the lid. So the potatoes aren’t only being cooked from the bottom they’re being steamed at the same time. Each culture has their own techniques, and with native cuisine we were always told, ’You’re cooking that wrong.’ And, see, I didn’t know that because I was just growing up with the way my mom cooks.” ”Look, when I got in the food business, I was looking at my mom and I said ’You’re cooking that wrong’ and I became colonized as a chef,” Bitsoie laughs. But working at the museum cafe is a whole new chapter for Bitsoie. He can call the shots  —   and figure out how he wants to integrate flavors and techniques from his own culture with his formal training as a chef. When Ailsa Chang went in for the taste test, she was surprised. ”I was expecting a saltier flavor,” she says. ”It’s very delicate, I really like it.” ”And that’s what native food is,” he says, ”it’s really delicate and innocent.” Bitsoie says that’s what he’s trying to do here  —   create new tastes and give people a new appreciation of one of America’s overlooked, and perhaps least understood cuisines."
38,"By day, Nicola Berlinsky and sisters Lisa Pimentel and Joanie Pimentel are all teachers at the same elementary school in southern California. By night, they’re rockers, playing together in a band called No Small Children. It sounds like a lot to balance, but the members say they often find their two careers overlapping. ”I’ll see Joanie and Lisa at work, and recess becomes a band meeting,” Berlinsky says, ”but then we start talking about our students and sharing notes about our students and really living the successes of each other’s students  —   and then we’re back at band practice again. They are so intertwined.” Joanie Pimentel says music feels like an ideal outlet given the work they do. ”It’s much cheaper than therapy,” she says, laughing. And Berlinsky says her students have generally been supportive of the project. ”They think it’s really funny,” she says. ”The parents do come to our shows, and so the children end up wearing our band   to school, which is quite something.” The three members of No Small Children joined NPR’s Ailsa Chang to talk about their work in and out of the classroom. Hear their full conversation at the audio link."
39,"It’s that time of year again, when I atone for my failure to make top 10 lists by simply offering a collection of 50 of the many wonderful things I read, watched or heard in 2016. (Here’s last year’s list, for reference.) Standard caveats: I don’t watch everything! I am behind on many things. That’s just the way the world is. So if something you loved isn’t here, it is not a rebuke. And: these are cultural  —   mostly    —   things. These are not the best things in the world. Like yours, my actual list of wonderful things from the year, if I wrote it in a journal instead of for work, would be a list of people and moments spent with them, of days when it was unexpectedly sunny and of the times when things suddenly felt better. But whatever journey you’re on at any given moment, you can always use more good things. So here we go. 1. The willfully  —   gleefully  —   stupid jokes of Angie Tribeca, the TBS comedy starring Rashida Jones that reminded me of Airplane! in a wonderful way that very few things do. Vive le prosthetic tongue! 2. The moment in Captain America: Civil War when a bunch of characters sit around and discuss, with seriousness, a moral dilemma. For a surprisingly long time! Searching conversations in which multiple basically good characters have very different things to say and are allowed to say them and mean them are not all that common in summer blockbusters, and this one was welcome. 3. Leslie Odom, Jr. telling the story of how he watched Shonda Rhimes yell at Art Garfunkel. It’s what   talk shows are for, and it made me instantly envious of everyone who got to see it in person. 4. All of John Mulaney’s comedy special, available on Netflix, called The Comeback Kid  —   and from a strictly shallow perspective, John Mulaney’s tremendous blue suit. Sue me, I’m a lady who likes a great . .. suit. 5. Mike Birbiglia’s sensitive, funny, sad, honest film Don’t Think Twice, which has more affection for and understanding of a certain kind of comedy person than perhaps any piece of fiction that’s ever been written about them. It’s got a killer cast including   Key, Gillian Jacobs, and Birbiglia himself, and it got some of the best reviews of the year  —   deservedly so. (And an R rating, by the way, which is dumb as rocks and completely unnecessary. You’d be much, much better with your teenager seeing this film than some   slaughterfest with abundant death but invisible blood. Boo, ratings.) 6. The finale of the most recent season of the beloved series The Great British  . As I’ve written at length, it’s a thoughtful and uplifting franchise  —   really!  —   and the most recent finale (which we Americans did indeed get in 2016) was as richly satisfying as a good slice of cake. 7. The most recent season of HBO’s Veep. I don’t want to spoil it, but while the show has always been sharp and hilarious, its unexpected and byzantine plotting (in both the    sense and the    sense) got utterly bazoo but somehow remained believable within the world the writers and performers have built. 8. Anna Kendrick and Stephen Colbert singing ”They Say That Falling In Love Is Wonderful.” This is also what   talk shows are for. 9. Christian Siriano, fashion provocateur  —   in the best way. Siriano has grown from a bit of a pain in the behind when he won Project Runway to a very interesting designer and a fascinating guy to listen to. He got a lot of attention for dressing Leslie Jones for the Ghostbusters premiere, but he wound up dressing eight women for the Emmy Awards, and they represented quite a mix of sizes, races and ages. They all looked very different, and they all looked right. Siriano believes in his own vision and always has, but he also seems to believe that the purpose of women’s fashion is to serve women, not that the purpose of women is to serve women’s fashion. Good on you, CS. 10. Speaking of Ghostbusters, Kate McKinnon’s Jillian Holtzmann was one of the weirdest, greatest characters of this year and most other years, and her work on Saturday Night Live as Hillary Clinton was surprising and touching. SNL is often plagued by its institutional standing and a certain cultural (not political) conservatism, and the fact that some of what McKinnon did as Clinton was so weird as comedy  —   even if you didn’t think it always worked  —   is one of the most encouraging signs that the show remains alive. 11. Titus Burgess on WNYC’s Death, Sex  Money. The discussion he had with host Anna Sale is one of the most candid, peaceful, wise conversations I can remember from any corner of public radio, and I recommend it to everyone, always. 12. ”Grandma’s Teenage Diaries,” an entry by David Rees in the New York Times Magazine’s ”Letter Of Recommendation” feature. Rees discovered some of his grandmother’s early writings, and the way he describes them is warm and lovely, but more than anything, it sheds light on the way so many of us think of our older relatives as having always been calm and settled, when in fact, they often led wild, adventurous, exciting lives all their own that we simply never saw. 13. Kristin Chirico’s BuzzFeed piece about visiting the bridal salon where Say Yes To The Dress is filmed. It doesn’t go the way she expects, and I won’t spoil it more than that. Chirico is one of my favorite writers for all sorts of reasons, and her willingness to be surprised by her own experiences is one of the big ones. 14. The Indigo Girls story in Dave Holmes’ memoir Party Of One. I enjoyed this book so much that the second time I read it, I lost all track of time and got my first bad sunburn in years. True story!  : Dave’s tweetstorm about phone scammers. 15. The anniversary celebration of All Songs Considered where I saw Glen Hansard break a guitar string with the force of his   which he does kind of a lot. 16. The frustrating and enlightening ”Object Anyway” episode of the podcast More Perfect. Officially about jury selection, it winds up being about the complex ways people think about race and crime. It’s great radio, and very educational, and constantly compelling. Bonus: I also love the episode ”The Imperfect Plaintiffs.” 17. ”I got this.” The U. S. women’s gymnastics team cleaned up at the Rio Olympics, but perhaps nothing thrilled me more than Laurie Hernandez, just before her beam routine, being caught on camera saying to herself, ”I got this.” 18. Take My Wife, Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher’s comedy series on the   Seeso network. It would have been a terrific show about a complex couple even if it weren’t the regrettably rare depiction of lesbians who, as one episode points out, don’t die immediately when they have sex. 19. W. Kamau Bell’s United Shades Of America, the bracing and funny travelogue series about race and culture that seems even more needed now, as it prepares for a second season on CNN, than it did when it first aired. 20. The    musical Sing Street, which seems to be about a kid who starts a band, but which also turns out to be about the bonds of friendship, the perils of romance and especially the crucial role of siblinghood for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t quite know how to bloom in quite the place where they were first planted. 21. The year Sterling K. Brown had on both FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson and NBC’s This Is Us. Both are shows with large casts, and no one in either group was more critical or better than he was. It’s really rare for the same actor to do such good work on both a prestige cable miniseries and a traditional broadcast drama, and Brown more than pulled it off. Absolutely my dramatic acting MVP of 2016. 22. Samantha Bee’s acceptance of the award for Outstanding Achievement In News And Information from the Television Critics Association for her TBS show Full Frontal. She spoke about the show and how grateful she was, then added, ”Now I’ll take your questions on how I achieve   balance.” Like much of what she did through the year, the line was direct, funny, and cutting. So maybe don’t always ask women about   balance, because it appears that they do notice. 23. Michelle Obama’s Carpool Karaoke segment with James Corden, which took a bit that was (and is) rapidly reaching overexposure and immediately made it surprising and joyful, particularly when you include the cameo appearance in the back seat. 24. Sunny Pawar in the drama Lion. Dev Patel is terrific as the adult Saroo, but before he can play a man who looks for his biological family, Pawar has to hold up a good part of the film as a very little boy who loses contact with his. In a pretty good year for kid acting, Pawar was one of my favorite discoveries. 25. ”Unbreakable.” Not everything worked in the revival of Gilmore Girls, but the performance by Sutton Foster of an original song by Jeanine Tesori and show creator Amy   was an unexpected surprise that broke the format but did its job with great force. I was surprised to learn it was written for this, because it’s the kind of song you instantly feel like you’ve heard before, not in the sense of cliche but in the sense of warm familiarity. 26. The ending  —   perhaps too neat, but come on, that’s kind of the format  —   of the   Downton Abbey. It didn’t precisely scratch my every itch (I don’t personally believe Downton ever quite recovered from the loss of Dan Stevens) but did give me some of the things I wanted most, and did deliver a solid dose of Matthew Goode, perhaps the most Downton man who took quite that long to be on Downton. 27. Weiner, hoo boy. There is much, especially in retrospect, that is   about this documentary, which chronicles Anthony Weiner’s failed 2013 run for Mayor of New York City two years after he resigned from Congress following a sexting scandal. If you see this movie with, say, five friends, I can almost guarantee you that you will have a series of conversations about it in which the running theme is, ”I just do not get it.” There is one sequence that involves Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, just . .. pacing, that may be the most interesting thing I saw in a documentary all year. 28. Minnie Driver’s funny, singular performance as the mother to three kids including a special needs son on ABC’s Speechless, a show that has avoided about eight different potential pitfalls to become one of the best broadcast comedies on TV. Driver has needed and deserved a role just like this for years, at least as far back as her hilarious guest spots on Will  Grace, and it was a delight to see her find it. (Bonus: the rest of the cast is just as strong it’s a really solid group and the show is a fine addition to ABC’s strong family comedy lineup.) 29. ”Hello?” I’m convinced that no one who really knows and likes PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman, the hosts of Gimlet’s Reply All podcast, would think it was a good idea for them to take phone calls from anyone and everyone for 48 hours straight. And it was not a good idea. It was a terrible idea, and their bizarre apparent fantasy of going without sleep (? ?) for days (? ??) while talking to strangers (? ???) on tape (? ???? !) quickly fell apart, as it should have. But what ultimately came of it was a nearly   episode that contains, particularly as it progresses, moments of real grace and surprise. 30. Nothing I saw this year was more unexpectedly weird than watching the real Grandmaster Flash try to explain his art to a bunch of television critics during a preview of Netflix’s The Get Down (in which Grandmaster Flash is a character) at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. We were overmatched by what amounted to Grandmaster Flash’s TED talk, and I’m not afraid to say so. Meanwhile, The Get Down was a little bit all over the place, but the central performance from Justice Smith was a real pleasure. The show has half of its first season yet to come, and for Smith, at least, I’ll watch it. 31. Ryan Gosling leaning on a lamppost in La La Land. It pushed a button that’s been deeply programmed inside me since I saw Singin’ In The Rain, and I found it utterly delightful. The movie isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my entire pot thereof. 32. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. One of the real travesties of this year was that this music mockumentary from the Lonely Island somehow slipped past people. Already, it’s got a reputation as a film much better than its   flopsitude would suggest, and I firmly believe that as years pass, those of us who truly appreciated it will be vindicated. Please see it just for the   songs and the celebrity cameos. 33. The second season of Catastrophe, starring Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan  —   with Carrie Fisher. It started with a time jump that was clever and wise and instantly moved the story to a more interesting phase of their relationship to explore than you would have seen had the second season picked up right where the first left off. That kind of experimentation is always welcome in episodic comedy, where it’s so easy to box yourself into a corner with such matters as . .. new babies. 34. Little’s bath. While there are a lot of things about Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight to celebrate, I’ll just choose an early sequence in which Little (Alex R. Hibbert) carefully heats a pot of water on the stove. It’s a beautiful little peek at his routine  —   at his independence, resilience and loneliness, all of which will recur through what we see of his life, all at once. 35. The youngest tier of performers in Stranger Things  —   Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Caleb McLaughlin, and Gaten Matarazzo. They were asked, in essence, to embody archetypes from a period they never lived through: the Steven   King ’80s, when kids roamed on bikes and discovered oddities with their best friends. Nevertheless, they all came through like champs, and while the show had trouble delivering on all of its promises (as supernatural stories often do) the friendships sustained it throughout. 36. Sailor dances. I am overlapping as little as possible with Glen Weldon’s Pop Culture Advent Calendar (which offers 25 more good things from this year) but I, too, would be remiss if I didn’t mention Channing Tatum’s ”No Dames” number from Hail, Caesar! For musical aficionados, the callbacks to sailor movies, tap numbers and even Rodgers and Hammerstein (the song is a   in places from ”There Is Nothing Like A Dame”) are a special treat, and Tatum can dance on my screen any time, for as long as he likes. I’m still not sure that guy has been used to the absolute height of his powers. I fear what could happen (to me) when he is. 37. Issa and Molly. There are lots of shows about friends, but not that many good shows about friends. Issa Rae’s Insecure on HBO was many wonderful things at once (I could easily have chosen the early sequence in which Issa talks to herself in the mirror, which has been rightly praised by many before me) but I treasured nothing about it more than I did the portrayal of Issa and her best friend, Molly. Their bond is their primary emotional entanglement in many ways, and therefore it’s the relationship that often has the highest stakes. 38. Michael Shannon in Loving, the story of Richard and Mildred Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) whose Supreme Court case established that it was unconstitutional for states to ban interracial marriage. The leads in the film are absolutely divine, and Nick Kroll does good and unexpected work as their attorney. But I was also a sucker for a brief appearance by Shannon as Grey Villet, the Life photographer who took the most   portraits of the Lovings while their case was pending. (Take a look at the real photos, if you never have.) 39. As if it’s not enough that Mamoudou Athie played Grandmaster Flash in The Get Down, he was also a very dreamy romantic lead in a little movie called Jean Of The Joneses, from   Stella Meghie, which follows a young woman (Taylour Paige) with a sprawling matriarchal Brooklyn family. It premiered on TV One in October, and while I don’t think you can stream it right now, it’ll show up, and it will be well worth seeking out. 40. HBO’s documentary Suited, about a Brooklyn custom suiting shop that caters to transgender, nonbinary, and gender   customers. It’s about identity and fashion and compassion, and it was one of this year’s best. 41. Ezra Edelman’s O. J.: Made In America. As good as the FX drama series of the Simpson trial was, I think Edelman’s documentary was even better  —   more stirring, more focused on the social aspects of the case, more searching. It makes the point over and over that what’s most beneficial isn’t to know more about the court case itself, but to understand the many ways in which the case, both as a series of events and as a cultural phenomenon, was created by the country where it happened. 42. Josh Gondelman’s comedy album Physical Whisper includes a track called ”Kiss Me Neck,” and in it, you’ll find one of the reasons Josh (who’s a pal and a writer for Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) is the kind of comedian he is: it’s long and involved, and then . .. the punch line doesn’t come from him. It’s somebody else’s laugh, and telling the story comes from a place of generosity. That would make it unusual in a lot of people’s repertoire, but it fits right in on this record. 43. I am   obsessed with the musical The Last Five Years, and I had no worse FOMO this year than what I experienced when I missed Cynthia Erivo and Joshua Henry performing it at Town Hall in New York. Fortunately, there’s video evidence. This kind of   theater experience, which is sort of a relative of the production of Company a couple of years ago with Neil Patrick Harris and Stephen Colbert, is something I could stand to see a lot more of, hopefully when I’m not traveling. 44. The Brooklyn   episode ”9 Days,” in which both Jake (Andy Samberg) and Holt (Andre Braugher) got the mumps  —   and were quarantined together, and named their goiters  —   was goofy and perfect. Brooklyn is a show I’m crazy about, but never more than when they lock up Jake and Holt and just make them bump into each other in a variety of ways. 45. Emma Thompson being really just about perfect. Much of Bridget Jones’s Baby was just a nostalgia tour for    —   and there’s nothing wrong with that, really. But Emma Thompson shows up in a few scenes as Bridget’s   and she is so funny that it makes the entire film a great bargain, just for that. (”My husband said it was like watching his favorite pub burn down.” A line delivery so good I   in my living room.) 46. This fall’s fresh Emmy winners: Rami Malek for Mr. Robot, Tatiana Maslany for Orphan Black, and Louie Anderson in Baskets, Courtney B. Vance and Sarah Paulson and Sterling K. Brown for The People v. O. J. Simpson, among others, gave hope to those who would like to see the Emmys get a little more . .. well, creative in recognizing talent. Sometimes it feels like it’s all the same faces every year, and this year, it wasn’t. The rare awards show where the winners themselves were fairly frequently exciting to see. 47. All the moments in which, even while grieving, we shared thoughts about artists who died this year. While no one can feel happy, really, about losses like Prince and David Bowie and George Michael and Carrie Fisher, there is a way in which sadness frees up vulnerable thoughts, and I’m not sure we’ve ever had a better year for memorial essays and other reminders to appreciate the artists you love as loudly and unreservedly as you can. To wit: I could easily have made one of the items on this list my firm belief that nobody wrote better more consistently this year in more different ways than Rembert Browne here’s his remembrance of Phife Dawg, and here he is on George Michael’s ”Freedom ’90.” 48. Inside the NPR family, one of my favorite podcast episodes of the year was Code Switch’s ”Audie And The    School Bus.” Just listen. (Bonus in this category: My Pop Culture Happy Hour   and dear friend Glen Weldon’s great, great book The Caped Crusade: Batman And The Rise Of Nerd Culture. Pro tip  —   consider the audiobook.) 49. This was my year of Hamilton, as it was for many people. Not only did that mean I had the chance to see the show, but it meant I got to watch the #shotsoutthegrammy phenomenon on Snapchat, and I got to watch a digital puppeteer for PBS’s Splash  Bubbles make a fish lip sync ”My Shot,” and it meant I got to hear Code Switch’s Gene Demby talk to George Washington himself, Chris Jackson. (By the way: I don’t love everything on the Hamilton mixtape, but I do love Dessa singing ”Congratulations. ”) Big year. 50. I don’t think it would be fair not to acknowledge that all the wonderful things there are often coexist with tremendous sadness and disappointment and fear. In that spirit, I want to close the list with Gregory Porter’s Tiny Desk Concert, which he played at NPR just after we learned that NPR photographer David Gilkey and journalist and interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna had died in Afghanistan. There had been so much crying that day that half the eyes in the building were still swollen. Porter came to us by chance, but it was just as if he’d been sent for this purpose. The concert was sorely needed and incredibly healing. And yes, it was wonderful."
40,"For those of us at NPR, 2016 was   of big news stories, so much so, it sometimes seemed the horrors in the headlines would never stop  —   the migrant crisis, police shootings, terrorist attacks, and on and on. But when we looked at stories that you, our NPR One listeners, loved listening to the most in 2016, it painted a very different picture of the year. The   stories in NPR One indicate that you are passionate about three subjects. First, you love science and innovation. You really love the National Park Service for its 100th birthday, NPR produced a series of stories throughout the year that captured your attention. And you also enjoyed our longer,   discussions with artists such as Miguel and Dua Lipa, who talked about their creative processes. Oh, and you also love stories about Finnish mail carriers. (More on that later.) First, a little bit about how we came up with this list. Our NPR One app allows you to customize your NPR experience, by skipping ahead to the stories you like or to your favorite podcasts. When you listen to a story instead of skipping it and either share that story or tap on that story’s light bulb icon (it’s our version of the ”like” button) it’s a pretty good indicator you enjoyed or appreciated that story. These are the 10 stories that had the most of these positive interactions. 1. Just Like Human Skin, This Plastic Sheet Can Sense And Heal, Joe Palca took us to a lab to meet a scientist who is trying to make artificial skin out of plastic that can feel things, heal itself and keep germs out. Zhenan Bao has a long way to go before testing the plastic skin on humans, but she’s making progress. Listen, Read,  2. Planet Money  —   NPR One Oil Exclusive, In an NPR One exclusive, the Planet Money team explained how crude oil becomes more than just the fuel that powers our cars and heats our homes. It’s now the basis for many other consumer products, including the dyes that color our clothes and even painkillers that cure our headaches. Listen,  3. Noteworthy: Miguel, In this piece from NPR Music’s Noteworthy documentary series, host Jason King visited psychedelic soul artist Miguel in his Los Angeles home and spoke with him in the studio where he’s working on songs for an upcoming fourth album. This is a deep, immersive listen into the world of creating music. Watch, Listen,  4. Don’t Care About National Parks? The Park Service Needs You To, The National Park Service has been a part of our country for 100 years. But Nathan Rott reports about concerns that the majority of the visitors to National Parks are white and don’t reflect the demographics of the country. He looks at some attempts to change that with new programs and efforts toward diversifying the park’s staff and visitors. Listen, Read,  5. Indian Automaker Balances Luxury With Global Sustainability, Sonari Glinton, Ari Shapiro and Susan Stamberg put a Jaguar sports car through its paces in the hills of Los Angeles. An Indian company called Tata now owns Jaguar, and it’s trying to find new approaches to limit pollution and energy consumption. Listen,  6. Finland’s Postal Service Will Mow Your Lawn, Postal service workers in Finland have long helped out the elderly by delivering food and assisting with small things around the house, but now mail carriers are available to mow lawns. Listen,  7. Noteworthy: Dua Lipa, Noteworthy host Jason King met Dua Lipa in New York the morning before her Tonight Show performance for the latest episode in the NPR Music documentary series. They spoke about how she developed her sound, why she has always wanted to be a pop star, and why breaking through in the United States is so important to her. Listen, Watch,  8. National Park Service Celebrates Its 100th Anniversary, Nathan Rott introduces us to the people behind the scenes who keep the National Parks running. Listen,  9. Blockchain Looks To Change How To Do Business Online, Blockchain is a technology that allows people to share what is basically a digital ledger. It is best known as the code that makes Bitcoin work. Don Tapscott wrote a book about blockchain and says it is the greatest innovation in computer science in years. Listen,  10. Keeping Bears Wild  —   Or Trying  —   At National Parks, There are wildlife biologists who try to keep bears in National Parks wild and away from people. We learn about the problems of ”bear jams” and ”bear selfies” and meet the people who try to   the bears that get too attached to life near people. Listen, Read,  Related: The Secret Sauce Behind NPR One: An Editorially Responsible Algorithm"
41,"Though many of us lamented the   saga of this year’s U. S. presidential election, the news was too momentous to tune out. Indeed, many of the year’s biggest stories on NPR. org were all about politics. The top 20 most popular stories from the past year ranged from fact checks to mosquito bites, from Aleppo to taxes, and how to raise kids who will thrive, whatever the future brings. Here they are: the   stories from a year we won’t soon forget. Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days, The top story of the year  —   and in fact, the top story of all time on NPR. org, with more than 17 million views  —   was one that we didn’t write. It’s a memo from   Donald Trump, released in October, setting his agenda for his first 100 days in office. FACT CHECK: Donald Trump’s First 100 Days Action Plan, NPR’s reporters and editors took a deep dive into that plan for the first 100 days: How much of his proposed agenda can   Trump really pull off? They assessed what it would take, for instance, to eliminate two federal regulations for each new regulation that’s added, as Trump said he wants to do. Who Benefits From Donald Trump’s Tax Plan? Trump promised to ”massively cut taxes for the middle class, the forgotten people, the forgotten men and women of this country, who built our country.” During a town hall meeting on NBC’s Today, he said he believes in raising taxes on the wealthy. But some economists say Trump’s tax plan would benefit the 1 percent the most. Fact Check: Trump And Clinton Debate For The First Time, Though some have claimed we’re now in the ”  era,” NPR. org readers aren’t buying it. Our live fact check of the first debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton drew nearly 10 million page views, becoming what was at that point our most viewed story ever. FACT CHECK: Clinton And Trump Debate For The 2nd Time, The second debate was a testy one, and our political team assessed the accuracy of the candidates’ statements on everything from the deficit and the Affordable Care Act to Trump’s comments about women and Clinton’s email server. Fact Check And Full Transcript Of The Final 2016 Presidential Debate, This was the debate that added the terms ”bad hombre” and ”nasty woman” to our lexicon. NPR’s political team dug into the   of the candidates’ statements about guns, abortion, immigration and more. Shades Of 2000? Clinton Surpasses Trump In Popular Vote Tally, As the final votes were tallied, Clinton became the fifth U. S. presidential candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election. The structure of the Electoral College makes it theoretically possible for a candidate to win the White House with less than 30 percent of the popular vote. Live Coverage: Election Night 2016, Then there was election night itself. Trump’s victory caught many by surprise, and our live blog tracked the triumphs and tears as results emerged in contests around the country. Donald Trump Might Be In Real Trouble This Time, After the Republican Convention in July, Trump’s poll numbers went into a slump. NPR’s Ron Elving delved into the factors that were hampering Trump at the time. A Wounded Child In Aleppo, Silent And Still, Shocks The World, The image of one child, wounded and bleeding from the head, became a symbol of the Syrian conflict’s brutality, with airstrikes that often targeted hospitals. For 70 Years, A Mug In Auschwitz Held A Secret Treasure, In a mug belonging to Jews sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, museum conservators discovered a false bottom, concealing a gold necklace and a gold ring inlaid with stones. The jewelry had remained hidden all these years. What’s The Best Way To Keep Mosquitoes From Biting? The best way to avoid the Zika virus is to not get bitten by mosquitoes in the first place. NPR talked to researchers  —   many of whom spend a lot of time in   jungles and marshes  —   about the pros and cons of repellents including DEET, lemon eucalyptus and good   long sleeves. One scientist adds this fashion tip: Tuck your pants into your socks. Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away, With the advent of laptops and tablets, many students started typing notes, because it’s often faster than writing. But it turns out that the slowness of taking notes by hand is what helps students process information and actually understand the concepts they’re writing down. How To Raise Brilliant Children, According To Science, Two developmental psychologists offer a new framework to help parents cultivate the skills their children will actually need to thrive in the world: ”If we don’t rear children who are comfortable taking risks, we won’t have successes.” Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil Did Not See His Shadow, It might have been the chilly weather that day or just a love for Bill Murray movies, but readers needed to know the latest   meteorology. Phil’s verdict: Winter was on its last legs. WATCH:   Nails Impersonations Of Trump, Clinton, Obama, Sanders, From the depths of an exhausting election, a bit of mirth emerged in the form of Jack Aiello,   graduation speaker extraordinaire. What would the candidates say about the cinnamon rolls at Thomas Middle School? You’ll have to watch the video. Suspect Purchased Guns Legally Ahead Of Deadliest Shooting In Modern U. S. History, In June, a gunman opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. killing at least 50 people before he was shot dead by police. The suspect, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to ISIS in a 911 call before the attack. Mateen legally purchased a long gun and a handgun in the days before the attack. Minnesota Gov. Calls Traffic Stop Shooting ’Absolutely Appalling At All Levels’ Philando Castile, a    black man, was fatally shot by a police officer in suburban St. Paul, Minn. in July. Castile had notified the officer that he was licensed to carry a handgun and was reaching for his wallet at the officer’s request when he was shot. His death, streamed live on Facebook by his girlfriend, sparked national outrage. Gwen Ifill, Host Of ’Washington Week’ And ’PBS NewsHour,’ Dies, Gwen Ifill, one of the most prominent political journalists in the country, died in November. ”I’m very keen about the fact that a little girl now, watching the news, when they see me and Judy [Woodruff] sitting side by side, it will occur to them that that’s perfectly normal  —   that it won’t seem like any big breakthrough at all,” Ifill said in a 2013 interview. In Victory For Protesters, Army Halts Construction Of Dakota Pipeline, In December, the Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the construction of a key section of the Dakota Access Pipeline, to the cheers of protesters who had built a sprawling camp that was then covered in snow. That decision essentially halted construction of the   oil pipeline, just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation."
42,"With so much attention paid to   women in 2016, from Hillary Clinton to Wonder Woman, it’s easy to lose sight of   women who are blazing a trail in   and   countries. In ways big and small, these women have moved the needle on gender equality by being activists, role models or simply taking a stand. Here’s a roundup of some of the many memorable women we profiled on Goats and Soda in 2016. Halima Aden, the beauty pageant contestant who wore a burkini  The      wanted to compete for Miss Minnesota USA and didn’t let the fact that she is a hijabi  —   a Muslim woman who wears hijab  —   stop her. In the swimsuit portion of the competition, she wore a burkini, a type of modest swimwear specially made for hijabis. She grabbed headlines for her confidence, from the States to Somalia. ”Beauty isn’t   ” she says. ”If I can find different ways to spread that message, I will.” Sitawa Wafula, founder of Kenya’s first mental health hotline  Wafula has bipolar disorder, but she had a hard time getting diagnosed in her native Kenya. Some people thought she was cursed  —   and even worse, there just weren’t many mental health facilities in Kenya where she could get good information about her condition or medications. So she established Kenya’s first text message mental health hotline so anyone in the country could send in questions to trained volunteers. She’s become a role model in Kenya  —   and this year, named one of her country’s 40 women under 40. Shahd   a mom who slammed a teacher who shamed her daughter, When Swerki’s    daughter stripped nude in front of some boys in preschool, the teacher was frantic, acting as if the girl had ruined her future. At first, Swerki was filled with panic and shame. But she was determined to raise her daughter to be comfortable with her own body  —   an awareness she herself wasn’t taught as a young Palestinian girl. ”I will never allow anyone to control my reactions and feelings toward any incident happening to my daughter. To my husband. To me. To my life,” she says. Jacqueline de Chollet, a Swiss aristocrat who tackles child marriage, What was supposed to be a vacation to northern India ended up changing her life  —   and the lives of almost 200 child brides and other girls. After a chance encounter with a woman in a remote village, de Chollet, the daughter of a Swiss baron, was inspired to start a school for girls in Jodhpur. Called the Veerni Institute, the school requires parents to sign a contract stating that they won’t send their daughter to live with her husband until the girl graduates from high school. In exchange, the girl gets free room, board and education. Petrona Choc Cuc, a victim of sexual violence who testified against her abusers  It happened during Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s, but Choc Cuc hadn’t forgotten. This year, the    Mayan Indian went to court and told a   judge how soldiers killed her husband, captured her and her daughter, and repeatedly raped her. Many women were too scared to come to court, but not Choc Cuc. Her testimony was critical. In February, two military officials were sentenced to over 100 years of prison each for their war crimes. Rita Superman, a police chief who fights human trafficking, Superman has found that sometimes a   conversation is all it takes to turn a victim’s life around. She shares the story of Sylvia, from Bulgaria, who was arrested in Cyprus for prostitution. Superman asked her: Do you like what you’re doing? Are you satisfied with your work? No one had ever asked Sylvia those questions before. Sylvia was inspired to go to a shelter and press charges against her captor. It’s moments like these that moved the U. S. State Department to honor Superman this year for her activism against human trafficking. Neetu, child bride turned   wrestler  She was a child bride. Today, she’s a   wrestler eyeing the 2020 Olympics. Neetu, a   athlete, an occasional Bollywood actor and a mom of two, is seen as an inspiration in India. ”She’s changed everything,” says a woman from her village. ”Everybody believes that a girl can now say  —   ’I want to do something.’ ”"
43,"As the 115th Congress is sworn in Tuesday, Republicans will be poised to control Washington with a stronger hand than they have in a decade  —   with the Senate, House and the White House in GOP control once   Donald Trump takes office on January 20. This past November, Republicans held their congressional losses to a minimum, helped by an unexpectedly strong GOP wave behind Trump. After losing just two Senate seats, they’ll hold a   edge (two independents caucus with Democrats). In the House, Republicans lost six seats, giving them a   majority. House Speaker Paul Ryan boasted shortly after Election Day that the ”new unified Republican government” would be ”focused on turning   Trump’s victory into real progress for the American people.” And as NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis explained, there is precedent for a unified government pushing through sweeping changes early on: ”When the White House and Congress have been controlled by the same party, Washington has produced some of the most sweeping  —   albeit politically polarizing  —   legislation aimed at shifting the political trajectory of the nation toward the cause of the party in power. ”In particular, the first   congressional session of a new administration  —   when public approval is generally at its highest for the incoming president  —   has produced some recent presidents’ most memorable legislative imprints.” GOP congressional leaders and Trump agree on many things  —   paramount among them their best chance ever to repeal and replace Obamacare, in addition to rolling back federal regulations and increasing infrastructure projects. But there are some looming showdowns between the incoming president and members of his own party on Capitol Hill  —   many of whom were less than supportive of Trump in the primaries and lukewarm on his prospects in the general election. Top Republicans have already signaled their break with Trump over alleged Russian cyberattacks intended to interfere with the U. S. elections. After President Obama announced sweeping sanctions against the country last week, Ryan called the response ”overdue” but ”appropriate.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the sanctions were a ”a good initial step” and reiterated his support for a congressional investigation into the supposed interference. Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain is planning a hearing for Thursday into the breach, with three top intelligence officials set to testify. Trump, however, has said the country should ”move on” from the cyberattacks. During the campaign he repeatedly praised Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, casting doubt that they were behind the intrusion. He even praised Putin as ”very smart!” after his muted response to sanctions from the Obama administration. Trump has, however, agreed to meet with U. S. intelligence officials regarding the cyber breaches this week. Congress is prepared to get a jump start on confirming Trump’s Cabinet nominees as well, with hearings on some top appointees beginning next week. But many of his most important picks are controversial, particularly Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson. The Exxon Mobil CEO’s ties to Russia and Putin have already raised concern, and he’s sure to be pressed about the new sanctions as well. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’s nomination for attorney general could be contentious too. While sitting members typically receive deference from their peers, Democrats will draw attention to his past failure to get confirmation as a federal judge because of alleged racist remarks made in the past. Another looming fight will be when Trump makes his pick for the Supreme Court to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia. President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland languished last year as Republicans declined to take up his nomination. The process of repealing the Affordable Care Act is expected to get started this week as the Senate is expected to take up a budget measure that would begin the process of dismantling President Obama’s signature domestic achievement. But it won’t come quickly. Without a replacement plan on the table, some Republicans are wary of moving too quickly to dismantle the healthcare law for fear it would roil insurance markets if no fix is ready to be implemented. Soon after the members of the 115th Congress are sworn in on Tuesday, their next task will be to officially   Ryan as speaker. And while there’s little drama expected, there could still be defections once the voice vote is held on the House floor, particularly from hardline Trump supporters. Two years ago,   John Boehner had 25 members of his own party vote against him. When Boehner stepped down in October 2015, only nine other Republicans voted for someone other than Ryan. Ryan distanced himself from Trump just before Election Day after damaging audio emerged of Trump bragging about groping women. The two have since reconciled, but there have been signs of discord among the base. At a rally last month in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin, the speaker was booed. And while Trump quieted the dissenters, he did caution that if Ryan ever opposed him their relationship might not be so rosy any longer. ”Honestly, he’s like a fine wine: Every day goes by, I get to appreciate his genius more and more,” Trump told the Wisconsin crowd on Dec. 13. ”Now, if he ever goes against me, I’m not going to say that, OK?” It may have been a joke, but speaks to the strain in the most powerful relationship in Washington."
44,"Democrats may have lost the House and the Senate over the past eight years, but they always had one thing: President Barack Obama  —   and his veto pen  —   in the White House. That won’t be the case next year, when Republicans find themselves with all the power in Washington for the first time since 2006. The capitol’s new power dynamic  —   and the aggressive agenda Republican leaders are laying out for 2017 —   is forcing Democrats to make some tough strategic choices about how they’ll work as a minority party. The starting point in the conversation Democrats are having with themselves right now is this: Republicans in Congress spent almost all of the past eight years opposing President Obama, and they seem to have reaped a lot of political rewards for the block opposition. GOP leaders will get to set the agenda in Congress next year. And among their first orders of business will be voting on a Supreme Court nominee picked by President Donald Trump. That’s after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected any hearings, let alone votes, for Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is quick and careful to reject an approach of wholesale opposition, though. She recently described Democrats’ approach as ”always trying to find a place where we can find a common goal. Giving [Republicans] credit, or saving face, whatever it happens to be.” ”We would be hopeful that there are some places that we can work together,” Pelosi said. But when Pelosi and other Democrats talk about working with Trump, that common goal is conditional. They say Trump would have to be willing to do things they care about  —   like, perhaps, following through on a promise to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects. ”We think it should be large. He’s mentioned a trillion dollars. I told him that sounds good to me,” incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told ABC News. Highlighting differences, But otherwise, Democrats are confident that drawing out their differences with the new president will be a winning strategy. ”Our big leverage is the public,” Pelosi said, expressing confidence that public opinion sides with Democrats when it comes to issues like not making major changes to Medicare and Social Security. Democrats are eager to draw the contrast on those sorts of topics, and see those particular wedge issues as a big reason why they won back the House and Senate in 2006, the last time Republicans held so much power in Washington. That’s why, while Republicans like McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan are focusing on repealing Obamacare, Pelosi, Schumer, and other Democrats keep talking about the possibility of wholesale Medicare changes. ”Republicans here in Washington are gearing up for a war on seniors,” Schumer warned at a recent Washington press conference with a ”hands off our Medicare” message. Schumer said Senate Democrats will give ”one heck of a hearing” to Rep. Tom Price, Trump’s pick for the Department of Health and Human Services and a longtime Medicare critic. Democrats think they can generate a lot of positive headlines by grilling Trump’s cabinet picks. ”These are, with a few exceptions, radical nominees, the likes of which we have never seen in this country,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Democrats see hearings as a way to continue emphasizing their key concerns about Trump, like the fact he never released his tax returns, and the ongoing question of how he’ll avoid    problems as president. They see Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson’s hearing as an avenue to highlight Russia’s attempt to disrupt the presidential race, and Trump’s warm words toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. A big choice on Obamacare, But highlighting contrasts can only go so far, when Republicans set the Congressional agenda. At some point, Democrats still face a choice. Do they do their best to block every single big initiative, or try to work with Republicans to make it more  ? Sarah Binder studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, and said Democrats do have leverage. ”On most measures, whether it’s spending bills, deregulation, repeal  . That all requires cooperation from at least eight Democrats.” That’s because while Republicans will control the Senate with 52 seats, they’ll need at least 60 votes to advance bills in the chamber. The hardest political calculus could be Obamacare. Republicans can repeal the landmark law without any Democratic votes, using the budget reconciliation process that helped pass the initial law. But they’d need Democratic support in the Senate to pass a replacement plan, since the measure would be subject to filibuster. Blocking any sort of replacement plan, and then trying to lay the blame for disappearing health care coverage on Trump and Republicans, would be a bold, if callous, political move. ”Are they kind of, as a party, constitutionally adverse to that type of strategy? Many people think so,” said Binder. ”That they just value government and legislative action too much to do that to the process.” Indeed, many Democrats might want to work with Republicans to keep as much of Obamacare as they can. But helping give Trump a big legislative accomplishment could make him more popular. And it could anger progressive activists. ”It is the responsibility of this minority of Democrats in Congress to block, obstruct, disrupt, and do whatever they can,” filmmaker Michael Moore recently argued on CNN. He issued a warning to Democrats who may consider cutting deals with Trump: ”In the same way that the Tea Party was there in 2009, myself and thousands like me are going to be at those town halls in the district in the spring. And we will primary these Democrats if they don’t do their job.” Warnings like that may be why leaders like Schumer are quick to qualify any talk about working with Trump on issues like infrastructure spending. ”When we oppose Trump on values, or if his presidency takes a dark, divisive turn, we’re going to do it  ” he told ABC News. Pelosi knows Democrats all across the country are anxious. But she’s urging patience as the party tries to make its case to voters. ”Somebody used the analogy of, it’s like telling somebody they married the wrong person or their art is fake,” she recently told reporters. The first scenario is something many people have seen happen to a friend or family member. The second? Maybe not as much. Still, Pelosi’s point was that American voters did choose Trump and the GOP this year. ”They bought it. They’ll find out sooner or later whether they made a mistake,” she said, arguing that it’s better to let the married couple or art connoisseur make that discovery themselves, than to be told by an outside party. Pelosi has seen voters reject Democrats, come back to the party, and then reject them again. She said she is patient enough to point out the key differences between the parties, and wait for voters to eventually come back."
45,"There’s more methane gas in the atmosphere than there used to be, by every scientific measure. The Obama administration has been trying to stem the increase of this powerful greenhouse gas, but the incoming Trump administration appears bent on keeping the government’s hands off methane. The gas comes from agriculture, especially flooded agricultural lands like rice fields, as well as from the digestive tracts of livestock. But it’s also the main component of natural gas some methane escapes from leaky oil and gas operations. Whatever the source, scientists have found that, after many years of very little change, concentrations of methane in the atmosphere have increased by 3 percent over the past eight years. ”Methane concentrations in the atmosphere are surging faster than any time in the last 20 years,” environmental scientist Rob Jackson, of Stanford University, told NPR. Jackson and his colleagues have long tracked various sources of methane, as it emanates from oil and gas wells, city sewers and manure pits he recently published scientific papers on global as well as local concentrations of the gas. ”We understand some of the reason for (the increase),” he said, ”but not all of the reasons.” Other climate researchers have confirmed Jackson’s findings, and point out that methane warms the atmosphere at about 30 times the rate carbon dioxide does. Jackson said the recent increase convinces him that methane deserves as much, if not more, immediate attention as carbon dioxide, the main contributor to greenhouse gas. Scientists point to agriculture as the likeliest source of the new methane, especially in Asia and Africa. Feeding more people has meant more rice fields, more livestock and more manure  —   all sources of methane. There also is some evidence that small changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere may be allowing methane to stay aloft longer than usual, giving it more time to warm the air. But Jackson noted that there are other sources. ”We also see evidence for some increase from the fossil fuel sector,” he said, meaning drilling, processing and the transporting of natural gas. Recent research shows that leaks from the natural gas supply chain are more widespread than previously thought. The U. S. government is taking steps to stem that source of methane. The Environmental Protection Agency has written regulations to make companies plug methane leaks at new or modified oil and gas operations, and at the operations on some federal land. But the oil and gas industry believes the government is overreaching. That debate is likely to flare up when   Donald Trump takes office. Trump has said that environmental regulations drive up the cost of doing business and kill jobs his choice to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, has made similar claims that the agency has a history of overly regulating oil and gas companies. Jack Gerard, who leads the American Petroleum Institute, told reporters in November that he wants the incoming Trump administration to dump the regulations. ”Methane (regulation) is a top priority, and we’ll be pursuing that aggressively,” Gerard said. Some oil and gas companies have already sued to stop the regulations, which aren’t yet in effect. ”I think everybody understands that there needs to be methane regulation, and it’s really a question of degree,” Steve Leifer, an environmental lawyer at Baker Botts, a legal firm that represents oil and gas companies, told NPR. ”I know the industry is very concerned. They are taking it very, very seriously.” Oil and gas representatives argue that the recent research shows that the biggest source of methane is agriculture, along with natural sources like wetlands. That may be true, but Mark Brownstein, a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund, said he believes that’s a red herring. ”I think the debate over what’s caused the   rise has served to obscure the fact that emissions are already too high,” Brownstein told NPR. You have to start somewhere, he said, and capturing leaked methane from oil and gas operations is easier than changing agriculture practices. In fact, stopping methane leaks should make economic sense for the oil and gas sector, he said: Methane is a commodity, and leaked methane is money lost. Brownstein’s organization, along with university researchers and natural gas companies, has studied how much gas is leaking. ”Let’s keep in mind what’s at stake here,” he said. ”We’re wasting enough natural gas every year to serve the needs of 7 million homes.” So far, oil and gas interests haven’t been convinced. Gerard points out that the industry is voluntarily reducing leaks and doesn’t need federal enforcement. Leifer, the attorney representing oil interests, told NPR the debate will likely end up in court, along with lots of other pending environmental regulations. ”There is no major rule that isn’t going to go to court,” he said. ”You just can’t find one.” That shouldn’t be surprising, he said. Every change of administration in Washington means more business for lawyers."
46,"A Jewish farming couple from Canada says it has shepherded the sheep of the bible back to the Holy Land after centuries in exile. With donations from Jewish and Christian supporters, and some help from the Israeli government, Jenna and Gil Lewinsky have airlifted 119 furry members of the Jacob Sheep breed from their farm in Abbotsford, British Columbia, to Israel. Jacob Sheep are found in the U. K. and North America, but the Lewinskys say the breed originally roamed the Middle East and ancient Israel, and their spotted and speckled coats match the description in the Book of Genesis of Jacob’s flock. ”You know that Israel is built on Jewish people returning. Now you have a case of an animal from the Old Testament also returning,” said Gil Lewinsky from a customs loading dock at Israel’s international airport near Tel Aviv. Several times a week in recent weeks, an Air Canada jet touched down at the airport carrying a group of the Lewinskys’ fluffy Jacob Sheep in its cargo. ”Come, Israel, come!” farmer Jenna Lewinsky said to one reticent animal, coaxing him out of his shipping crate. Each animal comes with a Hebrew name. About two years ago, the Lewinskys wanted help with their spiritual mission to repatriate Jacob Sheep to their biblical homeland, and they contacted Eitan Weiss, then the head of cultural relations at the Israeli embassy in Ottawa. ”I was like, what the hell? Sheep?” Weiss recalled. ”I don’t know. It sounded very, very odd, I had to say. But when I did the homework and when they sent me some material, I said, I think this is an amazing story.” The Israeli Agriculture Ministry was not as enthused. Canada is not on Israel’s list of approved countries for livestock import. But the Israeli ambassador to Canada got involved, and the Agriculture Ministry granted a   exception for the Jacob Sheep. Curious to learn more about the sheep’s pedigree, I visited sheep expert Elisha Gootwine at the Israeli Agriculture Ministry’s research organization, the Volcani Center. ”Jacob Sheep are related to Jacob the same as the American Indians are related to India,” Gootwine said with a chuckle, standing inside the research center’s sheep pen. The Jacob Sheep are originally British and got their name in the late 19th century because their spots and speckles called to mind Jacob’s sheep from the Bible, Gootwine said. Generally, all sheep can be traced back to the Near East, he said, because sheep were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. But the Jacob Sheep breed, according to Gootwine, is not indigenous to ancient Israel. Zohar Amar, a senior lecturer in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at   University in Israel, who studies the flora and fauna of ancient Israel, said the Jacob Sheep breed ”may have a long history in the U. K.,” but, ”according to all of the scientific indications we have (historical and zoological sources) it has no connection to the ancient sheep breeds” of ancient Israel. ”Anyway, it’s a nice breed and people will be happy to see it,” Gootwine said. ”It is a good story. For journalists, not for scientists.” ”So, it’s just, it’s a myth,” I said. ”Yes. But what is wrong with myth? If you enjoy it, why not?” Gootwine replied. The Lewinsky farmers say the biblical roots of the Jacob Sheep are not a myth. They’ve traced the breed’s route from ancient Israel to the Iberian Peninsula to England to North America  ” and now, to Israel. The Lewinskys are currently setting up a farm for the sheep near Jerusalem, and they are continuing to solicit donations for support. Five of their sheep died shortly after arriving in Israel.  Meanwhile, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is planning a welcome home ceremony for the animals. Is Israel their original home? The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s Eitan Weiss said he sees it as a matter of faith."
47,"As Donald Trump prepares to become president, he’s promising to explain how he’ll deal with the many conflicts of interest posed by his businesses and charitable foundation, even as he insists they pose ”no big deal.” But short of selling his properties and putting the proceeds in a blind trust, it’s not clear that Trump can completely resolve the controversies over his many businesses. ”There’s a uniform consensus among everyone who does government ethics for a living . .. those who are still in government and those who have left government, that Donald Trump must divest,” says Norm Eisen, former ethics adviser to President Obama, and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”He’s got to sell his holdings, through using a blind trust or the equivalent of it, as every president has done for 40 years.” Since his election, Trump has settled some outstanding legal disputes, including lawsuits over Trump University and unionization drives at hotels in Las Vegas and Washington, D. C. Trump’s efforts to put these issues behind him suggest he recognizes that he and his family face serious conflicts of interest, Eisen says. ”That being said, [Trump’s actions] are not enough. They are baby steps, when what we need is a giant leap,” Eisen says. Trump says he will hold a press conference soon to explain his plans for his extensive network of businesses, but hasn’t said when it will take place. An earlier press conference to address the issue was canceled in December. His transition team cited the complexity of Trump’s businesses and said he needed more time to decide what to do. But Trump himself suggested to reporters in Palm Beach last week that addressing the conflicts was a simple matter and said his businesses are ”no big deal.” ”When I ran, people knew I have a very big business. So, I mean, they elected me at least partially for that reason. So I think that’s going to work out very easily. It’s actually a very simple situation,” he said. One issue that Trump appears eager to put behind him involves his charity, the Trump Foundation. Trump has been accused of using money from the charity, most of which was donated by other people, to pay expenses related to his businesses. The foundation has acknowledged ” ” on its tax returns, although it’s unclear what specific violations took place. Trump announced on Christmas Eve that he would shutter the foundation, a move that makes sense, says former IRS official Philip Hackney, associate professor of law at Louisiana State University. ”It begins to eliminate a minor conflict. I really think the Trump Organization is a much more significant conflict than the Trump Foundation was ever close to being,” Hackney says. But the New York  ’s office, which is investigating the charity, quickly scotched the idea of shutting it down prematurely. Closing the foundation too soon could complicate the investigation, Eisen says. ”We don’t want any information to disappear into the ether when the charity closes. That’s a particular problem for Donald Trump because he has a propensity for secrecy,” he says."
48,"The Islamic State issued a statement on Monday saying it was responsible for the attack at a New Year’s Eve celebration at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey, in which at least 39 people were killed. The   Amaq News Agency published the statement: ”In continuation of the blessed operations that Islamic State is conducting against the protector of the cross, Turkey, a heroic soldier of the caliphate struck one of the most famous nightclubs where the Christians celebrate their apostate holiday.” NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports the ISIS claim hasn’t been verified. On Sunday, Peter reported that Turkish officials identified several possible culprits for the shooting, including the Islamic State, Kurdish militants or   groups. Turkey’s   news agency says that nearly   of the people killed were foreign nationals. Clubgoers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon and France are thought to have been killed. Funerals for some of the Turkish victims began on Sunday. A      woman was killed in the attack. Peter reports that her father warned her not to go but she insisted  —   wanting to be with her friends. Nearly 70 people were wounded in the attack, among them a    businessman from Delaware, according to the State Department.   reports that Michael Raak of South Philadelphia says his brother, William Jacob Raak, called on New Year’s Eve to say he had been shot in the leg. The search for the attacker, who has not yet been identified, is still underway, says Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. Police believe he carried out the attack alone. The Associated Press reports: Hurriyet and Karar newspaper reports Monday cited unnamed security officials saying that authorities have determined that the gunman who killed 39 people comes from a Central Asian nation and is believed to be either from Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. Police had also established similarities with the   attack at Ataturk Airport in June and was investigating whether the same IS cell carried out both attacks. NPR’s Peter Kenyon reported on Weekend All Things Considered that Turkey’s prime minister says the attacker left his weapon at the scene and fled in the chaotic aftermath. At Reina, one of Istanbul’s most popular nightclubs, it’s believed some 500 to 600 revelers were celebrating the start of the new year. Reuters reports that the attacker shot at a police officer and at civilians before entering the nightclub. Many inside were said to have jumped into the neighboring Bosphorus waterway in an attempt to save themselves from the gunfire. The U. N. Security Council condemned the attack in a statement, calling it a ”heinous and barbaric terrorist attack.” Both the White House and State Department condemned the attack. The assault on the nightclub comes just two weeks after Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov was shot dead by   Turkish policeman Mevlut Mert Altintas and three weeks after a bomb attack killed 44 people at a football stadium in Istanbul. A Kurdish militant group claimed responsibility for the latter. Turkey, which is part of the U. S.  coalition against Islamic State, has faced numerous security threats. In all, there were at least six attacks in Turkey in 2016, claiming more than 200 lives."
49,"On a September day in 1940 while much of Europe was engulfed in war, four teenagers were walking through a forest in southern France when their dog fell down a hole. As they called for it they heard an echo. Crawling in to rescue the dog, the boys discovered a cave with hundreds of prehistoric animals painted across its walls and ceiling. It turned out to be one of the world’s best examples of prehistoric art. The Lascaux cave became a popular tourist site after World War II. But it had to be sealed off to the public in 1963 because the breath and sweat of visitors created carbon dioxide and humidity that would damage the paintings. Now the French government has spent $64 million building a near perfect replica to recreate the original cave  —   and the emotions of that first discovery. To see the replica, which is next to the actual cave, you begin outside, at the top of the adjoining museum. Visitors walk slowly down toward the cave entrance. All the while, sounds of the surrounding forest on a summer day are played on speakers. This specific order to the visit, referred to as the museum’s sequencing, is important to recreating an authentic experience, says Dina Casson, who was part of the team that worked on the museum’s design. ”When you visit the original cave, you’re actually walking through the forest with these sounds,” says Casson. Casson says recreating the impression of going underground and coming out again  —   from light to darkness to light again is also important. One member of her team was allowed into the original cave. ”That was one of the things that he said was so powerful,” says Casson. ”This sense of being outside, then inside, then outside.” Once inside the replica, the temperature is cool and constant, just like the real cave. As eyes adjust to the darkness there are suddenly animals everywhere. The more than 600 paintings and a thousand engravings in the actual cave were done 20, 000 years ago. Using a laser light to point out details, archeologist   Chadelle says these early human artists used very advanced techniques. ”You can see how they used a magnesium pencil for the black horns of this bull,” he says. ”And for the softness of the muzzle they used another technique. They blow dried paint made from natural ochre colors through a tool crafted from hollow bird bones.” Chadelle used to give tours in the original cave, which he says eventually became a victim of its own success. ”There were so many visitors that people were passing out inside the cave from all the carbon dioxide.” Chadelle says in the 1950s the hole the boys climbed through was opened up so a giant fan could be installed to help circulate the air. ”That’s why this replica is almost more real than the real cave,” says Chadelle. ”Because it has that original hole the boys climbed through.” Guillaume Colombo is the director of the new cave and museum complex at Lascaux. He says the art was so well preserved for so long because the cave was sealed tight  —   like a cork in a champagne bottle. ”So the cave wasn’t affected by sudden temperature changes,” says Colombo. ”And another reason it was protected is there’s a layer of clay in the soil that waterproofs the cave. That’s why Lascaux has no stalactites or stalagmites. It’s a dry cave.” Standing in the first big room of the cave replica, known as The Hall of Bulls, prehistorian Jean Clottes says the animals don’t really represent what these Cro Magnon humans would have hunted and eaten at the time. ”That would have been mammoth or reindeer,” he says. Clottes says the many bulls and horses were likely animals that played a role in the beliefs and spiritual life of these early humans. There are many mysteries surrounding the Lascaux cave paintings. For example, experts don’t really know how long it took to complete them. ”There was a code and a certain style they all follow, so we are pretty sure they were done by a small group, and in just a few years,” says museum director Colombo. ”But we don’t know if it was a few years within a hundred years or a thousand years.” Colombo says the paintings were most likely done by a couple generations of painters who passed down the knowledge. Such questions can be explored in interactive exhibits in the museum. Each visitor is offered a personalized tablet available in 10 languages. The glass museum looks as if it was slipped into a fault line on the hillside. Norwegian Thorsen Kjetilis is one of the architects. He calls the museum a link between past and present. ”It is a very contemporary building cut into the landscape and out of the landscape,” says Kjetilis. ”It’s just at the borderline between the vertical forest where the original cave lies behind us, and the horizontally of the farmlands in front.” The whole complex, known as Lascaux IV, is the third and most ambitious attempt to replicate the famous cave. It is precise down to three millimeters thanks to 3D digital scanning of the actual cave. Every nook and cranny is recreated using polysterine and resin, and the latest fiberglass techniques. Francis Ringenbach led the team of 34 artists who reconstructed the cave walls and ceilings and then copied the paintings onto them. He calls the   job ”colossal.” Ringenbach says to reproduce the art,   images of the paintings were projected onto the walls and copied pixel by pixel. The painstaking work gave them a real appreciation for the skills of the prehistoric artists. Ringenbach says they had a real level of mastery, and used the surface of the cave. ”These animals are not positioned by chance,” he says. ”For example, the eye of this bison is not engraved, it’s a natural cavity they exploited to make the eye.” Ringenbach says the more his team worked, the more astonished they were. ”Putting ourselves in the context made us realize how difficult the conditions were. They were working in darkness and working from memory to do these compositions.” Ringenbach said the prehistoric painters would also have had scaffolding that was fairly comfortable. ”They certainly weren’t working on a branch.” At times, he says the copy job became emotional. ”There were moments when I realized that I must be doing the exact gestures and movements of the prehistoric artist. And that’s when a little shiver would go down my spine,” he says."
50,"Hundreds came out New Year’s Day to ride the train in New York City, cheering as it left the station. That may sound odd, but this wasn’t just any subway or any old station, it was the stuff of urban legend: the Second Avenue subway line. To understand the crowd, you have to go back to the 1920s when the idea for the subway line was first floated, but never left the station because the Depression hit. The idea was revived again in the 1950s as a replacement for the elevated trains, but city planner Robert Moses decided to spend money building expressways instead. In 1968, the city finally got federal funding to build a subway on Second Avenue. It was expected to cost $220 million. The TV show Mad Men even worked in a reference to the plan when Peggy Olson, one of the main characters, goes apartment hunting on the East Side that year on the show. But it didn’t happen because in 1975 the city was broke. By the 1990s overcrowding on the sole East side line had become untenable so the idea for a Second Avenue subway line was revived, and in 2004, a plan was approved. The first phase would include three new stations that go from 72nd Street to 96th Street. The Metropolitan Transit Authority even gave a deadline: 2013. And a cost: $3. 8 billion. But the public was skeptical, as that deadline was pushed back to 2015 and costs crept up. The MTA finally settled on Dec. 31, 2016. On New Year’s Eve, at a newly renovated station on 72nd Street, Gov. Andrew Cuomo held an opening night party. There was a   band, a newsstand was converted into a beer bar, and the cavernous station was filled with purple, pink and orange lights. The governor helped secure more than a billion dollars in federal funding for the project and the MTA, and appoints their board members. At the New Year’s Eve party he told the more than 500 invited guests that the Second Avenue Subway is vindication of his vision. ”We needed to show people that government works and we can still do big things and great things and we can still get them done,” Cuomo said. The final cost for the three stations, and two miles of track was $4. 5 billion. And on Sunday morning, it officially opened to the public. ”I am so excited. I’ve been waiting for this for years and I’m thrilled to be on the first train,” said    Lillian Redl. Redl, who lives nearby, says the new line will shave nearly 20 minutes off her commute. And the new stations filled with colorful tile art, including 12 portraits by the artist Chuck Close, are snazzy. ”I love the high ceilings, it looks like there might be some soundproofing so I’m really pleased about that,” she said. And this announcement is sweet music to her ears: ”This is a   Q train via the Second Avenue line.”    train enthusiast Jared Margulis was impressed with the clean elevators, but had one suggestion: ”I think they got to work on the train, because the train did not say the right stop that the train is going to.” Residents are concerned that the new line will also bring higher rents that could push   residents out. The next phase will extend the line to 125th Street and is estimated to cost $6 billion. Tunneling could start in the next two years."
51,"What to expect when you’re expecting a baby dinosaur? Expect to wait. That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at Florida State University who determined how long it took dinosaurs to hatch from their eggs by studying their teeth. Much like tree rings, teeth have growth lines called lines of von Ebner that can be used to estimate the age of an animal. Researchers had expected dinosaurs might take the same time to hatch as bird, between a week and a half and three months. But in fact, they stayed in the shell far longer  —   between three and six months. The leader of the study, Florida State University professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleontology Greg Erickson, says you can think of it like layers of paint. Every day, a liquid layer of dentine fills in the inner portion of the tooth and mineralizes, leaving distinct growth lines on the tooth that scientists can measure. The researchers studied two types of dinosaurs, Protoceratops andrewsi and Hypacrosaurus stebingeri. These two dinosaurs produced eggs that range from the smallest known dinosaur eggs, to some of the largest. ”The Hypacrosaurus had a four kilogram egg  —   imagine that as four times larger than the egg of an ostrich,” says Erickson. ”They look like volleyballs.” The eggs revealed that dinosaurs probably spent about three to six months inside the egg before hatching, depending on the size of the dinosaur. The long incubation time of the eggs could have played a role in the extinction of dinosaurs after the   extinction event. ”You can imagine after the asteroid hit all of a sudden the resources went to nothing,” says Erickson ”Even when they (dinosaurs) did reproduce, they had extremely long incubation periods on top of it.” Unfortunately for the dinosaurs, animals that reproduce quickly are better equipped to adapt to challenges and are more likely to survive extinction events. The biggest limitations to the study are the number of specimens the researchers were able to analyze. While dinosaur eggs are fairly common fossils, intact eggs containing a skeleton are very rare. Erickson and his colleagues hope to look at more dinosaurs, including carnivorous dinosaurs, to see if their speculations about incubation times are true for all types of dinosaurs. The new research published in the journal PNAS on Monday."
52,"John Grant is not your      . He’s a superstar overseas, but he’s relatively unknown in the U. S. where he was born. He lives in Iceland and speaks four languages. He’s openly gay. And he’s HIV positive, as well as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Grant’s journey from obscurity in Buchanan, Mich. to playing   gigs at London’s Royal Albert Hall started in the 1990s with his band The Czars, which released eight albums over 12 years. This was a big deal for Grant, who had come from a home where his parents were convinced he needed to be ”fixed” because of his sexual orientation. ”When I was young, people were so disgusted by me,” Grant says. ”Before I even knew that I was gay . .. everybody else had it figured out and, you know, they were letting you know.” Even as The Czars gained critical acclaim, Grant submerged   dysfunctional relationships and anxiety in an oblivion of alcohol and drugs. ”I spent a lot of time caring, and it drove me to really just try and annihilate my brain,” he says. ”I just felt that I was going to fall apart if I didn’t learn to be myself.” The Czars split. Grant stopped drinking, and he stopped making music for a couple of years of recovery. He says he began to find the courage to bring out his whole self through his first two solo records. He sang about being HIV positive, and railed against a bad boyfriend. Ultimately, Grant realized he was dealing with severe depression. ”Sometimes I still can’t believe how much it can beat me down,” he says. BBC 6 Music Presenter Mary Anne Hobbs says Grant’s songs can be painfully  . ”Most songwriting, even if it’s based on a true story . .. is embellished in some way,” she says. ”But John’s lyrics  —   they’re so true they might as well be written in blood.” Grant says people close to him have questioned whether it’s good to expose so much of himself, but he says he enjoys performing intensely personal music. ”Sometimes, you might be feeling like you’re dredging things up, but that isn’t usually what’s happening,” he says. ”Usually, you sort of dealt with it and went through it when you wrote the song. And then when you perform it, there’s just the joy of connecting with people.” Pioneering singer and broadcaster Tom Robinson was one of the first rockers to come out as gay and mix music with LGBTQ liberation. He says Grant’s 2015 record, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, exudes a powerful confidence. ”If I had heard a song like ’Snug Slacks’ when I was a gay teenager in the ’60s, I think he could have saved me 10 or 15 years of heartache and pain,” Robinson says. ”It’s so great to hear somebody making music this unashamed and yet this irresistible.” Grant says he wants listeners to hear the fun in his music, because that’s a part of him, too. ”I want it to be a mixture of pain and laughter,” he says, ”which is a good representation of what life is like.”"
53,"Since George Washington penned his farewell address in 1796, announcing he would not seek   and laying out his hopes and fears for the nascent country, presidential farewell speeches have become a tradition in the peaceful and democratic transfer of power. President Obama announced Monday that his farewell speech will be Tuesday, Jan. 10 in Chicago. It will be held at McCormick Place, the venue for Obama’s 2012 Election Night celebration. In announcing the speech, Obama said he’s just starting to write his remarks but that he’s ”thinking about them as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here.” Presidential farewell speeches have historically been a chance for presidents to defend their accomplishments and lay out their hopes for the future. In some cases, the speeches have included pointed warnings that reverberate long after the speech has ended. For example, in his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the country about the growing might of the military, and specifically about the ”  complex,” the relationship between the U. S. armed forces and defense contractors. NPR’s Tom Bowman reported on the lasting impact of this speech in 2011, noting that it ”has become a rallying cry for opponents of military expansion.” Bowman said: ”Eisenhower was worried about the costs of an arms race with the Soviet Union, and the resources it would take from other areas  —   such as building hospitals and schools. ”Bowman says that in the speech, Eisenhower also spoke as someone who had seen the horror and lingering sadness of war, saying that ’we must learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.’ ”Another concern, Bowman says, was the possibility that as the military and the arms industry gained power, they would be a threat to democracy, with civilians losing control of the   complex.” In his farewell address on Jan. 15, 1953, President Harry Truman reflected on and defended his decision to drop the atomic bomb in Japan and mused about the start of the Cold War era. He said: ”I suppose that history will remember my term in office as the years when the ”cold war” began to overshadow our lives. I have had hardly a day in office that has not been dominated by this all —  embracing struggle —  this conflict between those who love freedom and those who would lead the world back into slavery and darkness. And always in the background there has been the atomic bomb.” President Ronald Reagan named the deficit as one of his regrets in his address to the nation on Jan. 11, 1989. He called out ”popular culture” saying: ”For those who create the popular culture,   patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom. . .. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile. It needs production. So we’ve got to teach history based not on what is in fashion, but what is important.” In President Bill Clinton’s speech on January 18, 2001, Clinton hailed the economic progress under his administration and called for the U. S. to be a beacon of freedom and peace in the world. He also saluted America’s diversity, saying: ”In our hearts and in our laws, we must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation and regardless of when they arrived in our country, always moving toward the more perfect union of our founders’ dreams.” President George W. Bush delivered his farewell address on Jan. 15, 2009. Despite his dismal approval ratings and a limping economy, he said, ”You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.” He also called Obama’s election ”a moment of hope and pride for our whole nation.” Obama leaves office with his approval rating at a   high, according to Gallup. Despite Obama’s conciliatory   speech about   Donald Trump, and his administration’s ongoing transition work, Trump tweeted on Dec. 28: ”Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. Thought it was going to be a smooth transition  —   NOT!” With the country fiercely divided after the election, Obama is expected to continue to strike a hopeful tone about the incoming Trump administration. And with much of his policy legacy  —   including his executive actions on immigration and the Affordable Care Act  —   at stake, it’s likely Obama will use his address to defend his actions."
54,"Erica Abad glides down the ancient canals of Xochimilco, a borough of Mexico City, on her   boat. Her cousin, Efren Lopez, steers their boat  —   called a chalupa  —   by pushing against the canal floor with a long wooden pole, while Abad flips a sizzling quesadilla on a steel griddle fitted into the boat. When a group of people on a nearby barge signal to them to order some quesadillas, Lopez navigates the boat toward them. And Abad places a few more quesadillas on the griddle for their customers. As the quesadillas turn golden, with the cheese inside perfectly melted, she fills them with huitlacoche (a deliciously earthy fungus that grows on organic corn) mushroom, chorizo, squash blossom and other ingredients. Abad’s chalupa is among many selling traditional Mexican street food and drinks, including sopes (a tortilla topped with refried beans, chorizo or ground beef, lettuce, salsa and a grated salty cheese called cotija) roasted corn and pulque (an alcoholic drink made from the fermented sap of an agave plant). The boats are surrounded by floating chinampas  —   gardens  —   with plants and small animals, like frogs, crayfish and salamanders. One chinampa is allegedly haunted, with creepy toy dolls hanging from nooses on trees.  Gliding past these gardens and boats are Xochimilco’s famous trajineras  —   vibrantly painted barges  —   that are filled with people knocking back micheladas (a spicy drink made with Clamato, beer and lime). Some barges even have mariachi bands playing on them. This is a typical day in this ancient borough, whose name means ”the garden of flowers” in Nahuatl, a language of the Aztecs. The chinampas were built centuries ago by indigenous settlers, who had found themselves surrounded by wetlands and needed to create spaces for growing plants like cactus, bougainvillea, bonsai and dahlias. So, they made floating gardens with tree branches, soil and mud, and tied them to juniper trees on the banks, to hold them in place. Over the years, the older gardens sank and new ones were on top of them. Today, the chinampas are no longer tethered to the banks. They look like little floating islands with plants, houses and other buildings on them.  The canals, which once helped transport goods from Xochimilco to other places, have evolved into a popular day trip destination in the last century. This borough’s history, beauty and a continuing campaign to protect the place from deterioration led UNESCO to declare it a World Heritage Site in 1987. Locals and tourists visit to enjoy the scrumptious street foods and alcohol, with the colorful sights and sounds all around. Lined up along the concrete loading dock is a long line of trajineras, with bright, swirly shapes and floral patterns painted on them. Their colors and designs have been an unchanging part of the boats for hundreds of years, reflecting the indigenous roots of the culture here. The trajinera have modern names these days  —   like Fernanda, Beatriz and Shakira. A newlywed couple, their wedding guests and a mariachi band dressed in white, board a trajinera with ”nuestra boda” (”our wedding”) spelled out in roses on an arched metal covering that shades the seated passengers. They drink and dance on their way to their reception, passing barges with a bachelorette party and a family enjoying lunch. You can spend an hour or four making your way down the long canals and experience a visual and aural symphony. There’s music everywhere. There are mariachi bands for hire. Or you can simply enjoy the Latin pop or club jams by rapper DMX blaring from rented stereos on passing trajineras. Dancing and singing at the top of your lungs are encouraged. As you float down the canals that once were inhabited by the Aztec and other indigenous communities, you’re treated to the smell of frying oil from boats selling quesadillas or the steam from boats selling elote (roasted corn smothered in butter, crema, cotija cheese, lime and hot sauce). And when you’re hungry, the boats will feed you and ply you with beer. The street food here is special  —   made with local ingredients deeply embedded in Mexico’s history. For example, the huitlacoche fungus goes back to the Aztecs, who gave it its somewhat unappetizing name, which means ’raven’s excrement.’ Food vendors take pride in the quality and   taste of their food. Lopez says all their quesadilla fillings are slow and patiently cooked at home before bringing it to her chalupa. And here in Xochimilco, you can enjoy these delicacies in a setting unlike anywhere in the world."
55,"Congress is back in session on Tuesday, and leaders of both houses say their first order of business will be to repeal Obamacare. If they do that, it will be a slap in the face to President Obama just three weeks before he leaves the White House. The Affordable Care is the outgoing president’s signature achievement, marked by an elaborate signing ceremony in March 2010 at the White House, with lofty speeches from the vice president and Obama himself. ”Today, after almost a century of trying, today after over a year of debate, today, after all the votes have been tallied, health insurance reform becomes law in the United States of America,” Obama said that day, to long applause from the assembled crowd. And Joe Biden famously leaned over to remind the president that it was ”a big f****** deal.” But Republicans have been vowing to repeal the law since the day it passed, and they’ll soon have a sympathetic president in the White House to sign whatever bill they send him. ”We will repeal the disaster known as Obamacare and create new health care, all sorts of reforms that work for you and your family,”   Donald Trump vowed last month in Orlando. That new health care plan hasn’t been fleshed out yet by Trump or his allies in Congress. So they say they’ll vote to get rid of Obamacare, but delay its demise until they come up with a replacement that will cover the millions of people who have insurance thanks to the law. Insurance companies and health care analysts are worried. ”I don’t see how you talk to any [insurance] carrier and give them any desire to hang around to see what they replace it with,” says Dr. Kavita Patel, an internist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ”Why would you stick around for that?” Patel worked in the White House and helped create the Affordable Care Act. But she’s not alone in her concern. Last month the health insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans sent a letter to lawmakers asking them to keep in place many of the financial incentives that are central to the law  —   including subsidies for patients to help them buy insurance and cover copayments, and a provision that eliminates some taxes on insurers. The American Academy of Actuaries also warned in its own letter that a repeal of the ACA without replacing it would be dangerous to the   health of the insurance market. Still, Republicans appear determined to move ahead with the vote as soon as this week. Some history: Democrats rammed the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 with no Republican support. It was a huge, complicated law and, like most legislation, it was flawed. Over the subsequent six years, Republicans, who were angry at the way the Affordable Care Act was passed, refused to cooperate in any actions that would be seen as helping it succeed. Instead, they promised in speeches and television interviews to repeal it entirely. In fact, the House has voted more than 60 times over the years to do just that. ”There’s no getting around the fact that lots of Republicans campaigned hard against the ACA and a lot of them won, including the person at the top of the ticket,” says James Capretta, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But even with control of both chambers of Congress and with Trump in the White House, Republicans can’t simply repeal Obamacare. They would need the help of at least a handful of Democrats to overcome a filibuster. Democrats can’t, however, filibuster budget bills. So Republican leaders have decided to defund Obamacare, eliminating the tax penalties for those who don’t buy insurance and the subsidies to help people pay their premiums. Essentially, that guts the law’s main elements. The problem for Republicans is that today, an estimated 20 million people get their insurance through Obamacare. About 10 million buy policies through the exchanges set up by state and federal governments, and most of those patients get subsidies to help pay the premiums. And millions more are covered because the law allows states to expand the number of people who are eligible for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. So people who had   conditions that shut them out of the insurance market before the ACA passed, or people who had reached   lifetime benefit limits, generally like the law. But, then there are people like Will Denecke, who is mad because his insurance costs have gone up since Obamacare passed. Before the law was enacted, he spent about $340 a month on health insurance. ”Incredibly, we got a notice from my health care company, Moda, which has been having financial problems, that my premium was going up to $930,” he said last October. He’s a   urban planning consultant in Portland, Ore. and, unlike most people in Obamacare, he makes too much money to qualify for government subsidies. ”I’ve had health insurance my whole life, but it’s just offensive in principle to think of spending $1, 000 a month on health care insurance when there is a good chance I won’t need it,” he said. He was considering just letting his coverage lapse. And, on the other side, you’ve got people like Leigh Kvetko of Dallas. She takes 10 medications every day because she’s had two organ transplant procedures, and the drugs are part of her daily regimen to survive. After Obamacare passed, she was able quit her job at a big company and start a business with her husband, because she could finally get individual insurance. ”This particular plan, the fact that they cannot discriminate against me because of how I was born, was a lifesaver, literally,” she says. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady told the Washington Times last month that consumers needn’t worry. ”We can assure the American public that the plan they’re in right now, the Obamacare plans, will not end on Jan. 20, that we’re going to be prepared and ready with new options tailored for them,” he said."
56,"Almost a million elephants roamed Africa 25 years ago. Assessments of their population now vary but suggest there are fewer than half that many. The main reason for the decline is ivory. Despite a 1989 ban on ivory trade, poachers continue to kill elephants for their tusks. Now China, the destination for most of that ivory, has announced it will shut down its domestic ivory market. Wildlife experts had thought that the international ban on ivory trade would slow or even stop the killing of elephants for their tusks. It didn’t. In fact, the killing got worse. That’s mostly because the ban didn’t cover older ivory, that is, ivory taken from elephants before the 1989 ban. So people are still killing elephants but passing off their ivory as old, and therefore legal to trade. John Robinson, with the Wildlife Conservation Society, says efforts to stop the supply of ivory at the source, in Africa, have not been very successful. ”Addressing the demand is absolutely essential if we are going to deal with the poaching issues,” he says. The biggest source of demand for ivory has been China. ”Almost all the ivory is for carving,” says Robinson. ”China has had a history of doing so. Whole tusks are carved into elaborately assembled pieces of one kind or another.” Now China has agreed to close down that legal trade by the end of 2017. Robinson says it’s an announcement conservationists have been waiting for since 2015, when U. S. and Chinese officials started negotiating an end to China’s trade. ”Certainly closing down domestic ivory in China will have a dramatic impact,” says Robinson. ”The Chinese market is the largest ivory market in the world.” Says conservation expert Elly Pepper at the Natural Resources Defense Council: ”It’s a game changer and could be the pivotal turning point that brings elephants back from the brink of extinction.” The Chinese government has laid out an extensive plan that includes putting ivory carvers to work on existing museum pieces or other projects. The government says it will also educate the public on the consequences of ivory trading for elephant populations. The Obama administration already has shut down almost all trade in ivory in the U. S. and several states have their own bans. Robinson says the Chinese decision may help convince other countries that trade in ivory, such as Vietnam, the United Kingdom and Japan, to do the same."
57,"The second day of January is National Science Fiction Day, an unofficial holiday that corresponds with the official birthdate of Isaac Asimov, the enormously influential and prolific scientist and writer of science fiction. The start of the new year is also a good moment to reflect on the future  —   an exercise familiar to both writers and readers of science fiction. But where New Year’s resolutions typically extend over weeks or months, the imagined futures of science fiction usually unfold years or centuries from the present. Interstellar travel and space colonization, if they come at all, aren’t coming in 2017. But maybe Jan. 2 is a good moment to take a longer view. What do the possible futures of 2067, or 3017, mean for the decisions we ought to make today? In an essay published in 1978, Isaac Asimov advocated for a ” ” way of thinking, a way of thinking that should inform the   of the present. He wrote: ”No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the word as it will be  —   and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our Everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.” The ”fictional” in Asimov’s ” ” thinking shouldn’t be misread. Asimov wasn’t calling for baseless speculation, but for systematic and scientifically informed prediction  —   an appreciation for possible futures, all the while acknowledging their contingency on our current actions and the many uncertainties involved. If this form of thinking is for Everyman (and Everywoman) what does it mean for us, in 2017? Adopting a longer view helps clarify which problems merit special attention. New Year’s resolutions are often focused on the self  —   with dieting and exercise topping many people’s lists. But looking a century into the future can change that focus from the self to future generations. For me, that highlights climate change and inequality as deadly problems of today, and science and education as crucial   investments.   thinking isn’t a reason to give up on dieting or exercise. But it might be a reason to consider a more ambitious set of resolutions for 2017 (and for 3017, too). Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo"
58,"Creatine, a chemical constituent of meat and fish that’s legally been sold online, in supermarkets, health food stores and vitamin shops for at least a couple of decades, may be the most commonly used   supplement marketed. But the safety and effectiveness of creatine hasn’t been rigorously analyzed by the Food and Drug Administration in the way that drugs are evaluated. And while proponents argue that the supplement’s long history of use by many athletes suggests it’s relatively safe for healthy adults, pediatricians warn that it’s unclear whether the supplement might harm the growing muscles and bones of kids and teens. That hasn’t been studied. The American Academy of Pediatrics specifically recommends against its use by adolescents, and most of the flavored powders, tablets, energy bars and drink mixes containing creatine bear warning labels that the supplement is not recommended for anyone under 18. Even so, use of the supplement among teens seems to be rising, particularly among young male athletes. Researchers at the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York wondered whether retailers were appropriately cautioning high schoolers and middle schoolers not to take the stuff. So they did a little survey: A    undergraduate, a member of the research team, called 244 health food stores across the U. S. posing as a    football player seeking to increase his muscle strength. In each phone call he asked workers at the stores for their recommendations about which, if any supplements he should take. More than two thirds of the sales associates recommended creatine to the caller  —   despite the label clearly warning against its use by young people. The researchers published their findings in in the February 2017 issue of the journal, Pediatrics. ”The biggest concern for teens is the potential impurity of the supplement,” says Dr. Michelle LaBotz, a pediatrician in private practice who specializes in sports medicine and   the cautionary position paper on creatine for the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Sports Medicine  Fitness. Because the FDA only lightly regulates dietary supplements, LaBotz explains, the purity of these creatine products cannot be assured some have been found to be contaminated with other substances, including testosterone, which can impair a child’s ability to grow and develop bone. The body is an ”amazing machine which functions, for the most part, beautifully on its own,” says Dr. Ruth Lynn Milanaik, who led the study. ”There’s no need to rush the game of muscle mass, which can be added slowly and healthfully through clean living, a good diet and exercise,” Milanaik tells Shots. LaBotz says a solid, strength training program can increase a teen’s strength by 30 percent or more in 12 weeks, and is far more effective than taking creatine. Milanaik says her findings should be considered a ”call to arms” for parents, coaches, pediatricians and retailers, to address and discuss potential risk of supplement use, especially with adolescent athletes."
59,"Men who work out may be using legal    supplements to the point that it’s harming their emotional or physiological health, according to a recent study. The preliminary study, presented Thursday at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention, recruited 195 men ages 18 to 65 who went to the gym at least twice a week and regularly consumed legal   or   supplements  —   things like whey protein, creatine and  . Participants answered questions about their supplement use as well as their   body image, eating habits and gender roles. ”The heyday for illicit supplements for the average man is over,” says Richard Achiro, lead author of the study and a registered psychological assistant at a private practice in Los Angeles. ”The bulky Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone are not what most men are seeking to achieve now. They want to be both muscular and lean, and it makes sense that [legal supplements] are what they’re using or abusing.” Forty percent of participants, who were all men, increased their supplement use over time, while 22 percent were replacing regular meals with dietary supplements. Eight percent of participants were told by their physician to cut back on supplement use because of health side effects, and 3 percent were hospitalized for related kidney or liver problems, which can be caused by excessive use of protein powders and other supplements. Men who used dietary supplements inappropriately also were more likely to have behaviors associated with eating disorders. Achiro is no stranger to the culture of workout supplements. His interest was piqued when he noticed throughout college and graduate school how common it was for his male friends to use supplements before or after workouts. ”It became more and more ubiquitous,” Achiro says. ”Guys around my age who I knew  —   I’d go to their apartment and see a tub of some kind of [protein] powder.” Not to mention that this has become a   industry that’s grown exponentially in the recent decade or so, he adds. Achiro was surprised to find that most studies focused on illicit supplements such as hormones and steroids and gave little thought to the role of legal supplements, which are readily available at supermarkets and college bookstores. One big factor behind supplement use is body dissatisfaction, the study found. The men internalize a particular set of cultural standards of attractiveness usually depicted by the media: healthy, muscular and lean, ”like Zac Efron,” says Achiro. And they’re unhappy that their own bodies don’t meet that ideal. But the study also found that the men using supplements were more likely to feel gender role conflict, which Achiro explained as underlying insecurity about one’s masculinity. ”This isn’t just about the body,” Achiro says, ”What this is really about is what the body represents for these men. It seems that the findings in part [show] this is a way of compensating for their insecurity or low  .” Abusing whey protein and the like can also put gymgoers at risk for other health problems such as body dysmorphic disorder, also known as muscle dysmorphia, and related body image disorders. ”Body dysmorphic disorder used to be referred to as reverse anorexia,” Leigh Cohn, a spokesman for the National Eating Disorder Association, says. ”Someone with anorexia will feel they need to continue to get thinner and lose weight. With bodybuilders, they act in the same kind of manner. They acknowledge that they’re ripped, but are obsessed with certain body parts that they find inadequate. This drive for muscularity preoccupies them. Supplements serve them the same way diet products serve someone with an eating disorder,” Cohn says. For people affected by body dysmorphic disorders, this constant and compulsive behavior takes over their lives  —   they are constantly   and can be unhappy, dissatisfied, or have low  . ”Think about competitive athletics on the high school and college level. Lots of these guys are encouraged by coaches and trainers to take these supplements,” says Cohn. ”This isn’t thought of as a negative behavior but can have negative consequences.” The silver lining, Achiro points out, is that 29 percent of study participants knew that they had a problem of overusing supplements. But they might not be aware of possible underlying psychological factors. ”Guys think taking supplements is healthy, [they’re] convinced it’s good for them, [it’s] giving them all kinds of nutrients they wouldn’t be getting otherwise,” says Cohn. ”[This is] ignorance about what proper nutrition is.” It’s also not unusual for people diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder or its characteristics to also have a high incidence of depression, anxiety and alcoholism, Cohn adds. Although the research is preliminary and has yet to be   Achiro hopes his research puts the issue on the map and encourages researchers to replicate his work. ”This is just the very beginning. There’re still tons to look at,” he says."
60,"There are a lot of reasons victims of sexual assault choose not to report it. High on that list is fear of retaliation, so many victims won’t come forward unless they can stay anonymous. The criminal justice system cannot guarantee that kind of confidentiality for accusers and the accused. Further, when sexual assault is reported to law enforcement, a majority of cases never make it to trial. In fact, only 3 percent to 18 percent of sexual assaults lead to a conviction, according to research funded by the Justice Department. But a court case involving the University of Kentucky has highlighted how confidentiality can complicate justice. Jane Does on campus, Student victims have the option of reporting sexual assault to their school’s Title IX office. Title IX is the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination on campus. These offices are also tasked with investigating allegations of sexual misconduct and these investigations come with the advantage of guaranteed anonymity for both the accusers and the accused. The two women at the center of this case were graduate students in the University of Kentucky Entomology Department when they said their adviser sexually assaulted them. NPR spoke with both women as well as the accused. Because this story is meant to focus on the system, we’re respecting the confidentiality of the accused and the accuser. We’ll refer to the women as Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, and the accused as the professor. NPR obtained a report prepared by the University of Kentucky’s Title IX office in which the Jane Does allege the professor groped them and said sexually suggestive things to them while attending separate conferences with him. The Jane Does told NPR that confidentiality was the most important thing for them when they decided to go to the university’s Title IX office with their allegations. Jane Doe 2 said they never wanted to go through the courts because they couldn’t afford to be named. ”I just spent a good portion of my life in grad school trying to further my career and if I’m labeled as someone who filed a sexual assault claim against a professor, that could very easily backfire against me,” Jane Doe 2 says. ”There’s a lot of people in academia who think that there are women who make up stuff like this.” Jane Doe 2’s concerns about retaliation in her professional life is just one of many reasons victims of sexual assault choose not to come forward. Research shows that only about 35 percent of rape or sexual assault cases are reported. On college campuses, the percentage of incidents that go unreported is more than 90 percent, according to the National Sexual Violence Research Center. The Title IX office launched an investigation and after months of interviewing dozens of people and collecting all sorts of evidence, they found enough of it to move to the next step: an official hearing. Who presides over Title IX hearings can vary from school to school, but they are typically run by school officials and do not involve law enforcement. If those presiding over the hearing found the professor guilty, everything would go on his employment record. But that hearing never took place because the professor was allowed to resign, highlighting what Jane Doe 2 calls a loophole in the Title IX system. ”Not just at UK but at every single university, if a professor resigns before there’s a hearing then he’s allowed to move on to another university potentially victimizing more students,” she says. In a statement to NPR, the professor said there is no truth to the allegations and that he resigned to protect his family from the publicity and stress of a hearing. Seeking justice, This gets to the heart of why letting universities handle sexual assault investigations can be problematic. You can’t remain anonymous in a criminal case as the Constitution guarantees the right to face our accusers. It’s different going through a university Title IX office, where the primary focus is protecting accusers. The office keeps their identities confidential and there’s even a different burden of proof. Frustrated that there would never be an official hearing, the Jane Does reached out to the university’s independent student newspaper, The Kentucky Kernel. Marjorie Kirk was the first person at the paper to hear the women’s story. Kirk is a journalism student at the school who had made a name for herself as an investigative reporter. ”It was March and a person walked in asking for someone to talk to and I said, ’I can talk’ and they basically unloaded this huge story on me,” Kirk says. After hearing the Jane Does’ story, Kirk was troubled by the lack of transparency on the university’s part and wanted to dig deeper. ”I felt an obligation to the safety of other people to try and report this,” says Kirk. ”And that’s why we started this battle for open records.” The newspaper filed two Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all the documents related to the investigation. The university turned over some records, but not all of them citing a law called the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act  —   or FERPA, which protects the privacy of student records at all public schools and universities. ”And this institution, the University of Kentucky, has consistently held that student information, particularly in cases that might identifying a student in a sexual assault, sexual misconduct case, must be held confidential,” says Jay Blanton, a spokesman for the university. So the newspaper appealed to the Kentucky attorney general, who sided with the newspaper. But the university still wouldn’t give up the records and because of a quirk in Kentucky law that says the attorney general cannot be named as a party in a lawsuit, the University of Kentucky took its own student newspaper to court in order to block the documents from being released. For Kirk, the move was reinvigorating. She really did believe the university could have simply redacted names and other identifying details and now she’d get to prove it in court. This time a lot more was at stake than just one professor leaving campus without a hearing. ”A decision would be for all the marbles,” said Kirk. ”It would affect any decision that a judge anywhere would try to come up with for similar documents. They would see this decision and likely follow the precedent.” Kirk says that just two days after the lawsuit was filed, two people who said they were acting as representatives of the Jane Does showed up in her office  —   a point the Jane Does dispute because they say they did not have two representatives. Though the Jane Does had consented to giving The Kernel 21 redacted pages of the investigation, they say they didn’t tell anyone to leak the full investigation to The Kernel. Ultimately, though, The Kernel ended up with the full report.” In the more than 100 pages were interviews with witnesses and emails where one of the women confronted the professor about his behavior. The investigation also included the professor’s version of events. So Kirk began writing. She’d publish her first story after receiving the documents on Aug. 13, but the investigation didn’t stop there. ”And as we dug into the system a little more, we saw there was much more to this than one professor,” she says. ”And so the scope definitely grew into a system that universities were enabling.” Pushing forward, pulling back, While Marjorie Kirk was on a crusade, the Jane Does watched with growing concern. They were happy with the first few articles. The women got to maintain their anonymity and the professor was named. But then their personal story mushroomed into something they hadn’t signed on for: dozens of articles and an open records fight. In an effort to put a spotlight on one broken system, the Jane Does stumbled upon another.    can be successful in exposing  . But media outlets ultimately have say on how they pursue stories and aren’t subject to the same rules as the court or universities. So it’s really not surprising that The Kernel took the story and tried to expose as much as they could. In November, the women filed a brief actually taking the University of Kentucky’s side. ”There needs to be some sort of reporting system for professors accused of sexual misconduct while still protecting the privacy of victims like me and Jane Doe 1,” says Jane Doe 2. ”And the records that Marjorie is calling for, those hundreds of pages of documents aren’t necessary for that reporting system.” Judge Thomas Clark of the Fayette County Circuit Court tells NPR he plans to issue an opinion sometime in the next two weeks. But in the meantime, we still have a university struggling to protect students and hold employees accountable, a crusading journalist sued by her own school and two women still searching for a more perfect form of justice. Ashley S. Westerman is a graduate of the University of Kentucky."
61,"You can only dissect a year for so long before another, hopefully better one comes along. So let’s set aside 2016  —   with its celebrity deaths, political upheaval and, yes, great music  —   and take a moment to look ahead to the best music of 2017. For a quick primer on 2017 music, here’s a world tour of sorts  —   one that runs through Mali (Tinariwen) the U. K. (Little Simz) Brooklyn (Sinkane, who’s also lived in Sudan, London and Ohio) Canada (Japandroids) and, finally, NPR’s hometown of Washington, D. C. (Priests). Hear a song from each below."
62,"After the countdown to New Year’s, Americans start thinking about upping the intensity of their workouts or making room in their schedule for a boot camp. But the men and women of the Hadza, a group of   in Northern Tanzania, have no need for resolutions to be more active. Anthropologist Herman Pontzer, an associate professor at Hunter College, and his collaborators distributed GPS units with heart rate monitors to a group of Hadza adults. The goal was to use the gadgets to pinpoint the level of physical activity in Hadza life. What Pontzer and his collaborators reported in a study published in October in the American Journal of Human Biology is that the Hadza are moving much of the time, typically in moderate and sustained activity rather than vigorous bursts. There’s a theory that human physiology evolved through hunting and gathering to require aerobic exercise, so that’s what the researchers were interested in testing. The 46 subjects  —   19 male and 27 female with a mean age of 32. 7  —   had their heart rates tracked over four   periods, covering both rainy and dry seasons. This data was matched up with what the researchers have learned about the Hadza’s cardiovascular health by testing 198 subjects (including 30 also in the   study). Their findings: An examination of blood pressure, cholesterol and other biomarkers shows no evidence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The typical Hadza day begins at sunrise. The Hadza wake up in grass huts in the middle of the savanna and mill about while figuring out plans and eating breakfast. Then the men set out with a bow and   arrows, covering miles and miles to track prey, such as giraffes, impalas and zebras. ”They don’t run,” Pontzer notes, unless, of course, ”someone jumps out of the bushes at them.” But they walk pretty much continuously, with just a single break at midday to avoid the worst heat. If they’re striking out with hunting, Pontzer says, they might chop into trees to get wild honey. Women go out in groups, along with children under the age of 2, who are usually wrapped up snug on mom’s back. They pick berries at such a rapid clip that Pontzer admits he couldn’t keep up with the pace. The tougher task is digging into the hard and rocky ground with a sharpened stick to collect tubers, which are a staple of their diet. The upper body workout can take hours, Pontzer says. It all adds up to about 135 minutes per day of    physical activity. Contrast that to the current recommendations from the U. S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion of at least 150 minutes per week. And only about 10 percent of Americans achieve that guideline, Pontzer says. This Hadza study is ”very relevant,” says Oxford University associate professor Charlie Foster, who is deputy director of the research group on Population Approaches to   Disease Prevention and president of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health. In a sense, he says, humans are all still  . ”We’re good at gathering food whenever we can. We just don’t have to go very far,” Foster says. ”Within 100 meters of your front door, you can probably buy a coffee.” And what many humans are hunting for these days is an exercise strategy that requires as little time as possible  —   hence, the rising popularity in the Western world of short,   interval training programs, says Foster, who was not part of the study. So one detail about the Hadza research that stands out to him is that they pretty much take the opposite approach. Is there a way for Westerners to design an equivalent exercise to tuber digging? ”Maybe if you garden aggressively,” Pontzer says. But he advises against mimicking the exact patterns of Hadza lives and instead recommends thinking about what you can learn from them. ”What the Hadza study says is that you don’t block out an hour. You put a bit of activity into everything you do. Forget this artificial distinction between exercise and life. Try to change things so you’re doing them more actively,” Pontzer says. And keep on doing them as the years go by. One of the researchers’ key findings is that the level of ”moderate and vigorous physical activity” doesn’t drop off as Hadza age. ”You see   and    men and women keeping up,” Pontzer adds. ”There’s no sitting on a   .” The same is true with Hadza kids. As soon as toddlers are old enough to skip foraging with mom, they join a mob of children who basically just run around all day, Pontzer says. Other than some limited opportunities to go to school, ”a Hadza kid has never spent a day inside because there is no inside,” he says. Maybe that’s another lesson to learn from the Hadza, Foster adds. When it comes to exercise, he says, ”You’re never too young to start.”"
63,"Some prominent conservatives have signed on to a letter warning   Donald Trump that he needs to sell off his businesses to address his many conflicts of interest. ”Respectfully, you cannot serve the country as president and also own a   business enterprise, without seriously damaging the presidency,” says a letter sent Monday by a bipartisan group of politicians, ethics advocates and academics. The letter was signed by several moderate Republicans, including former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and former Rep. Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, who was chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. But the signers also include some   conservatives, including Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, and political consultant John Pudner of Take Back Our Republic, which seeks to build GOP support for campaign finance reform. Pudner was instrumental in the successful Tea   effort to unseat   Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican. He also is a contributor to Breitbart News, which has been managed in recent years by Trump’s senior counselor, Stephen Bannon. A Trump supporter, Pudner said that cleaning up Washington had been a central part of the  ’s campaign and that now he needs to follow through. ”He made such a theme of things like the revolving door and the ways in which decisions can be influenced, not for the public good,” Pudner said. ”If you have the presidency and people are going to question every week, ’Why is he making this decision? Is there some business angle on it?’ I just think it undercuts so much of the reason that people did support him.” Other signatories included several   groups, such as People for the American Way, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the Revolving Door Project, as well as liberal Democrats such as Zephyr Teachout of Fordham University School of Law and Harvard Law School’s Laurence H. Tribe. Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN on Monday that a news conference is planned for Jan. 11 to address conflicts of interest. But she added that the date might shift, depending upon the advice of Trump’s lawyers. In the past, Trump has said he will turn over his companies to his grown children to operate. The letter notes that the   has begun to address some of the conflicts he faces, terminating real estate deals in Brazil, Azerbaijan and Argentina and announcing plans to close his charitable foundation. ”That is a good start, but we wish to be clear that the only way to solve the problems you face remains divesting your business enterprises into a blind trust managed by an independent trustee or the equivalent,” the letter stated. You can read the letter in its entirety here:"
64,"There aren’t many Shakers left. Sister Frances Carr, one of three remaining members of the religious group commonly known as the Shakers, died Monday at the age of 89. According to the group’s website, Carr died due to cancer at the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine, ”surrounded by the community and her nieces.” The group’s formal name is the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, founded in 1747 in Manchester, England. Critics called them ”Shaking Quakers” for their style of worship which included ”ecstatic and violent bodily agitation.” Persecution led them in 1774 to emigrate to the New World, where they established their first community in upstate New York. The persecution didn’t end for the group that advocated pacifism, gender equality, communal ownership and celibacy. Still, the community survived and attracted more than 5, 000 followers spread out over 18 communities in 10 states just before the Civil War. Along the way, Shaker communities were credited with creating distinctive furniture and   devices such as the   broom and circular saw. The Shakers’ utopian communities declined after the Civil War. What remains today is the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake. Sister Frances Carr was a    orphan when she was left in the care of the Shakers, according to The Associated Press. The surviving members of the religious group are Brother Arnold Hadd, 60, and Sister June Carpenter, 78. Hadd told The Associated Press that even in her final days Carr had hoped that the Shaker community would grow again, and that she would not be among the ”last” Shakers."
65,"It’s been 150 years since Fisk University opened in Nashville to educate freed slaves after the Civil War. The school’s later students would become prominent black leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. But the small school is still grappling with a dilemma that’s been there since the start: how to become financially sustainable. Fisk is perhaps most widely known for its music, but that legacy is intertwined with money. Just five years after the Fisk Free Colored School was founded in 1866, Congress stopped funding black colleges. Historian Reavis Mitchell says money dried up. ”When the school reached the point of less than a dollar left in the treasury, when there was no hope, a student chorus was put together in the fall of 1871,” he says. That chorus of nine students called the Fisk Jubilee Singers set out on its first national tour. ”They would present themselves  —   some the children of slaves, a few enslaved themselves  —   and the world was astonished by these young people from this place called Fisk,” Mitchell says. The Jubilee Singers became legendary. They performed at the White House for President Ulysses S. Grant. They traveled to England and sang for Queen Victoria, who instructed her court painter to create their portrait, which still hangs at Fisk today. And the tours worked. With the money the singers raised, Fisk bought the land it sat on and built the campus’ first permanent building. It’s a point of pride even today. At Fisk events, speakers frequently invoke the original nine Jubilee Singers, thanking them for their dedication to the school. But as their legacy lives on, so does the financial burden they tried to relieve. Fisk nearly went bankrupt in the 1980s. Then, a decade ago, it set off a long legal battle when it tried to sell famous paintings donated by Georgia O’Keeffe. The school was later put on temporary probation for its finances. That’s not to say it’s always been shaky. Marybeth Gasman at the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions actually wrote her dissertation on what she calls Fisk’s golden years  —   the 1940s and ’50s. ”And that’s really the last time that Fisk had like real financial success,” Gasman says. ”They were at the helm of [historically black colleges and universities].” To get back to that point, Gasman says, Fisk needs a few things. It needs stable leadership as the school has been cycling through presidents lately. It also needs to buckle down on fundraising by getting potential donors excited about the school today, not just its history. ”No one’s going to give to Fisk merely because of Jubilee Singers or Jubilee Hall,” Gasman says. ”They want to see what Fisk is doing now.” That’s the biggest challenge for Jens Frederiksen, who is in charge of fundraising at Fisk. He says he wants to move the school away from its reputation of being strapped for cash. ”I think for a long time we were probably mired down in a few familiar narratives that sort of usurped all the press,” he says. Instead, Frederiksen wants to highlight academics. For example, Fisk is nationally ranked for its master’s program in physics. He’s also trying to increase alumni and private company donations. The Jubilee Singers still have a role in all of this, 150 years later. They’re seen as ambassadors for the university as they travel around the country to perform. But this time, the fortunes of the school no longer rest on their voices."
66,"Lawmakers returned to Washington and wasted no time getting to work on the repeal of Obamacare. Sen. Mike Enzi,  . introduced a resolution just hours after the new Congress convened Tuesday that will serve as the vehicle for repealing much of the president’s signature health care law. ”Today, we take the first steps to repair the nation’s broken health care system, removing Washington from the equation and putting control back where it belongs: with patients, their families, and their doctors,” Enzi, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a press release on his website Tuesday. It’s the first step in Republican lawmakers’ plan to fulfill their most ardent campaign promise  —   to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a Republican alternative. Republicans have to use a special legislative maneuver, called a budget resolution, to undo the ACA because they don’t have enough votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Budget bills aren’t subject to filibuster, so lawmakers will be able to repeal the parts of the law that have budget and tax implications. That means they can essentially gut the law, removing all the subsidies that help   and   people buy health insurance and getting rid of the smorgasbord of taxes  —   on medical devices, insurance companies and wealthy individuals  —   that pay for those subsidies, Enzi’s resolution calls on the Senate to get a bill to the Budget Committee by Jan. 27. Republican lawmakers say they don’t want the 20 million people who have newly gained insurance because of the ACA to lose their coverage. So they plan to phase out Obamacare over time while they devise a replacement plan that they say will make affordable health insurance available to everyone, without the   mandate to buy insurance if you don’t want it. Many analysts are skeptical that this ”repeal and delay” strategy will work. ”The most likely end result of ’repeal and delay’ would be less secure insurance for many Americans, procrastination by political leaders who will delay taking any proactive steps as long as possible, and ultimately no discernible movement toward a real marketplace for either insurance or medical services,” said Joe Antos and James Capretta of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in a blog published Tuesday in Health Affairs. Antos and Capretta say a partial repeal with no replacement would lead insurance companies to pull out of the Obamacare market altogether, leaving those who get coverage there today with no insurance at all. It’s not clear exactly what will be included in the actual repeal bill. The best model we have now is a bill passed by the House and Senate and vetoed by President Obama last year. That bill eliminated the mandate for individuals to have insurance coverage right away but delayed the other parts of the repeal for two years. ”I can see how it would be hard for Republicans to maintain the individual mandate, which is possibly the most objectionable part of the ACA in their view,” says Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. ”On the other hand, getting rid of the individual mandate immediately risks a collapse of the individual insurance market.” The ACA includes the mandate to ensure that both sick and healthy people buy insurance to spread the costs across a broad population and keep premiums low. If Republicans follow the model of last year’s bill and eliminate the mandate immediately, many healthy people would forgo insurance, and the price of coverage for sick people would spiral out of control, analysts say. ”That is a prescription for health plan disaster during this transition and brings into question just how many plans would stay in the program for 2018,” says Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant."
67,"The House and Senate are back in Washington today for the start of the 115th Congress. With GOP control of both chambers and soon the Oval Office, Republicans are promising an aggressive agenda that will prioritize the repeal of the current president’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. The Senate is expected to start that process with a budget resolution this week. After the pomp and circumstance of taking the official oath and the   of new members is complete, the top Congressional priority is usually given the honor of being introduced as House Resolution 1, or ”H. R. 1” for short. With the rollback of Obamacare working first through the Senate, Republican Speaker Paul Ryan will not take the privilege of introducing that as H. R. 1, but looking back at the first bill to be introduced in the House in past sessions of Congress gives a glimpse at the priorities of legislators at the time. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Speaker at bill introduction: Nancy Pelosi,  . Control of House: Democratic Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Signed into law by President Barack Obama  The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is the official name for what is generally known as ”the stimulus.” Washington was 180 degrees from where things are in 2017  —   Democrats had control of both the House and the Senate and Barack Obama had just won the presidency.   Speaker Nancy Pelosi used the H. R. 1 designation for the bill which was intended to address the effects of the Great Recession. Eventually Congress passed the behemoth $787 billion plan, which aimed to save or create millions of jobs and funneled spending to highway infrastructure investments, improvements to public housing and expanding broadband access to underserved areas. Before its passage, President Obama lobbied hard to get congressional Republicans to support the legislation, but the measure failed to garner a single GOP House member and only three Republican senators.   Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, Speaker at bill introduction: John Boehner,   Control of House: Republican Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Died in the 112th Congress, but later became the legislative vehicle for Disaster Relief Appropriations Act in the next Congress. Following the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans picked up a net total of 63 House seats and regained control of the chamber. Much of the Democrats’ historic losses were blamed on a sluggish economy and backlash to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. With Republicans back in control of the House, Speaker John Boehner sought to make good on the GOP   promise to restore ”fiscal sanity” and cut back on government spending. He used H. R. 1 to introduce Rep. Hal Rogers’   Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011 bill to do just that. In a statement, Rogers said at the time that the bill’s spending reductions were ”historic.” ”HR 1 provides $1. 028 trillion for discretionary programs through the remainder of fiscal year 2011, a level $100 billion below the level President Obama requested in his fiscal year 2011 budget one year ago.” But this was the start of the   ” ” era of Congress  —   not a whole lot was being done with a divided government as Democrats maintained control of the Senate and White House. Though the bill passed easily in the House and was sent over to the Senate, no consequential action was made on it. That is not until December of 2012. By that time two major events had taken place: President Obama was   and Hurricane Sandy walloped the East Coast with New York and New Jersey taking the brunt of the storm. It was one of the costliest storms in our nation’s history and more than 100 people died in the U. S. alone. When the Senate finally took action on the measure, it became the legislative vehicle to supply funds for disaster relief efforts. The Senate amended the bill and passed it late in the year. According to the website GovTrack. us, the bill died in the 112th Congress because differences between the House and Senate versions of the measure were never resolved. The bill was reintroduced in the 113th Congress and came to be known as the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act, 2013. Implementing Recommendations of the   Commission Act of 2007, Speaker at bill introduction: Nancy Pelosi,   Control of House: Democratic Control of Senate: Democratic Final action on bill: Signed into law by President George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi’s first legislative action as Speaker of the House was bringing this bill up for a vote. Fresh off their sweeping gains in the 2006 midterm elections that gave Democrats control of Congress, members were eager to demonstrate their national security prowess as the Iraq War dragged on Republicans. It had been more than five years since the 2001 terrorist attacks and Democrats intended to make good on a campaign promise to put in place many of the recommendations put forth by the   Commission, which was released in July 2004. The highlights of this legislation included funding increases to state and local government   efforts and mandating the Department of Homeland Security inspect all cargo arriving in the U. S. by sea and plane. A provision was added before President Bush signed it into law favored by many Republicans that shielded Americans who report suspicious activity to authorities. When he signed it into law in August 2007, Bush said he was ”pleased” by this addition but also called for Congress to take further oversight action. ”There is still other work to be done. I continue to believe that Congress should act on the outstanding   Commission recommendations to reform the legislative branch’s oversight of intelligence and   activities, which the Commission described as dysfunctional.” Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, Speaker at bill introduction: Newt Gingrich,   Control of House: Republican Control of Senate: Republican  Final action on bill: Signed into law by President Bill Clinton, Like our previous entry, this piece of legislation was the first introduced at the beginning of a Congress in which one party, this time the Republicans, were fresh off historic gains. The 1994 midterms elections, commonly referred to as the ”Republican Revolution,” saw the GOP take control of the Senate and seize control of the House for the first time in 40 years. Seeking to put forth conservative principles outlined in the ”Contract with America,” which the new House Speaker Newt Gingrich was chief architect of, the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 was given the status of H. R. 1. This bill made certain that rules governing private sector workplaces are applicable to Congress. The bill passed the House with no opposition  . The Senate passed their version in similarly overwhelming fashion and President Clinton signed it into law. The action would apply a number of major laws to Congress including the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes minimum wage and overtime pay to employees, and the Americans with Disabilities Act that prohibits discrimination against people physical or mental challenges. The law also established the Office of Compliance, which covers more than 30, 000 federal workers. It is a   independent federal agency created to enforce the law and to serve as a place for workers to file complaints. Regulation Reform Act of 1981, Speaker at bill introduction: Thomas ’Tip’ O’Neill,    Control of House: Democrat Control of Senate: Republican Final action on bill: Died in the House, This bill was introduced in the 97th Congress and was intended to make regulations more   and directed each federal agency to provide instructions on how the public could take part in the regulatory process. The bill also required agencies to include instructions for the public to obtain agency reports on ”each proposed and final major rule instructions.” Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill slated regulation reform for the H. R. 1 designation following the landslide 1980 elections marked the start of the conservative Reagan era. That election returned Republicans to control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter century, in addition to giving the GOP the White House back. Other than a few hearings held by a House Rules Subcommittee, this bill went nowhere and eventually died in the House without coming up for a vote."
68,"One of the most stressful questions a new parent confronts is, ”Who’s going to take care of my baby when I go back to work?”  Figuring out the answer to that question is often not easy. When NPR, along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, surveyed more than 1, 000 parents nationwide about their child care experiences, a third reported difficulty finding care. Searching far and wide, finding little  Megan Carpenter, a new mother who lives in Alexandria, Va. knows well the feeling of desperation that can come with the search for safe, quality infant care. She had a hard deadline  —   16 weeks after her baby was born her maternity leave would end and she would have to return to her job at a nonprofit that serves homeless and   women. So she and her husband started looking for child care early, only a few months into her pregnancy. ”At our first few interviews we were asking a lot of questions and were really trying to get a feel for the place,” Carpenter recalls. ”And by place 10 or 11, our only question was, ’Do you have a spot?’ ” The answer to that question, time and again, was ”no.” That meant getting on a lot of waitlists  —   and paying a hefty, nonrefundable waitlist fee each time. ”There were a lot of places that were totally willing to take our $100 or $200 waitlist fee,” Carpenter says. ”We spent over $1, 000 in waitlist fees  —   many of which I never heard from again.” By the time baby Cora arrived, the couple still had no prospects. Ultimately, Carpenter and her husband persuaded their mothers to take time away from their jobs and fly out from Georgia and Missouri to watch Cora in shifts until a spot at one of the centers opened up. Scenarios like this are playing out all around the U. S. An analysis of some 7, 000 ZIP codes by the Center for American Progress describes roughly half as ”childcare deserts.” While Megan Carpenter’s experience is representative of what many working parents go through, Narinder Walia’s is a   scenario. Walia lives in Fremont, Calif. and works in biotech. Her baby boy, Avin, was born on Halloween 2014. During Walia’s   maternity leave, trying to find child care nearly became a   job. ”I made   calls,” she says. ”Some were not accepting infants. Or they were full.” Of the roughly six dozen centers, only three were able to offer her a slot. Of those, she says, two were messy and disorganized. The third option, an   facility, set off some red flags. But it was the best available. Walia says her main reservation was that the center catered to toddlers and older children. Still, the owner assured her, it could handle a baby. What ultimately happened on Avin’s first day at this facility is every parent’s worst nightmare. ”I was on the way to go pick him up,” recalls Walia, ”and the Kaiser ER called me.” You have to come over, they told her. Your son is here. To settle Avin for his first nap on her watch, the paid caregiver had put the baby   in his bassinet  —   a move that goes against established   guidelines set by the American Academy of Pediatrics and is against standard practice in the infant care field. Research has established that placing babies   to sleep puts them at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome. The caregiver told Fremont police that she turned Avin onto his back after about 15 minutes, and that he stopped breathing a short time later. On his first day away from his mother, Avin died  —   he was 3 months old. The coroner’s report confirms SIDS as the cause of death. ”I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” says Walia, straining to recount the day. ”He was smiling. He was a big baby, all chubby. There was nothing wrong with him. Even at the first and second checkup the doctor was like, ’Mama, keep doing what you’re doing. The baby’s doing really well.’ ” What happened to Walia’s family is rare. But it’s the deepest fear of parents who face severely limited child care choices. ”The market really doesn’t work”  These experiences  —   from disruptive frustration to tragedy  —   leave many parents wondering why the supply of quality, licensed infant care in the U. S. does not meet the demand for it. The answer boils down to the fact that child care, particularly infant care, is an extremely low profit field. Costs are high, factoring in real estate, supplies, insurance and, above all, labor. Many states require a ratio of one caregiver to every three or four babies. And, on the other side of the equation, centers can’t significantly raise their prices. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan think tank New America, parents in the United States pay, on average, $9, 589 a year for   care of children from birth to age 4  —   that’s more than the average cost of   college tuition ($9, 410). Many parents can’t afford to pay more. So, low profits  —   combined with high liability and the need to navigate complex regulations  —   make for an uninviting business climate. And, in this climate, the waitlist has become a tool necessary for providers’ financial survival, to buffer against unfilled spots and lost income. A select few providers are thriving, though. Over the past 30 years, the company Bright Horizons has grown to operate more than 1, 000 child care centers in 42 states and the District of Columbia. So, what’s the company’s secret? ”We’ve convinced employers to invest over a billion dollars, in either capital investments or subsidies, for their working families,” says Bright Horizons CEO Dave Lissy. ”That just didn’t exist before we pioneered the model.” Some employers, including Home Depot, Starbucks and Chevron, have partnered with Bright Horizons to establish child care centers primarily for their workers. These employers pay most, or even all, of the cost to build the facilities. ”After that’s all done,” Lissy says, ”on average, tuitions are funded 75 percent by parents and 25 percent through employer subsidies.” That means parents pay their college   sum, and the employers that partner with Bright Horizons pay even more on top of that. Bright Horizons is able to build these bright, cheerful centers because of this generous underwriting by employer partners. Without that cushion, the rest of the child care sector is largely operating on   profit margins, slow to grow and fragile. That industrywide weakness was a central finding of New America’s study of child care nationwide. ”The thing to remember about child care is that the market really doesn’t work,” says Brigid Schulte, an author of the study. ”It’s like education. When you look at the education market, it also doesn’t work. It has to be subsidized. It has to be seen as a public good, and the same sort of economic logic works in the [age]    early care and learning situation as well. We just haven’t thought about it like that.” An infrastructure investment? The idea of child care as a public good has increasing resonance with policy thinkers from the left and right. ”There definitely is an issue of child care supply,” says Angela Rachidi, research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. ”It’s an issue up and down the income scale.” Of all the ways the government could spend public money, investing in child care, she says, should be a priority. ”Not only does that then benefit children,” Rachidi says, ”but it also helps the parents work.” Katie Hamm, senior director of early childhood policy at the   Center for American Progress, agrees. Without much greater public support of the child care industry, she says, demand for licensed infant care will continue to outpace supply. But she takes heart from a campaign season where heavy emphasis was placed on the challenges American workers face when it comes to child care and the need for infrastructure investment. She sees the two issues as interconnected. ”It seems like there might be some consensus, both with the incoming administration and among members of Congress, that we need an infrastructure investment,” says Hamm. ”A lot of people talk about that and mean roads and bridges. But before parents get on roads and bridges and support our economy, they need child care.” For Walia, the mother from Fremont, Calif. more good quality infant care can’t come soon enough. She is expecting another child any day. ”I’m kind of being very hesitant even just thinking about the child care service right now,” she says. ”In my mind I just want to hold him tight and not let him go. But obviously that’s not practical.”"
69,"Ford and General Motors both reacted Tuesday to   Donald Trump’s continued criticism of U. S. companies manufacturing products in Mexico. Ford announced it would cancel its $1. 6 billion plans to build a plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and instead invest an additional $700 million to expand an existing plant in Michigan to make autonomous and electric vehicles. That comes on the heels of another decision in November to keep production of some small SUVs at its plant in Kentucky. That announcement came a couple of hours after Trump took to Twitter to criticize General Motors: ”General Motors is sending Mexican made model of Chevy Cruze to U. S. car   free across border. Make in U. S. A. or pay big border tax!” GM responded that only a small number of hatchback models are manufactured in Mexico and sold at U. S. car dealers. ”All Chevrolet Cruze sedans sold in the U. S. are built in GM’s assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. GM builds the Chevrolet Cruze hatchback for global markets in Mexico, with a small number sold in the U. S.” Why did Ford change its mind? The move marks a departure for Ford, whose CEO last month said it was looking forward to working with the Trump administration on trade but that it very likely wouldn’t change plans for its $1. 6 billion factory. Now CEO Mark Fields tells NPR that Trump’s rhetoric was a factor in reversing the earlier decision, but one of several factors. He says the carmaker was influenced by promises of new tax and regulatory reforms and the prospect of keeping jobs at home. ”Ford is a global automaker, but our home . .. is right here in the United States,” he said. What is the significance of this change? It means 700 additional Ford jobs will come to Michigan, and Ford says every factory job is likely to create another seven related jobs. ”We’ve created 28, 000 jobs and we’ve invested $12 billion in the U. S. in our plants in the last five years,” Fields said in a press conference. Shifting a factory itself would not be news but for the fact that it is highly unusual for companies to respond to direct, public pressure from an incoming president. ”I know from talking to business people that no major firm wants to be a subject of a Trump tweet,” says Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says companies realize Trump controls the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the IRS, Treasury and regulatory agencies, and ”the amount of control that intersects with what companies are doing is enormous.” Will such moves inspire retaliatory trade barriers that hurt other U. S. firms and cost American jobs?  Trump has pledged to rework U. S. trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement. Trump has also called for high tariffs on companies that manufacture products overseas and then import them for sale in the U. S. The question is how broad such tariffs would be, and whether American trading partners would object and retaliate with similar measures. So far, Trump has (or claims to have) put pressure on American companies including Carrier, Sprint, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and GM. But Hufbauer says if Trump makes good on actually raising tariffs, ”I think some form of retaliation [from other countries] is almost certain.” Who’s next, and what is the possible economic impact? So far, tweeting trade and other corporate policy has played well for Trump. He has targeted Boeing for a potentially large contract to build a new Air Force One, and he criticized Lockheed Martin for its expensive   fighter jet contracts. Hufbauer says it remains unclear what the economic impact of all this will be. So far, the tweets have gotten a massive amount of media attention, and that may mean it will continue and that others  —   consumer brands in particular  —   could find themselves targets. ”Some people may wrongly think this is the way to create jobs in the U. S.,” Hufbauer says. ”My estimate is that this kind of thing [companies responding to tweets] is not going to have a major effect,” and it is not in keeping with a   economy,” says David Dollar, senior fellow for the Brookings Institution."
70,"  Donald Trump said Tuesday that he intends to nominate Robert Lighthizer as his U. S. trade representative, potentially signaling a major overhaul of U. S. trade policy once Trump takes office. Lighthizer has long advocated a tougher stand on trade with China, which is in line with Trump’s campaign rhetoric. Lighthizer, 69, was deputy U. S. trade representative under former President Ronald Reagan during a time of ferocious trade wars with Japan. He has spent the past three decades as a Washington, D. C. lawyer primarily representing U. S. steelmakers in trade cases. He would replace Michael Froman, who led negotiations for the   Partnership, a massive trade deal devised to link the economies of the U. S. and 11 other Pacific nations. Trump says the TPP would take away American jobs and has vowed to pull out of the deal. He has also threatened to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, hammer out new bilateral deals and slap punitive tariffs on a number of U. S. trading partners seen as violating trade rules. Lighthizer gained plenty of experience negotiating tough bilateral trade deals on everything from steel to grain during his time in the Reagan administration, according to a statement from Trump’s office. The   says Lighthizer will do an ”amazing job helping turn around the failed trade policies which have robbed so many Americans of prosperity.” One target would be China, which Lighthizer has accused of unfair trade practices. He wrote in 2010 congressional testimony that years of passivity had allowed the U. S.  trade deficit to grow ”to the point where it is widely recognized as a major threat to our economy.” Going forward, he wrote, U. S. policymakers needed to take a more aggressive approach in dealing with China. Lighthizer won’t be the lone voice on trade in the Trump administration. Peter Navarro, widely considered a China hawk, will head up a new trade council. Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, also could play a role on trade policy. Lighthizer’s nomination quickly drew praise from many Democrats calling for a change in U. S. trade policy. Richard Neal,  . ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee, called Lighthizer a skilled negotiator whose nomination could ”signal a welcome move in a new direction for the Republican Party.” Still, Neal acknowledged that many Republicans are advocates of free trade deals, saying Lighthizer’s ability to change policy will depend on whether he is ”able to overcome the resistance he is likely to face within his party.”"
71,"After a storm of criticism, including from   Donald Trump, House Republicans have reversed themselves and restored the current rules of the Office of Congressional Ethics. GOP members met Tuesday afternoon and agreed by unanimous consent to withdraw a change to House rules approved late Monday evening, before the new Congress was sworn in, that would have weakened the ethics office, an independent watchdog first established in 2008 under House Democrats. According to lawmakers in the room, GOP leaders said the change was a distraction from their agenda and that the issue needed further vetting. Public outcry, opposition from ethics watchdog groups, a divided GOP, and two tweets from Trump critical of the rules change prompted a swift reversal of the proposal authored by House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte,  . Trump questioned, via Tweet, Congress’ priorities. He tweeted a pair of posts saying that while the OCE was ”unfair,” Congress had more important issues to take up, including tax reform and health care. Inclusion of the ethics measure threatened to bring down the entire rules package  —   the governing rules of the chamber  —   that is headed for a vote later Tuesday. The majority party traditionally passes the rules package on its votes alone, and a defeat would have been an embarrassing start for Republicans in the new Congress. House Ethics Chairwoman Susan Brooks,  . said that the ethics panel will review the proposal and come back to the conference with any recommendations by late summer or early fall. Republicans said they would like to have Democratic   to any proposed changes to the OCE. Several Democrats in recent years have also voiced criticism of the OCE, but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,  . who played a critical role in establishing the office, has fought back any efforts to reduce its role. Pelosi said in a statement that ”House Republicans showed their true colors last night” and decried ”the toxic dysfunction of a Republican House that will do anything to further their special interest agenda, thwart transparency and undermine the public trust.” Democrats did not immediately comment on whether they would take part in an Ethics Committee review. Opposition to the gutting of the office was swift and came from some unexpected sources in addition to Trump. Exhibit A: Jack Abramoff, the former lobbyist, whose conviction on   charges helped lead to the creation of the OCE, told Politico the Republicans’ action was ”exactly the opposite of what Congress should be doing.” Former Rep. Bob Ney, who also served time after being convicted as part of the same scandal, said, ”House Republicans should not have done this and also the way they did it without announcing it is not a public policy to be proud of.” Judicial Watch, the conservative group that has led efforts to release former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, called the House rules change ”shady and corrupt” and a ”drive by effort” to eliminate the OCE, as well as ”a poor way for the Republican majority to begin ’draining the swamp.’ ” House Speaker Paul Ryan had issued a statement saying many members feel that after eight years, the office ”is in need of reform.” Ryan argued the office would continue to operate independently and still take complaints from members of the public. He said the House Ethics Committee would merely provide oversight of the complaints office but insisted that the office ”is not controlled by the committee.” The Project on Government Oversight also chimed in, saying ethics watchdogs like the OCE ”need to be strengthened and expanded  —   not taken out back and shot in the middle of the night.”"
72,"Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is leaving the cable network for a role at NBC News. In a statement Tuesday on her Facebook page, Kelly said, ”I have decided to end my time at FNC, incredibly enriched for the experiences I’ve had.” Kelly has been an icon for conservatives, but her decision to move to NBC, a network that   Donald Trump and some conservative pundits have branded as ”liberal,” is not a complete surprise. As NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports, Kelly’s career change follows a period of turbulence in her relationship with the network: ”[Kelly’s move] comes in the aftermath of her explosive accusations that former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes had sexually harassed her earlier in her career. And that was on the heels of her colleague Gretchen Carlson alleging the same in a lawsuit. That led to the departure of Ailes and to significant questions about what path Fox News would take forward. Her departure only raise the stakes for Fox.” Kelly butted heads with Ailes and her network colleagues at other times as well. When Trump, angered by a question she asked him during a debate, attacked her repeatedly during the campaign, Kelly said she didn’t feel supported by the network. In an interview with NPR’s Kelly McEvers, she said, ”My boss, Roger Ailes, was not able to stand Trump down. My friend Sean Hannity, who is a big Trump booster as you know, he was not able to stand Trump down. No one was able to stop his antics.” In the interview, Kelly said she received threats from Trump supporters for months. Kelly’s move to NBC News was first reported by The New York Times. Her contract with Fox News expires this summer, and the Times says rival networks were not prepared to match Fox News’ offer, reported to be ”more than $20 million a year.” The newspaper adds: ”The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Ms. Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an   Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other   coverage.” The exact terms of her new contract are not yet known. Kelly started at Fox News 12 years ago as a legal correspondent and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the network’s biggest stars. Since October 2013, she has hosted her own nightly program called The Kelly File, becoming the    host on cable news after her Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly, according to TVNewser, a website that tracks TV ratings."
73,"When spirits entrepreneur Steven Grasse considered writing a book about early American cocktails, he already knew it was a subject that had been, in his own words, ”done to death.” Ultimately, the book he did write, Colonial Spirits: A Toast to Our Drunken History, tells the story of a time when water was full of deadly bacteria, making alcohol the safest liquid to consume. As Grasse says, ”this book is about survival.” Colonists, transplanted to a New World, were faced with the task of   old recipes, often with unfamiliar new ingredients. Alcohol was a godsend in the Old World, sipped by adults and children alike. In the New World, imbibing called for experimentation. There was plenty of trial and error, and, in Grasse’s view, an unexpected recipe for democracy. ”Before democracy, there were spirits, and from spirits we created taverns,” writes Grasse in the book, ”and it was in those taverns that we laid out the blueprint for a new kind of country. . .. In other words, we got drunk and invented America.” With witty illustrations by Reverend Michael Alan  —   think Pennsylvania Dutch folk art crossed with Edward Gorey  —   Colonial Spirits thumbs its nose, ever so slightly, at the American obsession with mixology and fussily precise   cocktails. It does so by providing just one simple premise outlined on Page 3: ”In relating these recipes to you, and updating them for modern times, it was of the utmost importance to us that you  —   yes, you  —   would not die or even be hospitalized should you choose to make or imbibe them.” In all honesty, some of this stuff could kill you. In fact, on Page 154, you’ll find out that, yes, some home distillers were desperate enough to try making alcohol from sawdust  —   which Grasse reminds us would actually be methanol. So, yes, you’d die if you imbibed it, which is exactly why you won’t find a recipe for it in Colonial Spirits. What you will find, however, is Ass’s Milk, Cock Ale, and Lambswool (only one of them does not actually involve farm animals) with a    history of each concoction in question and modernized versions that sound, actually quite palatable. ”I wanted to make this like a Betty Crocker kind of book,” says Grasse. ”This is not a book for snooty mixologists. These are culinary folktales.” While many of those mixologists tend to laud the recipes by Jerry Thomas, the bartender generally credited with popularizing mixed drinks beginning in the 1850s, Grasse’s view is that cocktails existed well before Thomas was behind the bar. ”Cocktailing, as we know it,” says Grasse, ”was a result of industrialization and the rise of leisure time. But punch was clearly a cocktail, just served in a communal bowl.” Sharing and crafting history is a hallmark of Grasse’s career, which has included creating Hendrick’s gin, Sailor Jerry’s rum and Art in the Age craft spirits. A team of 65 employees in Grasse’s   company, Quaker City Mercantile, did copious amounts of historical research into the alcoholic recipes of early America. They dug through 17th, 18th and 19th century manuscripts detailing the booze preferences of Gen. Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, a failed attempt during the 1500s to establish a vineyard in what is now Jacksonville, Fla. and how rum was considered to be a cure for syphilis, malaria and even death. Many of the recipes are unfailingly simple: Spruce Ale starts with spruce essence made from Douglas fir tips (be sure to pluck those tips from actual spruce trees instead of some possibly poisonous lookalike, the book cautions, so you don’t, you know, die) which is added to chilled ale. The Everlasting Syllabub ended up being a favorite of illustrator and recipe tester Alan, who says, ”It’s essentially a big bowl of whipped cream that you incorporate a little bit of alcohol into. There’s really nothing bad about that.” During the process of recipe testing for the book, Grasse’s unique position as a distillery owner also gave him the opportunity to make a   production of one of the recipes, Martha Washington’s Cherry Bounce, a classic blend of brandy, cherries and sugar, typically enjoyed during winter as a fresh taste of summer. The updated version, made at Grasse’s Tamworth Distilling in New Hampshire, incorporates rye whiskey and smoked cardamom for a modern twist on a Colonial favorite, while also tipping a hat at George Washington, who was one of America’s largest whiskey producers. ”When I look at cocktail books, I don’t really get a context,” says Grasse. ”So my goal was to present the historical context behind these recipes, while making it relatable to the modern reader. I like to retell these stories in a way that people can digest.” He pauses. ”We’re inspired by history, but not slaves to it,” he says. ”At the end of the day, the point is to have fun and maybe learn something at the same time.”"
74,"Every year in the U. S. more than 30, 000 people die from things related to guns. That puts guns ahead of HIV, Parkinson’s disease, malnutrition, hypertension, intestinal infection, peptic ulcer, anemia, viral hepatitis, biliary tract disease, atherosclerosis and fires. Yet, the funding for research on gun violence lags far behind other leading causes of death, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers evaluated the leading causes of death in the U. S. and plotted them against the funding and publication of research dedicated to to them. The researchers wrote: ”Gun violence had 1. 6% of the funding predicted ($1. 4 billion predicted, $22 million observed) and had 4. 5% of the volume of publications predicted (38, 897 predicted, 1738 observed) from the regression analyses. Gun violence killed about as many individuals as sepsis. However, funding for gun violence research was about 0. 7% of that for sepsis and publication volume about 4%. In relation to mortality rates, gun violence research was the   cause of death and the   funded cause of death after falls.” NPR’s Cheryl Corley reports that in a different study published Tuesday by JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers studied gun violence in Chicago over an   period to explain how it can spread like an infectious disease.” She said medical advocates have long argued that gun violence is a public health crisis, and that the researchers say their study helps prove this point. Cheryl says that: ”Yale University sociologist Andrew Papachristos said researchers treated the idea of gun violence literally and created a network from more than 100, 000 individuals at risk of getting shot. ” ’These gunshot victims  —   they’re in very small social networks. They tend to cluster together in these networks. And really what our study shows is that gun violence cascades over time,’ Papachristos said.” Papachristos said the study in JAMA Internal Medicine helps show there must be a more coordinated approach to drive gun violence down, one that treats it as a public health epidemic and not just a policing problem. The research published in JAMA offers an explanation for the lack of funding: A 1996 congressional appropriations bill that banned funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be used to ”advocate or promote gun control.” The authors of the study note that ”similar restrictions were subsequently extended to other agencies (including the National Institutes of Health) and although the legislation does not ban   research outright, it has been described as casting a pall over the research community.” Research, though, has proved an effective tool in driving down mortality rates from other leading causes of death. David Stark, one of the JAMA study’s leaders and medical director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told The Washington Post that   deaths can be reasonably compared to motor vehicle deaths. According to the newspaper, he said: ”I think a good parallel can be drawn to motor vehicle accidents. Those kill about the same number of people, but that has been decreasing substantially. . .. All of that really starts from essential public research that determines the proximate causes of accidents  —   and it’s only with research that you can start to develop plans and policies and initiatives.”"
75,"   Demarco Webster Jr. was helping his dad move to a new apartment a few months ago, when he was shot and killed. His stepdad, Juawaun Hester, says they had intentionally waited to start the move until after midnight in order to avoid any trouble. Hester says Demarco didn’t even like going outside if he didn’t have to. ”I don’t understand man, and you know what’s going on now is like the future children, the good children, the smart children, with scholarships and they’re the ones who’s dying to the gun violence,” Hester says. Hester says just one day after his stepson was killed, his neighbor’s twin teenage boys were both fatally shot, too. Two more deaths in what has been a very bloody year in Chicago. The city has logged more than 700 homicides this year, more than any other major U. S. city, In September, the city surpassed last year’s total of about 470 killings. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced the city would hire about 1, 000 new people to work in the police department. ”These officers will be assigned directly to the streets of our communities,” Emanuel says. ”To work with residents in partnership to confront gun violence.” But many residents are skeptical that having more cops will stop the murders. The Rev. Marshall Hatch has a church in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood, one of the most violent in the city. He says relations between the police and the community have deteriorated since late last year when a video showed a Chicago officer fatally shooting Laquan McDonald, a young black man. ”They’ve seen it in their best interest to pull back and not be aggressive,” Hatch says. ”That probably has helped fuel a lot of the surge of violence that we’ve seen this year.” Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said earlier this month that fallout from the shooting of McDonald has contributed to the spike in violence this year. But he says his officers are in a bind. ”They’re cautious about the national narrative that’s out there right now, so they’re careful about how they do police,” Johnson says. ”But at the same time the biggest reason for this spike is because our repeat guys just don’t fear the judicial system.” Johnson says Illinois needs tougher sentencing laws for repeat gun offenders. And locking up gang leaders did help in the late ’90s  —   the last time the city saw this level of killing. But University of Illinois Criminologist John Hagedorn says that comparison is far from perfect. ”[In the late ’90s] we were at the downward slope of organized gang wars that racked Chicago,” he says. ”Homicides were often called by leaders who were locked up in prison. They were intentional kinds of violence. Today the violence is spontaneous it’s local. The gangs are no longer structured and citywide. They are small cliques of kids. The reasons for the homicides are often insults, accidental events  —   very difficult kinds of things to contain.” Hagedorn says in the late 1990s Chicago police ”cleared” about   of all the city’s homicides  —   meaning they knew or thought they knew the culprit. Now, the Chicago police only clear about a quarter of all killings. ”So we are dealing with a different kind of situation, which calls for some different policing strategies,” Hagedorn says. ”But mainly it should tell the city that is has to address the roots of desperation.” Kyisha Weekly knows that desperation. Weekly says she tries hard not to think of her friend Candice Curry, who was shot and killed in a park when they were both 13 years old. Curry was the victim of a    on Aug. 10, 1998 in Bronzeville, according to a Chicago Tribune article published days after she was killed. ”She was at my house before she went to the park, and I was telling her to wait on me while I got dressed, and she just wanted to go to the park,” Weekly says. ”So I told her I’d meet her up there. And she went to the park and got shot.” Weekly says she remembers a group of boys from the neighborhood coming by her house and telling her Curry had been shot. At first, Weekly thought her friend would pull through, but Curry died that night. Weekly remembers Curry as a pretty,   girl who liked to jump rope. ”Our favorite spot to go to was called Route 66. It was a skating place, and it was skating on one side and dancing on the other side,” Weekly says. ”So our parents used to think that we used to go for the skating, and we used to go for the dance part until one day my grandma came and picked us up and saw all the people and how rowdy they were. She was like, ’No, no, no, y’all can’t come back up here.” Weekly says a few years after Curry was killed, a second member of the group, Charlene Johnson, was killed by another girl she had been fighting with over a boy. Weekly says she has also lost a brother and a nephew to gun violence. ”I try not to think about it,” she says. ”Sometimes I drink a lot to not think about the stuff that has happened in my life.” Now, Weekly says she hardly goes outside, except to take her    daughter to the aquarium or park. ”I love my baby. That’s why you can’t sit on the bus stop with your kids,” Weekly says. ”People getting shot, they’re shooting women, it’s out of control.” Despite the loss of her friend in 1998, Weekly says she is certain the violence is worse now. It was rare then, she said, for an innocent victim such as Curry to get caught in the crossfire. But not anymore. ”The gangbangers [in the ’90s] used to make sure the kids were in the house before they started shooting, Weekly says. ”They used to care then about kids, but now they just don’t. It’s the little kids. They’ll be 13 or 14 years old with guns. If somebody looks at them wrong. ..they want to pull out their guns and start shooting. And it’s like they’re shooting with their eyes closed because they’re hitting innocent people.” Member station WBEZ has been revisiting families affected by homicides in 1998, the last time the city suffered more than 700 murders. See more of their work here."
76,"Ah, to work in France: plenty of vacation and a   workweek. And, as of Jan. 1, a new law that gives French employees the right to disconnect. Companies in France are now required to stop encroaching on workers’ personal and family time with emails and calls. The law was part of an overall labor bill that provoked months of street demonstrations and divided the country. The controversy was mostly over a single provision that made it easier for French companies to fire people. But nearly everyone supports the provision allowing workers to walk away from emails and ignore their smartphones when they’re out of the office. French Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri commissioned a 2015 study that warned of the health impact of what she called ” .” It showed that more and more French people could not get away from work  —   even when they weren’t there. Labor lawyer Patrick Thiebart argues that burnout and other   issues are on the rise because of an overload of digital demands on employees. ”If an employee receives emails during all their weekends and at night until 11 p. m. then I can assure you that at a certain point in time, it can negatively impact his health,” he says. The new law stipulates that companies with more than 50 workers must negotiate with employees and unions and agree on a policy to reduce the intrusion of work into private lives. ”Of course your boss shouldn’t send you emails on a Sunday when you’re at lunch, enjoying a leg of lamb and a good Bordeaux,” says Bernard Vivier, who runs the Higher Institute of Work, a think tank that focuses on the French workplace. ”It’s so French to throw a law at every kind of problem,” he says. But he doesn’t think a law can fix this one. Such ills must be changed by management and through new practices, he says. It’s a complicated issue, notes Thiebart, the lawyer, because digital culture also offers employees freedom and flexibility. ”Everybody is happy with the smartphones and the new technology,” Thiebart says, ”because employees can work at home and don’t have to spend time and money in commuting. And for companies, they can save money because they don’t need all the staff on the premises.” Many large European companies and government departments already recognize the right of their employees to disconnect from work. Companies such as Volkswagen and Daimler, and French insurer Axa, have taken steps to restrict    messaging  —   including Volkswagen’s limited email server connections on evenings and weekends. Thiebart says that isn’t such a good idea, since many businesses operate across several time zones. But he says his clients, many of them large corporations, are not hostile to the new French law. They believe a lack of downtime decreases the productivity of their workforce. At a Paris gym where people are working up a sweat after a day at the office, many are still attached to their devices. Jean Luc Bauché is lifting weights, wearing white earbuds connected to a smartphone in his pocket. He says it’s a great idea to be able to disconnect. But he doesn’t think it’s possible. ”You can pass laws to protect people from dangers like speeding,” he says, ”but this law won’t work because it’s counter to the way society is evolving.” Bauché says he’s the only person he knows who turns his phone off at night when he sleeps. ”Most people don’t dare,” he says. ”They’re afraid they’ll miss something.”"
77,"Viridiana Martinez’s parents brought her to the U. S. illegally when she was 7. But it wasn’t until she was in her 20s, when she took the microphone at a rally in Durham, N. C. that she ”came out” as being unauthorized herself. Martinez, now 30, has been on the front lines of the immigrant rights movement in North Carolina ever since. She   the North Carolina Dream Team, which advocated for immigrants who were brought to the U. S. illegally by their parents. She was once arrested at a   demonstration in Atlanta, risking being turned over to immigration agents for the sake of protest. A year ago, she helped launch Alerta Migratoria, a hotline that immigrants in North Carolina can call to report the presence of ICE agents in their communities (it forwards calls to her cellphone). In other words, Martinez is just the kind of person you might expect to be terrified by Trump’s ascension to the presidency, given his promise to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally and repeal President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has granted Martinez and 730, 000 young immigrants like her work permits and temporary protection from deportation. And yet, sitting on a futon in her tidy apartment in Raleigh recently, Martinez said she wasn’t upset by Trump’s victory. In fact, quite the opposite. ”I’m actually happy that Donald Trump won,” she said. ”I am. I’m very happy, because this is an opportunity to take a new approach at immigrant rights organizing.” For Martinez and others advocating on behalf of immigrants, this election has surfaced some unexpected opportunities. In the battle over the fates of people in the country illegally, Trump’s election may look like a victory for those who would have the federal government expel as many as possible. But people like Martinez are finding that the simple fear of that possibility has given their   efforts a shot in the arm. Viewing Trump as a grave threat to their immigrant communities, many local lawmakers are reacting to his deportation proposals with the kind of defiance that   advocates have been asking of them for years. ”I mean, sure, it sucks that it took Donald Trump winning,” Martinez said, ”but it’s already moving people to act.” She was referring to reports from across the country of mayors, police chiefs, city council members dozens of public officials who have vowed to defy Trump should he try to enlist them to deport people. Though the   has scaled back his most sweeping campaign promise to deport all 11 million immigrants in the country illegally, many local officials are taking no chances. ”If the federal government wants our police officers to tear immigrant families apart, we will refuse to do it,” New York Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a speech days after the November election. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a $10 million fund to provide lawyers for immigrants facing deportation. ”We don’t know how far the new administration will go when it comes to our nation’s immigration policy,” he said, ”but we all heard the rhetoric.” In smaller cities and towns, from Arizona to Iowa to North Carolina, officials have taken a similar tone. This is exciting for   activists like Martinez. During the past eight years, many efforts to advance immigrant rights in the absence of a federal immigration reform bill were aimed at persuading the Obama administration to act unilaterally through programs like DACA. Now, in anticipation of Trump, the strategy appears to be shifting. Activists say they’ll focus on persuading local officials to be more aggressive in protecting immigrants in the country illegally from the federal government. ”In the coming years you’re going to see people fighting to establish new civil rights protections in cities by forging new ground with policies that might not have been deemed possible even as recently as two months ago,” said Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a   immigrant advocacy group. The public statements many local officials have made in recent weeks, he said, suggest that cities will be receptive to this strategy. Officials in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago have already started acting. For activists like Martinez, there’s a tinge of frustration over the fact that it took Trump’s election to spur this response. ”Because the reality is, we just came out of a presidency where the administration has deported more immigrants than any other,” she said. ”And the only reason this is happening now is because our   is Donald Trump.” It’s hard to say for sure whether Obama outdeported all of his predecessors. Interpreting the statistics can be tricky because the government’s method for tracking deportations has changed over time. Department of Homeland Security figures indicate the Obama administration will have deported about 3 million people by the time the president leaves office. The George W. Bush administration deported roughly 2 million. Martinez said that for years, she has been watching families get torn apart by Obama’s deportation policies. So, while Trump’s rhetoric has been alarming, she said she sees little substantive difference between his most recent proposal  —   to deport 2 to 3 million immigrants he says have criminal records  —   and what Obama has already done. ”It’s like a guy who tells you you’re ugly to your face versus a guy who tells you you’re pretty, but then turns around and tells his friend, ’Damn, she’s ugly!’ ” Martinez said. Martinez said the problem is that for the past eight years, many local officials were convinced by the ”you’re pretty” guy  —   Obama, in this case  —   and didn’t feel the need to take as forceful a stance against his deportations as they now are taking against Trump. ”I think people were conformed, complacent,” she said, ”and they felt that under a Democratic presidency things could not be bad that President Obama was a friend of immigrants, even though that was far from the truth.” Obama, critics like Newman and Martinez say, believed that to gain Republican support for an immigration reform bill that included legalization for millions, he also had to prove he could be tough on enforcement. It was a strategic gambit that failed, Newman said. Obama deported millions while Republicans blocked immigration reform efforts that might have made it possible for immigrants in the country illegally to gain legal status. ”And he was able to, on a certain level, get away with it” among his allies, Newman said, ”as long as people believed that he was also in favor of something that might not have ever been possible  —   namely, comprehensive immigration reform.” Kevin De Leon, the Democratic leader of the California state Senate, represents a heavily immigrant district in Los Angeles. Earlier this month, he introduced a bill he calls the California Values Act. It would prohibit police departments from devoting resources to enforcing federal immigration laws. Addressing unauthorized immigrants in a statement announcing the bill, De Leon said ”the state of California will be your wall of justice.” This is the sort of thing activists in California have been asking for for years, through a campaign called ”ICE Out of California.” The campaign’s goal has been to persuade local and state officials to kick Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of local jails to make it harder for them to take immigrants into federal custody when they’re arrested by local police. Asked to consider the argument that a lot of these new   measures should have been put in place years ago, given Obama’s deportation record, De Leon said he understands why many activists might feel that way. ”But this is very different,” he said. He called Trump’s deportation promises during the campaign unprecedented. ”It’s a very pernicious,   type of campaigning that we have yet to ever see. And I think that is the major difference.” De Leon said part of what concerns him about Trump is his unpredictability. The   promised so many things, has changed his posture on major issues so many times, that it’s impossible to know exactly what he’ll do, De Leon said. Because of that, he said, California has to ”prepare for the worst.” Martinez is skeptical that it will get any worse. Trump is a businessman, she said, and he understands the value of immigrant labor. Still, she said she appreciates the steps officials are taking to enshrine into law protections for immigrants at the local level. She and fellow activists in Durham have a list of proposals they plan to bring to the City Council, which has proved to be  .   of Durham’s recent population growth has come from immigration, both legal and illegal. Newman, of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said that as justified as many immigrant advocates are in fearing a Trump presidency, there’s also reason to believe some good will come of it. In the past, liberal leaders have held out hope for an immigration reform bill, he said. Now they seem to agree that a sensible bill is unlikely under a government controlled by conservatives. ”And the absence of that possibility has in some ways been liberating for local policymakers,” he said. Now, Newman said, he expects local leaders and activists will start to ”experiment with a range of decentralized tactics” that will make cities the locus for policies aimed at better treatment of immigrants. ”Legalization from below,” he called it. In some cities it’s already started, with initiatives like the legal defense fund in LA and the refusal by many cities to put their law enforcement officers at the disposal of federal immigration agents. Officials in other cities have said they will look into becoming   sanctuary cities, jurisdictions with policies to protect immigrants who are in the country illegally. The city of Santa Ana, Calif. took that step in December. Newman said that activists in other cities are organizing to push their local leaders to follow suit."
78,"Beijing’s sky appears blue at the beginning of the   video. Then it completely disappears from view, blotted out by a cloud of brown smog. The   video shot Sunday by Chas Pope, a British citizen, dramatically illustrates the extent of China’s pollution problem. Pope says the thick haze moved into Beijing over the course of 20 minutes. Dozens of Chinese cities have suffered heavy smog for nearly a month. ”State media report that 72 Chinese cities are under pollution alerts,” NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing. ”Environmental officials have fined some 500 factories that have failed to cut emissions as the alerts require, and some 10, 000 heavily polluting vehicles that are on the roads in violation of the alert.” Some 40, 000 inspectors have been deployed to make sure everyone is complying with required emissions cuts, Anthony adds.   of the Chinese cities are on red alert, the most severe level of air pollution, according to a statement from the country’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. Schools in   areas were suspending classes, the ministry said. It added that conditions were expected to improve by Friday. The crackdown on industries that are violating environmental regulations is part of China’s larger ”war on pollution,” now in its third year, Reuters reports. The news service says it’s ”aimed at reversing the damage done to its skies, soil and water after decades of untrammeled economic growth.” But there are major challenges in curbing pollution. Recently, ”state media have also reported that some local environmental authorities are tampering with air quality monitors to make pollution look lighter than it actually is,” Anthony says. China’s pollution issues also are exacerbated in the winter. According to The New York Times, ”residents have come to expect such dense air pollution in late fall and winter, as people burn coal to heat their homes.” A recent World Health Organization study found that China had the most deaths in the world attributable to air quality in 2012  —   at 1, 032, 833."
79,"It’s 1968 in New Bordeaux, La. On the surface all looks tranquil as you drive through the bustling city in your red Pontiac, tapping your foot to Sam Cooke’s ”Chain Gang.” But as you take a sharp left down a winding back alley, an alarming sight gives you pause. Behind you, trucks painted with the Confederate flag begin to appear, the white men behind the wheel angry and visceral as they shout racial slurs. Your name is Lincoln Clay. You’re a    biracial man  —   but in this place, this time, you’re black, and instances of racism and bigotry are commonplace. This is Mafia III, an   video game developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K Games. It’s a game that, in a lot of ways, meticulously adopts and adapts from the racial and political history of the era. And it’s become a provocative and in some ways cathartic alternate reality that directly confronts gamers of all walks of life with the reimagined raw trials of a protagonist rarely featured by the industry. The game’s authentic use of past racial tensions isn’t the crux of the plot  —   its premise is similar to other Mafia games, in which a protagonist goes up against the mob. But their presentation is heavy and deliberate. Senior writer Charles Webb says the creators wanted to spark players’ consciousness without overindulging in a history lesson. ”One of the things I’m really, really proud of is we’ve kind of created this game of empathy,” Webb says. ”This is what it was like to occupy this space, as this particular type of person, as a young black man in 1968 in the South.” Grounded in history, As you drive throughout the city or make a pit stop for some quick cash, music of the era  —   Nina Simone or Janis Joplin  —   keeps you company. News broadcasts reflect the period, announcing tragedies like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the arrests of Freedom Riders. ”We attached ourselves to this idea of the documentary. It gets you to think about how have things changed, if at all,” says Creative Director Haden Blackman. The writers say they did extensive research, studying films, documentaries and literature, including The Trials of Muhammad Ali The Black Power Mixtape   the James Baldwin debates with William F. Buckley from 1965 and Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. The writers cited ”The Ballot or the Bullet,” speech from April of ’64 by Malcolm X as a primary influence. An invisible character by the name of ”The Voice” delivers evidence of this research: As a radio personality, he often speaks directly to the player, providing critical commentary and analysis of the prejudice and injustices within this reimagined narrative. ”Being able to have him as this ’voice of the people’ in the city, especially of the marginalized, specifically black community, at the time  —   it’s one of those things that really helps tie things together,” says Senior Writer Ed Fowler. ”The way that it evokes the time and still resonates today speaks to many things, just in general in our world right now.” ’Scared as all  ’ With so much history involved, the team admits the game’s subject matter can be, at times, grueling and potent. As Clay, you go on a mission to dismantle the Ku Klux Klan and confront other white supremacists groups on numerous side quests. You hear racial slurs and witness hateful acts against  . The police watch you  —   always. The game’s open world is abundant but you, the player, are not welcome in every aspect of its landscape, simply on the basis that you are you. The ambiance of bigotry  —   quiet or bombastic  —   is consistent, whether in hateful glances when you walk through areas reserved for ”whites only” or the seemingly increased police presence when you stroll through predominantly white suburbs. The team knew the game had the potential to be polarizing. ”I was definitely scared, scared as all ” Webb says. ”It was very important to our team as a whole to hammer home to be authentic and true to the period, and that’s a fine line . .. not only respecting how hostile this space might be toward Lincoln but also figuring out ways to not make it completely repellent to the player.” It all appears to have worked, as Mafia III became the   title by 2K Games, with more than 4 million units shipped in the first week. But despite the game’s positive reception, some reviewers have argued that its excessive and chaotic violence overshadows the abuse black and brown people experienced during the era, as The Verge’s Chris Plante has argued: ”A black man lynching a white man in the American South in 1968 is an arresting image, except its power is undercut by the game’s pace. It takes no time to unpack what we’re seeing, let alone acknowledge that, below the hanging man, fester dozens of other men murdered by Lincoln Clay.” Female representation, Still, Mafia III inches away from the familiar tropes of  ’  games. One of them is the poor depiction of women, who are often heavily sexualized or subservient to the male protagonist. In Mafia III, women hold their own and serve more than just atmosphere, which Webb says was a deliberate move. There’s Cassandra, the head of the Haitian mob then Alma Diaz, who runs smuggling operations and Nicki Burke, a lieutenant in the Irish mob. And then there’s the inner circle of Clay’s friends and family, most of whom are black and help shape the narrative. This batch of characters joins a small group of other individuals of color from recent major games: Marcus Holloway from Watch Dogs 2, antagonist Nadine Ross from Uncharted 4 and Lee Everett from The Walking Dead Telltale games universe and others. Yet, many groups remain highly underrepresented in the gaming industry, which has faced criticism, for instance, not only for the rarity of protagonists of color, but also for their voices being performed by white voice actors. A 2009 study found that Latinos were virtually unrepresented as playable characters, while   were largely featured in sports games or similar titles that reinforce stereotypes. A possible harbinger? S. Craig Watkins, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, says the tech industry is commonly under fire for its lack of diversity, while the video game industry hasn’t been held ”nearly as accountable.” The vast majority of game developers are white  —   the results of a 2015 survey by the International Game Developers Association suggest that only about 3 percent of   makers are African American and 7 percent are Latino. Meanwhile, several studies have found that black and Latino children and teenagers spend more time per day playing video games. ”The statistics are shifting and telling us that who plays games is no longer this imagined idea of the white straight   adolescent male who is at home in their parents’ basement,” says Edmond Chang, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Oregon. ”The industry has really failed in certain ways to catch up.” Watkins says Mafia III could be a harbinger for the industry. ”The idea that a studio would even consider investing the resources, the time, the human capital to develop a game like Mafia III,” he says, ”that’s a really interesting approach to what the gaming world and experience might look like.” And Blackman, the creative director, says he’s proud of the game sparking important dialogue. ”We’re not so naive as to think that a single game could cure racism  —   and that was never our intent,” Blackman says. ”But at the end of the day, if we make people think about race and we make people think about what’s happening today, I think we’ve done something that very few games have done.” Iman Smith is a freelance reporter. You can follow her on Twitter at @ImanThePress."
80,"One in five Americans is religiously unaffiliated. Yet just one of 535 members of the new Congress is. That’s what the latest data from the Pew Research Center show on the opening day of the 115th Congress. The nation’s top legislative body remains far more male and white than the rest of the U. S. population as well, but religion is one of the more invisible areas where legislators in Washington simply aren’t representative of the people they represent. Only Arizona Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema admits to being ”unaffiliated,” which Pew defines as people who are atheist, agnostic or who describe their religion as ”nothing in particular.” That means only 0. 2 percent of Congress is unaffiliated, compared with 23 percent of U. S. adults. That group is   than any religious group in America, as Pew found in 2015. Meanwhile, nearly 91 percent of congressional members are Christian, compared with 71 percent of U. S. adults. Here’s a full breakdown of how Congress’ religious affiliations compare with those of the U. S. population: America’s nonreligious are young  —   and not politically organized, Why the massive gap? For one, religiously unaffiliated people tend to be young, and Congress just isn’t that young. In the 114th Congress, the average age for House members was 57 years old and for senators it was 61. (To a modest extent, this is a reflection of age rules: Senators must be 30 or older, and representatives have to be at least 25.) But groups that identify as ”nothing in particular,” agnostic and atheist  —   the three groups that make up the unaffiliated in Pew’s definition  —   are among the youngest ”religious” groups in America. So it may be that once Americans start electing more millennials to Congress, there will be a greater share of nonreligious people elected as well. In addition, younger Americans tend to have much lower voting rates than older people. That may also contribute, though the logic requires a couple of leaps  —   if this means the (relatively young) religiously unaffiliated population isn’t voting as much, and if the religiously unaffiliated are more drawn to likewise unaffiliated politicians  —   that could also help explain the lack of ”nones” in Congress. Likewise, the inverse is true: If older (and more religious) Americans are voting for more religious politicians, it means less room for the nonreligious ones. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unaffiliated Sinema is also relatively young for a congressional member at 40.) One more potential reason unaffiliated people aren’t in power: Not being affiliated often also means not being politically cohesive. ”They may be unaffiliated they may be atheist they may be agnostic . .. but they’re not part of some club,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic strategist at Purple Strategies, to NPR in 2015. ”You could certainly argue that evangelicals are not monolithic in terms of their policy beliefs, but there’s no denying that there’s more of an organization around organized religion than there is around disorganized atheism.” Atheism doesn’t poll well, It’s true that Americans remain at least somewhat open to atheist officeholders. In one regular polling question, Gallup asks Americans what types of people they would (or would not) vote for as president. For example, 91 percent of Americans say they would vote for a Jew and 81 percent say a Mormon.   percent of Americans would vote for an atheist. That’s not only a majority but a record high for atheists. Then again, it’s very low compared with Jews and Mormons (and Christians in general, who have made up all of the presidents to date) and the numbers altogether suggest that America’s nonreligious have a long way to go before they become mainstream as politicians. That 58 percent put atheists next to last on Gallup’s list, above socialist (at 47 percent) and on par with Muslim (60 percent). Not only that, but atheist is still far more of a minus than a plus for voters. According to one 2014 Pew poll, just over half of Americans said that knowing a presidential candidate was atheist would make them less likely to vote for that candidate only 5 percent said ”more likely” (the remaining 41 percent said it ”wouldn’t matter”). It’s not exactly ”nones” (atheists are only one subset of unaffiliated Americans) and it’s a question about voting for president, but it at least sends a message: Being nonreligious is still not a big selling point for many voters."
81,"Updated at 1 p. m. ET, Turkish authorities made multiple arrests Tuesday as they search for the person who attacked an Istanbul nightclub in the early hours of New Year’s Day, killing at least 39 people. A lone gunman shot his way into the Reina nightclub, which was packed with holiday revelers. Police arrested two foreign nationals who they described as suspects at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, according to the   Anadolu news agency. They reportedly searched the pair and took them to police headquarters in Istanbul. ”The country remains on high alert, especially at transport hubs and border crossings,” NPR’s Peter Kenyon in Istanbul reported. The two arrests follow earlier media reports Tuesday  —   which were later reversed  —   that police had identified the suspected gunman at the Reina nightclub. The   TRT World news network showed images of a passport from Kyrgyzstan belonging to someone it identified as the suspected gunman and named that person, as Peter reports, but the broadcaster stopped showing the passport page shortly after without explanation. (We have since removed that name as well from this post.) Police later denied that the passport was linked to the shooting, as Peter reported. He added: ”The Hurriyet newspaper says police detained a woman in the town of Konya who’s described as the wife of the main suspect in the attack. According to the paper, she told police her husband never showed any sympathy for ISIS, which has claimed responsibility for the attack.” Turkish authorities have released a ”selfie” video purportedly showing the gunman walking along a city street. Turkish authorities did not say when the video was recorded or how they obtained it. Peter reported: ”The claim of responsibility by ISIS prompted Turkey’s deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus to say Turkey’s response will be to step up military attacks against ISIS in northern Syria. ”That escalation appears to have already begun. The military tells the   Anatolia News Agency that Turkish attacks have killed at least 18 ISIS fighters in the past 24 hours, and at least 150 ISIS targets have been hit by airstrikes or tank and artillery fire in recent days.” Police have conducted raids in Istanbul neighborhoods, Peter reported, and 14 people were being held for questioning in connection with the attack, in addition to the pair from the airport."
82,"When   Miranda was a teenager in the 1990s, he liked to make eclectic mixtapes for his friends. In those cassettes, he experimented with the rise and fall of energy in music: A musical theater number might play after a   song, only to be followed by an oldie or an obscure pop song. It was through mixtapes that he could bridge the gap between two seemingly opposing passions  —   Broadway and rap. ”I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mixtapes . .. than I did in college,” the actor, composer and lyricist tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. In 2008, Miranda’s first musical, In The Heights, won four Tony Awards, and in 2016, Hamilton  —   a   infused retelling of the Founding Father’s life  —   won 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Though Miranda stepped away from his Hamilton role in July, he remains busy with other projects. He wrote several songs for the Disney animated film Moana, and he’s preparing to star in a film sequel of Mary Poppins. Looking ahead, Miranda says he doesn’t feel pressure to duplicate or exceed the success of Hamilton. ”If you think in terms of topping, you’re in the wrong business,” he says. ”I remember getting that question after In the Heights. ’It’s your first musical and you won the Tony, how are you going to top it?’ I’m like, ’I went from broke substitute teacher to Broadway composer. I will never make a leap that big in my life again.’ ” On what it was like to play Alexander Hamilton every night  It was an enormous challenge to do that show every night, and yet who to blame but myself? I wrote the part! And it was also the most thrilling roller coaster every night. You know, I got to fall in love, I got to win a war, I got to write words that inspired a nation. Getting to go through that experience, it’s something I’ll never get old of, which is why I really tried to downplay my departure as much as possible, because I don’t think I’m remotely done with it. On Donald Trump’s tweet calling for the theater to be a safe place after the Hamilton cast read a statement directed to Vice   Mike Pence, who attended a performance soon after the election, Here’s where I agree with the  : The theater should always be a safe space. . .. I think one of the reasons Hamilton has been embraced by people of every stripe on the political spectrum is that theater is one of the rarest places where we still come together. You may take a totally different conclusion from Hamilton than I do, based on your ideology and your politics and your life experience, but we all sat in a room together and we watched the same thing, and that doesn’t happen anymore. As you can see from this election, we have our own sets of facts based on who we listen to. Which news organization gets our business determines the facts that get in our head. So I think one of the things that makes theater special is, first of all, it’s one of the last places you put your phone away, and second of all it’s one of the last places where we all have a common experience together. So to that end, I agree with [Trump’s comment]. I don’t agree with his characterization of what we did. I think anyone who sees that video sees [actor Brandon Victor Dixon] silencing the boos . .. from the audience itself, who . .. nine days after the election are still working through that thing. I can’t speak to that, but I know that Brandon quieted the boos and made a plea to lead all of us. I don’t believe there’s anything remotely resembling harassment in what we’ve done. On the life he dreamed of as a kid  I have two wonderful, supportive and very practical parents who are like, ”You’re really talented and really creative. You should be a lawyer,” because there’s a safe path there. I knew I was never going to be a lawyer. I knew that I wanted to make movies, and I wanted to write shows. On his love of Disney musicals growing up, I had the great joy of being 9 years old when The Little Mermaid came out, and I went and saw that three times in the theater. Then I dragged my parents back and my family back to see it a couple more times. I don’t know why it changed my life as much as it did. I think Sebastian the crab had a big amount to do with it  —   the fact that this calypso number happens under the water just knocked my socks off when I was a kid. It had this power over me. I would perform that thing  —   I would jump up on my desk in fourth grade and sing that song. Then I had the good fortune of being a kid during that really kind of amazing run of musical animated films. It’s Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, followed by Aladdin, followed by The Lion King. That’s an incredible run. And what’s been exciting is animation has changed so much. There’s this incredible Pixar golden age, and really golden age from all these other studios as well, and it feels like we’re in another one of those where musicals have a seat at the table. You’ve got Tangled, you’ve got Frozen, next to Inside Out, next to Zootopia, and it’s exciting to be a part of that tradition again. On the music that influenced him as a teenager  My sister is as responsible as anyone for giving me good taste in music. I remember stealing her copy of Black Sheep’s A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing and learning ”Engine, engine number nine, on the New York transit line.” I think that’s probably the first rap song I really worked hard to memorize in sixth grade, but then also Naughty by Nature and Queen Latifah. The music you love when you’re a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it’s all over the score of Hamilton. . .. These are all New York, East Coast, ’90s rappers, and that’s when I was a teenager. On   between the Latin American neighborhood he grew up in and his school with affluent white kids  If you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time . . .. I won the lotto when I got into Hunter  —   to get a great, free, public school education sort of saved my family, and I was aware of it. I was aware that I was at a school with kids who were really smart. And I also had friends in the neighborhood who went to the local school, and I remember feeling that drift happen. . .. The corner that I lived on was like this little Latin American country. It’s one in which the nanny who lived with us and raised us, who also raised my father in Puerto Rico, never needed to learn English. All of the business owners in and around our block all spoke Spanish, and yet I’d go to school and I’d be at my friends’ houses on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and I’d be the one translating to the nanny who spoke Spanish. So it’s interesting to become a Latino cultural ambassador when you’re 7."
83,"Opening punches were thrown in what one top Democrat today called ”the first big fight” of the new congressional year  —   the promise by   Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. President Obama met with Democrats on Capitol Hill while Vice   Mike Pence sat down with Republicans, as each side prepared for the skirmishing in the days and months ahead. Asked what advice he gave Democrats in the   meeting about the legacy program that bears his name, Obama responded, ”Look out for the American people.” It was likely Obama’s last visit to the Capitol before the inauguration of his successor. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama told the lawmakers he wished he were in their place. ”The word he used was ’envy,’ ” Earnest said, ”for the opportunity they have” to fight GOP repeal efforts. Pence told reporters that Trump will sign executive orders on his first day in office to begin implementing the repeal of Obamacare, saying it was ”the first order of business.” The incoming administration, Pence said, is working right now on ”a series of executive orders that will enable that orderly transition to take place even as the Congress appropriately debates alternatives to and replacement of Obamacare.” He did not offer any specifics on what those orders would entail. He said Republicans will be taking a ”  approach” with a combination of executive and legislative actions. The new leader of Senate Democrats, Chuck Schumer of New York, said GOP lawmakers seek ”to rip health care away from millions” of Americans, ”which will create chaos.” In his short, prepared statement, he repeated the word ”chaos” four times. Schumer said Democrats in both the House and the Senate are united in their opposition to Republican attempts to ”make America sick again.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said Republicans asserted, however, that there would be ”an orderly transition, so that the rug is not pulled out from under the families,” which he said are currently ”struggling” under Obamacare. But replace it with what? Ryan offered no specifics, except to insist Republicans do ”have a plan to replace it. We have plenty of ideas to replace it.” But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, addressing reporters after hearing from Obama, said Republicans don’t have the votes for a replacement plan. Pelosi blasted an approach that some Republicans have discussed, that would repeal the ACA but delay its effect to give lawmakers time to come up with a replacement. She called the strategy ”an act of cowardice.” Trump himself weighed in today via his preferred method of communicating, tweeting that ”Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed Obamacare disaster” and ”Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web.” He warned that ”massive increases of ObamaCare will take place this year and Dems are to blame for the mess. It will fall of its own weight  —   be careful!”"
84,"Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s former Anglican archbishop and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently celebrated his 85th birthday with an interesting message: He wants the option of an assisted death.  Tutu has largely retired from public life, but is still considered the moral conscience of South Africa for his leading role in the fight against apartheid. Some were taken aback when Tutu said he wants the option to end his life when he chooses. ”As a Christian, I believe in the sanctity of life, and that death is a part of life,” Tutu said in a recent video. ”I hope that when the time comes I am treated with compassion and allowed to pass on to the next phase of life’s journey in the manner of my choice.” An assisted death is currently illegal in South Africa. The Supreme Court of Appeal reaffirmed that stance in December when it struck down a lower court’s ruling that granted an applicant the right to an assisted suicide. Tutu, who has lived with prostate cancer for decades and has been in and out of the hospital in recent years, says he supports efforts around the globe to legalize the procedure.  ”I pray that politicians, lawmakers and religious leaders have the courage to support the choices terminally ill citizens make in departing Mother Earth with dignity and love,” he said. Tutu made that video for advocacy groups that support      laws. At the St. Alban’s Anglican Cathedral in the capital Pretoria, the organ starts to play as parishioners file into the   stone church, which sits among tall government buildings. Musima Gwangwa, who is attending the service, says Tutu’s leadership in ending apartheid, and the stances he has taken on human rights around the world, serve as a model that Anglicans like her should try and emulate. ”He’s more than an icon for us,” she says, adding that she supports his position. Not all parishioners agree. For Richard Botha, the archbishop’s decision is a confounding one. He calls Tutu a global elder and someone who is willing to call out leaders for poor judgment. But Tutu’s support for assisted death does not comport with Botha’s religious beliefs. ”I won’t remember him for that. I will remember him for his credentials and his human rights struggle,” says Botha.  Tutu has largely stopped giving interviews and declined NPR’s request. But he’s been making his feelings known in editorials in which he described as ”disgraceful” Nelson Mandela’s final days before his death in 2013. He described how Mandela, widely known as Madiba, was used as a political prop in photo ops, despite being unable to communicate. ”It was an affront to Madiba’s legacy,” Tutu wrote in The Guardian newspaper in 2014. He went on to argue that South Africa needed to revisit its laws regarding a person’s right to die. South African judges wrote in their recent ruling that they would welcome action by Parliament, meaning the legislature, and not the courts, should determine whether assisted death will be permitted in South Africa. Advocates for assisted death could take the case to the Constitutional Court.  Whatever the outcome,    advocates say Tutu’s support for the issue can guide conflicted people across the globe. ”It helps to hear a person who has dedicated his life to religion, and about whom there’s no question they are deeply religious, say there’s no incompatibility in religious faith and medical aid in dying,” says Barbara Coombs Lee, who leads Compassion and Choices, a group that lobbies for assisted death in the U. S."
85,"If you’re looking for a diet plan that suits your lifestyle, a new list of rankings from U. S. News  World Report has you covered. Most dieters are familiar with commercial plans such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig  —   both of which continue to make the magazine’s list for top diets. But a range of options offer fresh approaches, including the MIND diet, the   diet (a     diet) and the Ornish diet  —   which is ranked top for heart health. The annual rankings list includes 38 different diets, all of which have been evaluated by a panel of doctors, nutritionists and other health professionals. ”Each profile is an exhaustive look at what it’s like to be on each plan,” says Angela Haupt, assistant managing editor for health at U. S. News. The diets are ranked in categories, from ”easiest diets to follow” to ”best diets overall” to ”fastest weight loss.” The   diet makes the cut in the fastest   category. The diet was developed by a nutrition scientist at the University of Toronto. ”It’s a   spin on the Atkins diet. It calls for 31 percent of daily calories to come from plant proteins, 43 percent from plant fats and 26 percent from carbs,” explains Haupt. The claim is that dieters can lose 8 pounds a month, while improving blood levels of triglycerides, cholesterol levels and blood pressure. ”Our experts say it’s superior to Atkins and good for fast weight loss, but it can be tough to follow, since guidance is scarce. You’re largely on your own, which can deter some dieters,” Haupt tells us. Other   diets that rank high include the Ornish diet, based on the plan developed by Dr. Dean Ornish. This diet approach is touted as a way to reverse diabetes and heart disease. The diet moved up a notch from the 2016 list. It emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nonfat dairy, as well as some ”good fats that contain   fatty acids,” according to a description on the diet’s website. The Mediterranean diet retains a top spot as well. As the reviewers explain in the diet’s profile: ”There isn’t ’a’ Mediterranean diet. Greeks eat differently from Italians, who eat differently from the French and Spanish. But they share many common understandings.” A   Mediterranean diet pyramid was developed by Oldways, a nonprofit in Boston, working with researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health. The U. S News reviewers point out: ”The    secret [of a Mediterranean diet] is an active lifestyle, weight control, and a diet low in red meat, sugar and saturated fat and high in produce, nuts and other healthful foods.” Another bonus: A little red wine with meals is not frowned upon. If keeping your noggin sharp is a high priority, the MIND diet  —   which is ranked No. 3 on the list of Best Diets Overall  —   combines the DASH diet approach (which was originally designed to help people control high blood pressure) and the Mediterranean diet. According to the U. S. News reviewers, MIND  —   which was developed by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago  —   focuses on foods that influence brain health. So what are some changes from last year’s rankings of Best Diets? The vegan diet moved up to No. 16 on the Best Diets Overall List. (Last year it was No. 21.) And SlimFast dropped from No. 15 on the list of Best Diets Overall down to No. 20. Two other diets that slipped in the rankings: Atkins fell on the Best   Diets list, and Biggest Loser also slipped in the Best Diets for Healthy Eating category. The paleo diet hangs on. It’s ranked 36th out of 38 in the Best Diets Overall category. The main knocks against it: Reviewers say the produce aisle and meat counter tend to be expensive, and the diet can be hard to follow while dining out. Reviewers note that dieters will need to get accustomed to ordering breadless sandwiches and skipping many other menu items that contain grains and dairy. Also noted: Alcohol is not part of a true paleo diet. Why the changes in rankings? ”Our expert panelists reviewed and rescored each diet, and their scores vary each year based on program changes, new research and general evolution of thinking in the diet and nutrition space,” Haupt tells us."
86,"Rex Tillerson,   Donald Trump’s nominee for U. S. secretary of state, is severing his ties with Exxon Mobil. The former chairman and CEO is in line to receive a $180 million retirement package. Tillerson, who has spent his entire career at Exxon, would have reached mandatory retirement age in March. The company announced that it will pay him in cash for the more than 2 million shares he would have received over the next 10 years and that the money will be transferred to an independently managed trust. If confirmed as secretary of state, Tillerson also has committed to sell the more than 600, 000 Exxon shares he currently owns. The deal means he will give up about $7 million dollars, compared with what he would have received had he retired in March as planned. The deal was worked out to comply with federal ethics rules. Tillerson has promised not to return to the oil and gas industry for 10 years. If he violates the agreement, he would forfeit all the money in the trust, which would be given away to charities chosen by the trust manager. All this is meant to reassure senators that Tillerson would not be unduly influenced by Exxon Mobil if he were to become America’s top diplomat. He still has an uphill battle for confirmation. Democrats have yet to agree on confirmation hearings tentatively set for Jan. 11, and senators on both sides of the aisle will likely question Tillerson about his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Exxon Mobil CEO, he was opposed to U. S. sanctions on Russia, which got in the way of his company’s project with Russian energy company Rosneft to drill in the Arctic. Tillerson met Wednesday with the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin, who has been an outspoken critic of Russia and a supporter of sanctions. The Maryland senator said he had a ”candid” discussion with Tillerson.  ”Russia is not a friend of the United States,” Cardin told reporters outside his office, saying he thinks ”that is a strong bipartisan message you will hear during the confirmation process.”   Cardin also said he didn’t have time to review Tillerson’s divestment and ethics plan before the meeting and that he still wants to see three years of his tax returns. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker,  . has argued that there’s no need for that. He said the agreement that Exxon Mobil’s board reached with Tillerson to comply with conflict of interest requirements is ”all tidied up and done.” Sens. Marco Rubio and John McCain, both Republican members of the foreign relations committee, also have expressed concerns about Tillerson’s views on Russia."
87,"Dylann Roof delivered his opening statement in a South Carolina courtroom Wednesday, as the penalty phase of his federal trial got underway. Roof, who was convicted last month of murdering nine black churchgoers, will be representing himself as jurors weigh whether to give him the death penalty or life in prison. His remarks were brief, focused only on defending his decision to dismiss his lawyers for this phase of the trial. He said it’s ”absolutely true” that he chose to represent himself so that his lawyers would not present evidence of mental illness. ”The point is I’m not going to lie to you,” Roof said. ”There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.” He did not address his crimes or the prosecution’s opening remarks against him. U. S. District Judge Richard Gergel approved the    white supremacist’s request to serve as his own counsel after a second hearing on his mental competency. The request for    —   and its approval  —   came over the protests of Roof’s own lawyers. Roof has said he will not call witnesses or experts to the stand during this phase of the trial. Still, earlier this week, Gergel laid out strict rules for Roof’s conduct while acting as his own lawyer. ”In an order, the judge detailed how Roof can behave while in court,” Alexandra Olgin of South Carolina Public Radio reports. ”He cannot approach witnesses, the jury or the bench and has to give opening statements from behind a podium.” Roof killed nine parishioners at Charleston’s historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015. In a confession taped shortly after he was taken into custody, Roof made plain his racial motivations, adding: ”I am guilty. We all know I’m guilty.” It took less than three hours last month for the jurors to concur. They found him guilty of charges ranging from murder and attempted murder to obstruction of religious belief and damage to religious property. Federal prosecutors, who are pursuing the death penalty, delivered a much longer opening statement. Assistant U. S. Attorney Nathan Williams focused his remarks on those who died in the shooting, and on what he called Roof’s lack of regret. Central to the latter argument is a journal that prosecutors say Roof wrote in after his arrest. In the journal, excerpts of which were presented to courtroom reporters, Roof allegedly says that ”  have to pay for what they’ve done.” ”I created the biggest wave I could,” Roof allegedly wrote. ”I did all I can do, now it is in the hands of my brothers.” In concluding his remarks, Williams warned that the testimony to come will be worse than what jurors have heard yet: ”It will be heartbreaking,” the prosecutor said. The penalty phase of the trial resumed Wednesday with prosecutors calling their first witnesses. The prosecution plans to call up to 38 people as witnesses and experts during this phase of the trial, according to The Associated Press. This is not the only trial that Roof is facing  —   and not the only possibility for capital punishment. ”After the federal proceedings,” reports NPR’s Debbie Elliott, ”Roof is scheduled to be in state court early next year on murder charges that also carry the possibility of a death sentence.”"
88,"A crowded commuter train crashed into a bumper block and partially derailed as it pulled into Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal on Wednesday morning, according to N. Y. officials. The FDNY says at least 103 people sustained    injuries. ”It appears that the train was heading into the station, at 10 or 15 miles per hour, and did not stop,” WNYC’s Stephen Nessen tells our Newscast unit. ”It hit a bumper block the front two cars were lifted off the tracks. One of the rails actually pierced the bottom of the front car.” The crash happened during peak morning commuting time, when between 600 and 700 people were on the Long Island Rail Road train originating from Far Rockaway, Queens, Nessen adds. ”People just went flying,” passenger Donette Smith told The New York Times. ”Bodies were everywhere. It was very scary.” The injuries reported so far have been largely minor: WNYC reports that the most serious is a broken leg. The chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Thomas F. Prendergast, told the Times that most of the injuries were sustained when the train ”came to an abrupt stop after crashing into the bumper block at the end of the track.” Nessen says it’s still unclear what caused the train to crash: ”Trains pulling into the station do automatically slow down but it is up to the conductor to hit the brake finally for the train to stop and in this case, it appears that didn’t happen. Investigators are still looking into what happened.” Prendergast also suggested that responsibility may lie with the train’s conductor. ”At that speed, it’s pretty much the locomotive engineer’s responsibility to stop the train,” he said, according to Reuters. Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters at the scene that it could have been worse. The crash is drawing comparisons to September’s train crash in the nearby Hoboken Terminal in New Jersey, which killed one person and injured more than 100 others. The Times quotes Cuomo as saying that the train in the Hoboken crash ”was coming in much faster, did much more damage, hurt many more people.”"
89,"Amid this week’s firestorm over Republicans’ attempt to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics (and subsequently, backpedal on that attempt) you may have seen this chart floating around the Internet. It depicts data from Google Trends about Americans’ search interest in learning who their congressional representatives are, with a pronounced spike around 9 a. m. Tuesday. The Hill reported this on Tuesday, with the The New York Times later referencing the trend. The conclusion some are drawing is that people looked up their representatives, then called them to complain about the ethics issue, and that the groundswell of support got Congress members’ attention. And, indeed, some Congress members reported that these phone calls did influence them. But there’s a   issue with this data, and with all Google Trends data  —   the problem of scale. While there’s a ”spike” here, there’s no way to tell how big it is without comparing it to other popular  —   or unpopular  —   search terms. Depending on what you’re comparing it to, that spike is little more than a speed bump. Here, for example, is the ”who is my representative” search compared to searches for ”Obamacare” in the U. S. over the past week. The spike nearly disappears here  —   as of 9 a. m. Tuesday, ”who is my representative” registered at 7 on this chart, compared to 60 for Obamacare. But then, maybe that’s not fair. Obamacare is a really big topic in the news right now. Let’s try a Google search term that’s still   but with less mass appeal, like infrastructure. The    spike is a bit more apparent here, but it’s still dwarfed even by searches for the relatively nonsexy topic of infrastructure. The really striking comparisons come when you compare this ”spike” to searches for   topics. How about a newly released, poorly reviewed movie? What about a certain pop superstar who recently gave a catastrophic performance on national TV? OK, so the spike for Mariah Carey happened a couple of days earlier, but you get the picture. It’s true that Google Trends data can say something about what people care about, and that can be   in a democracy where politicians are theoretically supposed to represent those cares. For example, researchers reported in October that Trump searches outstripped Hillary Clinton searches. They subsequently concluded that ”this could be evidence that Mr. Trump is doing better than the polls project.” But when that data is presented without a reference point, it can overstate the importance of a particular search trend. In fact, to get a term that has comparable volume to the Congress member search, you have to get creative and do a lot of random Googling. As it turns out, searches for ”who is my representative” are roughly equal to searches for a 1990s trend that people have mostly forgotten. So searches for ”who is my representative” spiked, surpassing Beanie Baby searches for the first time in . .. well, a long time. None of this is to say that this spike didn’t matter lots more people than usual did Google their Congress members’ offices, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there was an increase in people calling their Congress members. But it is to say that Google data on only one search term can misrepresent the size of a phenomenon. Yes, plenty of people were Googling their Congress members this week. But plenty more were watching that Mariah video."
90,"Louisiana is losing its coast at a rapid rate because of rising sea levels, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can’t be saved. This makes Louisiana’s history an unwitting victim. As land disappears and the water creeps inland, ancient archaeology sites are washing away, too. Richie Blink was born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, La.  —   way down south of New Orleans along the Mississippi River. Now he works for the National Wildlife Federation. When he was a kid, his dad showed him a special place in Adams Bay, where they’d go fishing. ”We would come out of the floodgates and my dad would say ’Head for the Lemon Trees! ’” Blink says. What’s locally known as the ”Lemon Trees” is a stand of weathered old trees on a grassy tuft of land. It’s a   landmark for fishermen, but Blink says they would rarely stop there to hunt or fish because it’s a sacred Native American site. ”The legend goes that you were always to bring some kind of sacrifice, so somebody left some lemons for the ancestors,” Blink says. And those grew into big trees with   lemons. But as land was lost to the Gulf of Mexico, saltwater made its way into the freshwater marsh, killing off the trees and other plants. The trees stand like skeletons on the edge of this scrappy,   island. Waves beat against the dirt, washing it away, exposing shards of ancient pottery. ”You can see, it’s just everywhere . .. there’s just shards of it all over the place,” Blink says. ”This is earthen pottery made by natives. This site is in the process of being destroyed. It only has a few more years left.” This ancient Native American site is an important archaeological find. It’s one of many historic sites being forever lost to the Gulf as rising seas and saltwater intrusion eat away at Louisiana’s fragile marshes. Two sites like this are lost each year. When Blink saw how fast the land was eroding he decided to find an archaeologist and ask for help. That led him to Brian Ostahowski. Ostahowski says he gets a lot of calls like this, at least once a month. People who say: ” ’I have a great archaeological site in my backyard,’ ” Ostahowski says. ”And chances are they usually do.” So he hopped in a boat with Blink and went out to the ”Lemon Trees.” ”Richie wasn’t lying,” Ostahowski says. ”This is actually a very, very important archaeological site.” Based on the pottery and soil, Ostahowski says native people lived at the site 300 to 500 years ago. The pieces of broken pottery are probably from an ancient trash pile, called a midden. There could even be human remains there. ”You’re talking about a whole ceremonial center that could tell you about lifeways, or the change of lifeways, that’s going to be completely gone within 10 years,” he says. ”It maybe took 300 years of occupation there.” Three hundred years to build it  —   and in just 10 years it could be erased. Ostahowski took samples of the soil for radiocarbon dating. Unlike the usual   archaeology dig, Ostahowski wants to excavate the mound as soon as possible and study the pottery shards and oyster shells. But the truth is, there just isn’t much time. ”We’re talking about different ways that we can come up with kind of an emergency action, or emergency excavations,” Ostahowski says. He wants to learn more, like how long people lived there and how many different occupations there might have been. These details could help fill gaps in our understanding of the prehistoric Plaquemine culture, which includes tribes that lived on the lower Mississippi before Europeans came. For Blink, it’s more than ancient history at stake. It’s personal history, where he grew up. He honors that in his own way, like two weeks ago when he brought out some lemons. Under a windswept tree, on top of the small mound, a handful of dried up lemons sits in the shade."
91,"Murmuration refers to the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky. Maybe you’ve seen a murmuration video before. But this one is especially beautiful. It was shot earlier this month in Wales, at Cosmeston Lakes in the Vale of Glamorgan, and posted on Facebook by the BBC Cymru Wales. Why do I love this short video so much? It’s all about science. Just how do the starlings manage to fly in such an amazingly coordinated way? A few years ago, George F. Young and his colleagues investigated starlings’ ”remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information”  —   a nice description of what goes on in a murmuration. Going in, Young et al. already knew that starlings pay attention to a fixed number of their neighbors in the flock, regardless of flock density  —   seven, to be exact. Their new contribution was to figure out that ”when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” Young et al. analyzed still shots from videos of starlings in flight (flock size ranging from 440 to 2, 600) then used a highly mathematical approach and systems theory to reach their conclusion. Focusing on the birds’ ability to manage uncertainty while also maintaining consensus, they discovered that birds accomplish this (with the least effort) when each bird attends to seven neighbors. In following this role of seven, then, the birds are part of a dynamic system in which the parts combine to make a whole with emergent properties  —   and a murmuration results. That’s just incredibly cool. Also, starlings are essentially an invasive species in this country. They were famously introduced to North America at New York City’s Central Park in the 1890s by Shakespeare enthusiasts who wanted all the bird species ever mentioned by Shakespeare to inhabit this continent. With starlings, they certainly succeeded: 200 million of these birds now inhabit North America. They aren’t welcomed by everyone. As the Cornell Lab of Ornithology puts it, starlings in the U. S. are ”sometimes resented for their abundance and aggressiveness.” In this Scientific American piece, they’re even called a ”menace.” The murmuration video invites us to see them with fresh eyes. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape"
92,"Armed men reportedly attacked a jail in the Philippines, killing a guard and allowing more than 150 prisoners to escape. The attack took place at the North Cotabato District Jail in Kidapawan, a city on the island of Mindanao, just after 1 a. m. local time on Wednesday, according to the BBC. It added that ”authorities suspect the gunmen are linked to Islamist separatist groups.”   newspaper The Philippine Star reported that the strike was carefully planned: ”Superintendent Peter Bungat, provincial jail warden, said the attack began with a power outage that plunged the facility into darkness, followed by heavy gunfire aimed at the buildings inside its fenced compound. ”Bungat said one of his subordinates, Jail Officer 1 Hexel Rey Desibo, was killed in the ensuing encounter with the gunmen who attacked from the rear of the jail compound. ’It was not a jailbreak. It was a planned rescue of certain detainees,’ he said.” The BBC noted that the 100 or so attackers were ”armed with rocket propelled grenades and snipers’ rifles,” and far outnumbered the jail staff of around 20 people. The broadcaster added: ”In the chaos following the attack, 158 prisoners were able to put a ladder against a back wall and escape. Many of the 1500 inmates at the jail are linked to the various Islamic insurgent group in Mindanao. The authorities are already blaming the attack on the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, a   faction which has refused to join the protracted peace talks with the central government.” A spokesman for the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters denied the group was involved in the attack, according to the Star. The assault was the third in 10 years at the Cotabato jail, the newspaper said. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose war on drugs has led to the deaths of thousands of people, hasn’t yet publicly commented on the attack and mass escape."
93,"Frenchman Robert Marchand set a new world record Wednesday when he cycled 22. 547 kilometers (about 14 miles) in an hour  —   at the age of 105. Wearing a purple and yellow cycling suit, pink helmet and yellow glasses, Marchand completed 92 laps at the Velodrome National, an indoor track near Paris that’s used for elite cycling events. According to The Associated Press, he set a new record for the   age group and received a standing ovation from people in the crowd, who chanted ”Robert, Robert” as he rolled to a stop. Still, he said he could have done better. ”I did not see the sign warning me I had 10 minutes left,” Marchand said, according to the AP. ”Otherwise I would have gone faster, I would have posted a better time. I’m now waiting for a rival.” For comparison, the U. K.’s Bradley Wiggins rode 54. 526 kilometers (about 34 miles) in 2015 and holds the record for the men’s hour, the BBC reported. ”I am not here to be champion. I am here to prove that at 105 years old you can still ride a bike,” Marchand said, per Eurosport. His   ride Wednesday was incredible, but Marchand’s entire life has been a series of singular events. The AP has this on his background: ”Marchand, a former firefighter who was born in 1911 in the northern town of Amiens, has lived through two world wars. He led an eventful life that took him to Venezuela, where he worked as a truck driver near the end of the 1940s. He then moved to Canada and became a lumberjack for a while. ”Back in France in the 1960s, Marchand made a living through various jobs that left him with no time to practice sports. ”He finally took up his bike again when he was 68 years old and began a series of cycling feats. ”The diminutive Marchand  —   he is 1. 52 meters ( ) tall and weighs 52 kilograms (115 pounds)  —   rode from Bordeaux to Paris, and Paris to Roubaix several times. He also cycled to Moscow from Paris in 1992. ”Ten years later, he set the record for someone over the age of 100 riding 100 kilometers (62 miles).” So what’s his secret? Marchand’s coach and friend Gerard Mistler told the AP it’s simple: He eats fruits and vegetables, doesn’t smoke, drinks wine only on occasion, goes to bed at 9 p. m. and exercises every day. Mistler, perhaps cognizant of the cloud of doubt that hovers over impressive cycling performances, told the news service: ”If [he] had been doping, he would not be there anymore.” As if this story couldn’t get any better, here’s some amazing photos of the feat."
94,"People think of black holes as nightmare vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything in reach, from light to stars to Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar. But, in real life, black holes don’t consume everything that they draw in. ”They’re actually pretty picky eaters,” says Jedidah Isler, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University. She spends most days chipping away at one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: How do the huge, overactive black holes, known as quasars, work? ”They are billions of times the mass of our own sun,” she says. ”I like to call them ’hyperactive,’ in the sense that they are just taking on a lot more than an average black hole.” And these monster black holes tend to do something strange. They not only reject material, but they use it to put on a space version of a fireworks show, shooting out shredded stars and other things in a stream of light and charged particles. ”Think of them as cosmic water hoses that are spewing out all kinds of particles and light,” says Isler. These are some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed, causing chaos in their host galaxies. Theoretically speaking, if an unlucky planet happened to cross paths with one of those jets, Isler says, it would not be pretty. ”It would basically destroy the planet completely. It would completely eviscerate anything that got in its way,” she says. She added, ”You know, things are being eviscerated in space all the time. It’s part of what makes it fun.” Isler specializes in the subset of quasars that happen to have their jet streams of material pointed toward Earth. These are called blazars, or ”blazing quasars.” Telescopes built in the last decade, like NASA’s Fermi   Space Telescope, have spotted a few thousand blazars. But don’t panic. ”Thankfully, they are far enough away that they are not going to have any negative impact on us as human beings,” Isler says. One of the closest blazars is 2. 5 billion   away. ”But they do serve as really interesting laboratories to understand these really exotic systems,” she says. ”They are able to accelerate particles to 99. 99 percent of the speed of light,” Isler says. ”How does that happen? So, I’m interested in where along that jet do we get this acceleration, and what is the physical mechanism that is responsible for the acceleration of particles that we see?” By analyzing data from a large sample of blazars, she and her colleagues have found that some particles exhibit   acceleration closer to the black hole than expected, suggesting that differences in blazar jets occur because of an internal process, like turbulence, as opposed to a more consistent factor, like how quickly the blazars draw in material. If the scientists can figure out how these natural particle accelerators work, they may begin to understand the physical laws that guide these unusual black holes, and maybe a lot of other systems out there that are capable of pulling things in and flinging them out. ”That process happens at many different scales across the universe with many different systems,” Isler says. For example, when planets form, they pull nearby material into what are called protoplanetary disks. Sometimes, they shoot that material out in jets, too, though on a much smaller, weaker scale than blazars do. ”There may be some way that this process is universal in our cosmos,” she adds. Understanding supermassive, hyperactive black holes could be a first step in figuring that out."
95,"Several civil rights activists were arrested Tuesday night for staging a   at Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office in Mobile, Ala. to protest his nomination as U. S. attorney general. The   was staged by the NAACP and portions were broadcast live online. The NAACP has sharply criticized Sessions’ record on civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice reform. Six of the activists were apparently arrested, including NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks. The NAACP highlighted Sessions’ history with voting rights as a major factor in the protest. Brooks told The Associated Press that Sessions ”does not acknowledge the reality of voter suppression while mouthing faith in the myth of voter fraud.” He also noted that Sessions once prosecuted civil rights activists on charges of voter fraud. As NPR’s Nina Totenberg has reported, those charges were dismissed by a jury, and civil rights groups described the prosecution as attempted intimidation of black voters. The NAACP cited Sessions’ ”record of racially offensive remarks and behavior” as another reason the group objects to his nomination. As Nina explained in November, Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship in the ’80s. He was rejected by a   Senate after he acknowledged having made racially insensitive remarks and calling several civil rights groups  —   including the NAACP  —   ” .” He later denied making some of the remarks, which ”seemed to add a credibility problem to his troubles,” Nina wrote. After making public statements objecting to Sessions’ nomination, the NAACP turned to civil disobedience. Brooks tweeted on Tuesday that the activists with him in Mobile were prepared to be arrested for their protest. The   began on Tuesday morning at Sessions’ office in Mobile, Ala. the AP reports: ”Demonstrators refused a request by the manager of the building  —   which includes several other tenants in addition to Sessions  —   to leave when the building closed for the day at 6 p. m. Police could be seen on video footage . .. handcuffing the six protesters and [escorting] them to a police van. ” ’We all are aware of the laws of trespass. We are engaging in a voluntary act of civil disobedience,’ Brooks told the officers who arrived at the scene.” AL. com reports that ”according to Mobile County jail records all six of the arrested members have been charged with   criminal trespassing.” The   was part of a statewide protest against Sessions, Kyle Gassiott of Troy Public Radio reports for NPR. ”Sessions has five offices in cities across the state, including Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile, and at each of the five locations members of the NAACP held press conferences protesting his nomination for attorney general,” Gassiott says. Sessions was in Washington, D. C. as the protests in Alabama were unfolding, the AP writes. A spokeswoman for Sessions said in a statement that ”false portrayals” of Sessions ”will fail as tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited,” the AP reports. Meanwhile, more than 1, 200 law school professors have signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Sessions’ nomination. ”Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the    attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge,” the professors write, citing his prosecution of civil rights activists and ”consistent promotion of the myth of   fraud,” among other things. ”All of us believe it is unacceptable for someone with Senator Sessions’ record to lead the Department of Justice,” they write. Sessions’ former chief counsel, who is black, told The Washington Post that the ”smear campaign” accusing Sessions of racial insensitivity needs to stop."
96,"Vocalist Xenia Rubinos ended 2016 with a bang: Her album Black Terry Cat was singled out in     lists by NPR Music, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. That kind of recognition is a major deal for an independent artist with a     artistic vision. Alt. Latino first recognized that vision back in 2012, when we featured a track from Rubinos’ first   EP, Magic Trix. After we first heard Black Terry Cat earlier this year, we rushed her and her band into our office for a mesmerizing Tiny Desk concert that only hints at the magic of her live show. That’s what we’re always trying to do at Alt. Latino: find and then support artists whose vision and imagination stops you in your tracks and opens up new worlds of sounds and ideas. So when Rubinos and her band passed through D. C. while on tour recently, we asked her to bring some music so we could discuss art, life and the joys of subtlety. It’s a spirited conversation, and we can’t wait for the next one."
97,"Imagine being able to collect the DNA of a human ancestor who’s been dead for tens of thousands of years from the dirt on the floor of a cave. Sounds fantastic, but scientists in Germany think they may be able to do just that. If they’re successful, it could open a new door into understanding the extinct relatives of humans. Most ancient DNA is extracted from bones or teeth. Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig says you don’t need very much of the bone less than a thousandth of an ounce will do. But there’s a problem. Anthropologists hate to give away any of their precious bones. ”We’ve been recently trying to explore new sources of ancient human DNA,” Meyer explains, ”as the fossil record is very limited.” He and his colleagues began to wonder if maybe they didn’t need an intact bone at all. Many of these interesting bones come from caves. What if, over the millennia, some of the bones had just degraded into a kind of dust, and fallen to the floor of the cave. It would be easy enough to get at that dust. ”You just take a shovel with some dirt, and then you look for DNA,” says Meyer. He says other scientists have recovered DNA from a variety of species from the floors of caves. Meyer now has some of this ancient human DNA from cave floors, and he’s been able to begin analyzing it. But there are problems to solve before he can make sense of the data. He’ll have to develop methods to be certain that the DNA came from an ancient human bone, and not a more recent human cave explorer or some contaminating bacteria. And the DNA they’ll get will be in tiny snippets. Piecing together the big picture will be tricky. Meyer says they’re making headway with those issues. Now, let’s say you can get lots of DNA that you know comes from an ancient human ancestor. What do you do with it? Plenty, says Janet Kelso, a colleague of Meyer’s at the Max Planck Institute. ”We’ve initiated a project just this year to try and generate sequences from a large number of Neanderthals, to try to understand something about the Neanderthal population histories,” Kelso says. Even though they’re gone now, Neanderthals were in Europe and western Asia for more than 300, 000 years, she says. During that time the climate in those areas changed dramatically. At times glaciers covered a large chunk of the landscape. If archaeologists can get DNA samples from Neanderthals at various time points in their history, Kelso says, ”we can see how were they adapting to the environment. How did they differ over time? Can we understand what happened to them in the end? That may not be something you can tell from the sequence, but it would be interesting to try.” Another question is just how often Neanderthals and modern humans had sex with one another. ”Was this something that was happening relatively regularly over some time?” she and other scientists wonder, as they try to piece together what was happening during each era. ”Was it something that was quite rare?” Kelso says most modern human populations have at least some genetic connection to Neanderthals. But there are many questions about when and where Neanderthals made their contributions to the modern human gene pool. It would be pretty amazing if the answers came from dirt on the floor of caves."
98,"The machinery inside Conner Bottling Works doesn’t sparkle like it used to. In fact, everything and everybody in here looks like they could use a break. ”We are the last   independent bottler in the state of New Hampshire,” says Dan Conner, part of the fifth generation to work here. ”A hundred and   years, from start to today. Never shut down, never stopped.” Launched in 1863, the first Conners bottled only beer, but in the 1890s, the company branched out into sodas. During Prohibition, harder drinks were made out back, while a friendly sheriff reportedly looked the other way. And then in 1938, the company laid out $2, 400 for the Dixie, a new bottling machine manufactured in Baltimore that has more than earned its keep. ”They put it in here brand new,” says Tom Howcroft, the only   working inside the factory. ”It’s been in this spot ever since, working just about every day.” Watching soda get made is more pleasant than watching, say, sausage. Howcroft lines up the gleaming glass bottles, with each one rattling along toward the spigots. He knows it’s a scene right out of a sitcom. ”Laverne  Shirley, the one that a lot of people bring up, with the conveyor belt,” says Howcroft. The gleaming bottles move down the line, first passing under the syruper that deposits two ounces of cane sugar and flavoring. Then, a stream of carbonated water, followed by the cap. ”Which happens with a big clang,” Howcroft says. The bottles then get a quick rinse from a tiny sprinkler. After they dry, they get a label, and finally, a taste test. ”It doesn’t taste anything like Coke, doesn’t taste anything like Pepsi,” says Howcroft. ”Like a traditional cola.” Traditions rolls deep here at Conner, and that’s thanks in part to the current owner, Tom Conner, who started working here ”when I was old enough to walk across the driveway from the house there. You didn’t have a choice back then.” Child labor rules have changed, and so have the economics of soda making. For starters, there’s not much local competition. ”At one time there were 60 bottlers in New Hampshire,” says Tom Conner. ”And we just happen to be the only ones left.” That ability to hang on has started paying off. The company’s line of sodas, sold under the name Squamscot Beverages, are now carried in more than 600 stores around the country. The Squamscott is a    river that runs through southeastern New Hampshire, as well as the name of the Native American tribe that settled in the region. Customers can choose from 27 different flavors, including root beer, cherry cola, fruit bowl and ginger ale. There are even some   options, much to Tom Conner’s chagrin. ”I don’t care for it. I know people like it. Some people have to drink it, and we make it. And let it go at that,” he says. During the holidays, the biggest demand is for Squamscot Beverages’ limited edition Mistletoe Mist, which is only available for about a month, unless it runs out sooner. It’s a family recipe Tom isn’t about to reveal. ”My parents used to take a mixture of different flavors, and they’d pour it into a punch bowl whenever they had holiday parties. And then we thought we’d just pour it into the bottle, cap it and call it something good,” he says. Mistletoe Mist is pinkish, citrusy and not really all that seasonal. But like a good punch, it goes well with whatever else is kicking around. ”Rum is good with it, vodka is good with it. But you can put anything you want in it,” he says. Everything in moderation, he cautions, though he ignores any concerns that too much soda is bad for your teeth. His smile reveals a mouth full of pearly whites, all his own. ”Well, most of them. You know, a couple broke off, had them fixed. But [my son] 40 years old, never had a cavity,” says Tom. ”So tell a dentist that.” After showing off his grin, his warehouse and the delivery truck, there’s one last item to see on the Conner family property. ”We can walk out back and see the solar system,” he says. Tom’s not talking about the celestial bodies that twinkle down upon his soda operation. Instead, it’s the 156 solar panels that power the entire factory. They’re big on tradition here at Conner Bottling, but are happy to update things if it makes financial sense. This story aired on New Hampshire Public Radio."
99,"An Israeli military court has convicted a soldier of manslaughter for shooting and killing a Palestinian assailant who was already incapacitated. The shooting happened in the occupied West Bank in March of 2016, and was captured on camera. The judges found that    Sgt. Elor Azaria acted in cold blood when he shot and killed Abdel Fattah   NPR’s Joanna Kakissis reports from Jerusalem: ”  had been shot and wounded after stabbing an Israeli soldier. Eleven minutes later, Azaria shot the motionless   in the head. ”A human rights activist filmed the killing. The video went viral. ”Many Israelis say Azaria was justified because he feared   might have been wearing an explosive belt. But Azaria’s superior officers say his actions contradict the army’s ethical standards.” On Wednesday, as three military judges announced that Azaria had been found guilty, hundreds of Azaria’s supporters outside the army base where the trial took place chanted ”God is with him,” Joanna reports. The case has been deeply polarizing in Israel, The Associated Press reports. It’s rare for an active member of the Israeli military to be charged with manslaughter. The AP reports: ”The verdict caps a   saga that has deeply divided the country. Defense officials have criticized Sgt. Elor Azaria’s conduct, while large segments of the Israeli public, along with members of the nationalist ruling coalition, have rallied behind him. ”In delivering her verdict, Col. Maya Heller systematically rejected all of Azaria’s defense arguments, saying ’the fact that the man on the ground was a terrorist does not justify a disproportionate response.’ ” Azaria is set to be sentenced on Jan. 15, according to the AP."
100,"”Dogs are better than human beings,” wrote Emily Dickinson, ”because they know but don’t tell.” That sentiment comes to mind when considering Emily Bitto’s debut novel, which showcases a dazzling, gabby and ultimately doomed collection of stray human beings. Assembled under one bohemian roof in 1930s Australia, most of these characters tell all to a fault. But one, an adolescent girl named Lily, sees all but keeps her mouth firmly shut  —   until she comes to narrate this book. Framed as a memoir drafted in 1985, when Lily has grown to maturity, The Strays invites readers into a world that is by turns disturbing and magical. The   art scene in   Melbourne burns white hot. Painters find themselves characterized as decadents in the newspapers and do their best to live up to the reputation. A canvas of riotous and erotic oils, the creative ferment comprises the narrative backdrop of The Strays. In the foreground is the story of two young girls who fall deeply in love and create an intensely private relationship amid the adult chaos that reigns around them. From the day they meet as    in grade school, narrator Lily adores Eva Trentham. The   exotic Eva lives with her parents Evan and Helena and two sisters in a grand heirloom of a house surrounded by rambling, sumptuous gardens. Lily assesses the sharp differences between the Trentham household and the boring, bourgeois,   suburbia where she has been raised by her utterly conventional mother and father Helena and Evan love their daughters, but that does not preclude them from partying nightly in front the kids. Helped along by generous doses of ”reefer,” as Bitto refers to marijuana throughout, the rolling revelry also features toothsome feasts, nudity, moonlit trysts and far too much wine. The     father of the clan takes a notion to defecate in the garden with everybody watching, which given the outrageous milieu is about par for the course. Lily is gobsmacked by the goings on. The adults are too feckless to shield their offspring, neglecting to send the young ones off to bed when it gets late. The girls themselves grab whatever stimulant they can get their hands on. Our narrator acclimates herself ”to being invisible, to being secretly in love with the people I lived with every day.” And the strays keep arriving, painters who move in with their slim suitcases, their brushes, oils and ”turps” (turpentine)  —   and their ambitions. Bankrolled by Helena’s inheritance, the Trentham property increasingly functions as a   arts commune. As a    Lily sees her future ”unfurling in the sunlight.” Taking up writing, secretly, as a voyeur, she finds herself ”learning the habit of attention, of noticing the world in all its ravishing detail and complexity.” The adolescent journals form her personal mode of   and eventually become the foundation for the ”memoir” that the grownup Lily presents in The Strays. ”Sometimes,” Lily tells us, ”I felt myself to be a dog under the table, scrounging after dropped morsels. I was sly and skulking like a dog has to be.” Word pictures which elevate the ordinary to exquisite appear throughout Bitto’s novel, appropriate to a book that focuses so much on the glory of art: ”The air there smelled of dry bush, gum leaves and wet clay, like the heavy blocks we used in pottery class, our teacher slicing them to pieces with a string tied between two clothes pegs.” It’s all too wonderful to last, of course. Eva, who prides herself as a young teen on a   dive from a cliff into the local quarry, suddenly grows up, engages in truly bad behavior, and distances herself from her crestfallen buddy Lily. They had shared a bed, with limbs entangled, ”an intimate, entwined existence.” With precise and graceful turns of phrase, Bitto reveals the bond of passion between the two girls, which seems unbreakable but inevitably snaps under all that can’t be said. And she delivers all of this with a grace and eloquence which rival that of the young friends’ bond. Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin."
101,"There are more than 80, 000 educational apps in Apple’s app store. It seems like a great way to encourage brain development and make your little one the smartest baby genius. But just sticking a tablet in your kid’s hands might not be as helpful. Sure, use the app. But it’s not a babysitter  —   you’ve got to help them use it, too. Several recent studies have looked at how young children learn from touchscreens. One study, published in Child Development, compared how   and    learned to build a   puzzle. Some children learned how to assemble the puzzle from a ”ghost demonstration”  —   meaning that, initially, the pieces moved by themselves on the tablet to show how it works. A lot of apps that are intended for young children often have some element of this ghost demonstration: Pieces move on their own or objects will move them. Other children had a person sitting next to them to move the puzzle pieces on the tablet. After they watched the demonstration, both groups of children were asked to complete the task on either a touchscreen tablet or a real puzzle that looked identical to the one they saw. The   and    who saw the ghost demonstration had a hard time replicating the task  —   but did well after they saw the human hand. Researchers concluded that having a human guide  —   often referred to as having social scaffolding  —   helped these young children learn. ”Simply having someone show them how to put that puzzle together, rather than the app showing it to them, allowed them to put that puzzle together themselves” explains Rachel Barr, a professor at Georgetown and one of the authors of the study. ”But taking away that person  —   taking away that scaffold  —   made their performance just look like they had never even seen it before.” Previous research from Barr found that the presence of a parent  —   more social scaffolding  —   increased a child’s ability to transfer knowledge from the tablet to a real object. I spoke with Barr and Laura Zimmermann, the study’s lead author who is now at the University of Delaware, about the takeaways for parents, teachers and app developers. Should we be surprised that   and    learn better from a real person than from a screen?  Rachel Barr: Learning from apps and connecting it to the real world is challenging for a really young child. When we watch children play with touchscreens, it seems so intuitive to them. It’s very easy for us to forget that they are just like any other tool. And just like any other tool, children are going to need to learn how to learn from them. The ease with which we use technology makes us forget that this is really a fairly complex tool. If we think about how many hours each of us as adults spend with technology each day, and if you just add that up over at least 10 years, this is thousands of hours that we spent learning how to use this technology. These babies are only 2 years old, so their amount of experience using the tools is relatively limited. The fact that they don’t just learn everything like magic from these tools means that they require someone to help them with this experience. Is this a plea to have adults interact with the apps their kids are using? Laura Zimmermann: In an ideal world, we would love for there to be joint media engagement. So: Having a scenario in which a parent or a teacher or a sibling or peer is   with the child, interacting, teaching and showing new things to each other. This is an optimal way to promote learning and that should not be downplayed at all. Typically, having another person present during these interactions with touch screens or while viewing television is really beneficial. The parent or teacher can take into consideration what their child knows and build on that  —   something that’s too complex for an app to be able to do. So rather than children interacting with a touch screen on their own, parents can provide support, to then boost their learning or help them transfer what they learned to the real world. They could also connect that information to something else that they have in their home. Barr: With   [it’s] giving the child a little bit of support. That can really help them to process. It’s no different than other learning situations. Technology seems to be able to do everything. But for a very young child, it’s just a tool just like any other. And they need to learn how to do it and the best person to help them may be a parent or older siblings. Can you give me a concrete example? What would this look like?  Barr: Let’s say there’s a show or an app game about a cat and you have a cat living in your house. When that image of the cat is on the screen, the parent can simply say, ”Oh that’s a cat just like ours.” So it’s not sort of   and guiding every single piece of the experience, but it’s providing that information at the key point. ”Here’s the cat. It’s like the cat in our real world.” Or, if they’re playing a game putting together pieces of a puzzle on an app, then afterward, the parent can say, ”Oh let’s get out a real puzzle and switch that out.” Or if they’re building a block tower on an app program, building it with them. And now, ”Let’s build some real blocks.” So it’s just really helping them make those connections that seem obvious to us, but really are more difficult for young children. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot, but the trick is to think about apps and the television more like you think about picture books.  That’s the ideal world. But that doesn’t always happen. Barr: Right. We want to be realistic. Zimmermann: There is going to be interaction without humans. That’s just the nature of our world. Kids are spending time using touchscreens. And if we want to promote the best possible learning, then we have to think about ways that we can provide this social scaffolding in some other form. That’s the way I approach it. I definitely agree that having a parent show a child something would be the gold standard. Very early in life, infants are capable of imitating different facial expressions or sounds, just by observing their parents. This isn’t a new idea, right?  Zimmermann: We know, from decades of work looking at social learning, that kids learn best from a human. Compared to a touch screen, compared to video. There’s real importance in terms of the social scaffolding. Barr: Exactly. It’s the same with books. There’s been a number of studies where we find the same thing. Parental support around   is highly beneficial for later literacy. Around television: Some support around the content, helping them bridge that gap between the 2D world and the 3D world is really helpful. And now these latest findings suggesting the same thing is happening with apps. So, if there’s not a human around, are there things that app developers can incorporate into tablet games to help replace or mimic the social scaffolding?  Zimmermann: App developers could provide information in the app that teaches children or gives them feedback if they’re right or wrong to help improve their learning. Maybe a special sound or other haptic feedback  —   which is a form of touch information, such as vibration. This addition is something that would allow kids to learn, ”Oh I’m doing something right, or I’m doing something wrong,” to help them achieve some type of goal. In our study we did not provide this feedback in the app. We also know from previous work that different factors like repetition can help facilitate learning and encoding of information. So building in things like repetition can be useful for young children. Barr: The really nice thing about technology is that it will repeat. So we know that if babies are able to see the same show again, or the same task, this does help them learn. Zimmermann: There could also be adaptive play  —   things like leveling and scaling. It may be the case that with the       in our study, this puzzle was pretty complex for them. So maybe we should have started with a   puzzle. And depending on either the age of the kids or their previous performance, the app could present information accordingly. So as the kid succeeds on a   puzzle, the app could move on to a   puzzle. The task could get increasingly more complex based on the kid’s individual performance. I also want to be clear that this leveling is not something we manipulated in this particular study, but it’s something that I think future work should look at. When making educational apps, we need to be careful, to go back to the basics. It should be the starting point for developers to ask: ”What do we know about learning and early childhood?” and then use that information to design new technologies. All this is not to say that there aren’t exceptional educational apps out there, but there’s a lot for parents and teachers to sift through. How could this apply to the classroom? Laura Zimmermann: Early educators often require children to transfer knowledge from a task that they learned in one context to another. One example of transfer learning is a teacher showing their students something online or in a video, and then asking them to do an activity in real life or with some   test. Another example, in a preschool or an early elementary school classroom, is children learning basic addition and subtraction with blocks from their teacher. Then later, being asked to transfer their learning to a math activity on a touchscreen for a   assessment. Touchscreen assessments can be very useful tools, but it may be important to consider how their children learn a new skill  —   on a touchscreen or with concrete toys  —   as it may influence how they demonstrate what they have learned. "
102,"To what lengths would you go to stifle the thunderous snorts and   growls of a spouse or roommate, just so you can get a good night’s sleep? Dozens of   devices crowd the market, ranging from slightly absurd to moderately torturous. ”Some of them are more medieval than others,” says Dr. Kim Hutchison, associate professor of sleep medicine in the department of neurology at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Ore. And some of the devices, she says, even have some basis in fact. ”When you sleep, the back of your throat relaxes. That narrows your airway and, as you’re breathing in, it causes it to vibrate,” explains Hutchison. So, many   products are aimed at opening up that airway, or the tunnels that lead to it. For example, you can buy hollow nose plugs that, instead of closing the nostrils, prop them open. ”If you have a deviated septum or something like that, those could help open up your nose and decrease snoring,” says Hutchison, but they won’t help everyone because ”most snoring appears in the back of your throat.” Other devices are designed to force sleepers to turn on their sides. ”Sleeping on your back makes your tongue block your airway a little, sort of like the skinny part of a balloon, when you let air out of it,” Hutchison says. So some devices combine straps and pillows that make sleeping on your back uncomfortable  —   or poke you if you roll over. There are also chin straps aimed at repositioning your jaw in a way that opens the airway. They might work for some, says Dr. Richard Schwab, director the Pennsylvania Sleep Center. But one chinstrap on the market covers the wearer’s entire mouth. ”A terrible idea!” says Schwab. ”You should never cover your mouth  —   you could choke.” Devices that gently poke and prod might help some snorers, says Hutchison. Eventually, some people do stop sleeping on their backs, to avoid being jabbed to consciousness. If that’s not annoying enough, there are more insistent devices: wristbands that send a little electric shock every time you snore. That seems drastic. But maybe not, if love is on the line. ”Snoring can create a lot of stress in a relationship,” Schwab points out. ”It’s an intermittent noise, so you can’t just get over it. People lose so much sleep, they can’t sleep in the same beds.” And snoring that routinely disturbs your partner could be a sign you should see a doctor, says Schwab. You might have sleep apnea, a disorder characterized by loud snoring and interrupted breathing. People with untreated apnea are at greater risk for high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke. A lot of apnea cases go undiagnosed, Schwab says. Consider prodding your snoring partner to see a doctor  —   even before trying some of the   remedies. ”If you treat the snoring and not the sleep apnea, you might never get evaluated,” says Schwab. And that’s important, because sleep apnea is treatable. Sleepers can wear masks linked to CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines, which are very effective at keeping airways open and stopping the problem, he says. Sleep apnea can prevent the snorer from getting deep sleep many people say they feel more awake after using the machines. The whir of the machine can take getting used to at first, Schwab says, but it’s much quieter than snoring, so roommates usually love them. The bonus for the snorer: It doesn’t shock you awake. And it actually works."
103,"Even though most of the protesters fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota have left, hundreds still remain here atop what is essentially a sheet of ice. One group of campers say there’s a change taking hold at camp, which was once overrun by thousands who felt a sense of excitement about the gathering. Byron Shorty, who lives on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, says now that the Army Corps of Engineers is temporarily halting pipeline construction, the protest camp is calm. ”I want to be here to reflect, and I want to be here to help clean up our abandoned campsites that I still see,” he says. ”And we’re in the process of cleaning those up and repurposing the things that people left behind.” Others, like Jacob Chamberlain, who came here from Scotland, are doing daily chores like chopping firewood. ”It’s not about taking selfies and saying that you were out here anymore. At this point, it’s about being hearty, surviving in the cold,” Chamberlain says. Earlier this month, the Army Corps said it would conduct a lengthy environmental review of this project, even as a fossil   administration is coming to Washington. Standing Rock council member Chad Harrison attended a recent meeting between tribes and the Trump transition team and was pleased that could even happen. ”My hope is that that’s an indicator of how serious he’ll be when it comes to Native American issues,” he says. But Doug Burgum, North Dakota’s new governor, is urging   Donald Trump to approve the project. He’s doing that even as he recently met with Standing Rock leaders in an effort to rebuild frayed relationships. A community divided, Demonstrations have caused gridlock, disrupted businesses and severely stretched police resources. ”It really kind of makes me sad when I see the picture that is being painted across the nation, this narrative that it’s this bad cop thing happening. And that’s not here in North Dakota. Not at all.” says Shelle Aberle of Bismarck, N. D. who runs a Facebook page supporting law enforcement. ”Our law enforcement are there to protect both sides.” Other residents back the pipeline opponents. The Unitarian Universalist congregation has supplied food to camp and shelter. In this protest, both sides often seemed to speak right past each other. Minister Karen Van Fossan says that should be changing. ”We aren’t often talking about the things that are on our minds, and now we really are,” Van Fossan says. Kay LaCoe hopes that’s true. The Bismarck resident recently called on residents to support businesses targeted by protesters. But soon after, hateful messages flooded her Facebook. She even received death threats and just wants a final decision on the pipeline to end all this tension. ”Whatever the government and the tribe and the energy companies decide to do with that pipeline, I’m good with it. Just give me my hometown back,” she says. But the legal battle over the pipeline will likely continue to play out in 2017 as North Dakotans grapple both with the protesters and the fallout from their continued presence. Amy Sisk reports for Prairie Public Broadcasting and for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America’s energy issues. "
104,"  Donald Trump has selected former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats to be director of national intelligence, according to a statement from   Donald Trump’s transition team. In choosing Coats, he is getting a veteran Washington establishment figure  —   a senator, former lobbyist and ambassador to Germany  —   with a rare distinction: being banned from Russia. Coats’ views on Russia after its annexation of Crimea, and his calls for stronger sanctions as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, landed him and other senators on Russia’s banned list. It’s a major difference with the   who has praised Putin and cast doubt on U. S. intelligence conclusions that the Russian government, sought to help   Donald Trump’s election chances. Coats even mocked Russia with a David   top 10 list on Twitter in 2014: Coats served as senator from 1989 to 1999 and again from 2011 to this year. (He did not seek   in November.) In between Senate stints, Coats served as U. S. ambassador to Germany during the George W. Bush administration and worked as a lobbyist. He was also asked by Bush to help his unsuccessful attempt to win Senate confirmation of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Coats has been an outspoken critic of the Russian leader. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Coats wrote President Obama after Russia annexed Crimea in 2013, urging Obama to impose sanctions against a Russian weapons exporter. The senators argued the sanctions ”would send a powerful message to Putin,” whose foreign policy, they went on, has become ”increasingly belligerent.” Coats also sponsored an amendment to a Ukrainian aid bill in the Senate that would prohibit the U. S. government from doing any business with the exporter, a company called Rosoboronexport. Such actions, Coats said, ”would require our foreign partners to make a choice between America and Putin.” In 2014, Coats also called on organizers of soccer’s World Cup to move the tournament, scheduled for Russia in 2018, somewhere else. All of which won Coats the honor of being banned from Russia, along with five other lawmakers, including Armed Services Chairman and 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and three Obama administration staff members."
105,"Updated at 2:15 p. m. ET, Intelligence agency leaders repeated their determination Thursday that only ”the senior most officials” in Russia could have authorized recent hacks into Democratic National Committee and Clinton officials’ emails during the presidential election. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper affirmed an Oct. 7 joint statement from 17 intelligence agencies that the Russian government directed the election interference  —   and went further. ”We stand more resolutely on that statement,” Clapper said during a Senate Armed Services hearing with the intelligence chiefs into the politically charged issue. Clapper noted that the intelligence officials would not dive into many more details at this hearing, deferring to a broader, unclassified report on the election interference to be released next week. Committee Chairman John McCain,  . said there is no national security interest ”more vital to the U. S. than the ability to hold free and fair elections without foreign interference,” and that ”every American should be alarmed by Russia’s attacks on our nation.” ”We will ascribe” a motive for the Russian cyberattack in the upcoming report, Clapper said. He wouldn’t say Thursday what it is, but it has been widely reported that the intelligence agencies agree that Russia was trying to get Donald Trump elected. Clapper also said he will ”push the envelope” to make much of that report unclassified without jeopardizing sources or   details. ”The public should know as much about this as possible,” Clapper said. In addition to Clapper, testifying before the committee were Defense Undersecretary Marcel Lettre and Adm. Michael Rogers, commander of the U. S. Cyber Command of the National Security Agency. All three will be leaving their positions at the end of the Obama administration. One of the first questions from McCain was about the involvement of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks published emails  —   from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta  —   that the intelligence community says were hacked by the Russians. Assange has denied the Russian government gave WikiLeaks the emails. McCain asked Clapper if Assange had any credibility. ”Not in my view,” Clapper said, adding that Assange ”has put people at risk” with revelations about U. S. intelligence gathering. ”I don’t think those of us in the intelligence community have a whole lot of respect for him,” Clapper said.   Trump, however, has openly questioned whether Russia was involved in the hacking, pointed to errors the intelligence community made over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and has appeared to back Assange in tweets. Clapper also said there is a difference ”between skepticism and disparagement” of the intelligence community. Trump has taken to Twitter, referring to ”Intelligence” and its officials in quotations. Clapper also testified that there is no evidence the Russian hacking changed vote tallies ”or anything of that sort.” He did say, however, there is no way of gauging the impact of Russia’s actions ”on choices the electorate made.” McCain asked Clapper if the Russian   constituted ”an act of war.” Clapper responded that constitutes ”a very heavy policy call,” which, he said, ”I don’t think the intelligence communities should make.” But he did say what was done carried ”great gravity.” Clapper added that Russia deployed more than just cyberattacks in its effort to disrupt the election, calling it a multifaceted campaign. ”The hacking was only one part of it,” he said. ”It also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news,” which he said was still going on. There was a fair amount of talk about rocks and glass houses, with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina calling the Obama administration’s response to the hacking, a set of limited economic sanctions, just ”a pebble.” ”When it comes to interfering with our election,” Graham said, ”we better be ready to throw rocks.” Sen. Thom Tillis,  . C. noted the U. S. has also attempted to interfere in other nations’ elections. ”We live in a big glass house,” Tillis said, ”and there are a lot of rocks to throw.”"
106,"The Republican Party has embraced   Donald Trump’s positions on immigration, trade, the deficit and conflicts of interest, but when it comes to Russia, Trump and his party are not even close to being on the same page. Trump has repeatedly and consistently expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and has refused to accept intelligence community findings that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails during the campaign. That puts him at odds with almost every other Republican in Washington, D. C. On Wednesday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CNN he is mystified by Trump’s feelings toward Russia. ”What bothers me is that   Trump seems to get the Chinese for what they are the Iranian agreement is bad, he understands that he understands the threat we face from ISIL and he understands we can’t let the North Koreans build a ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] to attack our homeland,” Graham said. ”When it comes to Russia, he seems to have a blind spot. And I’m completely perplexed, because the Russians are undermining democracy throughout the entire world they’re taking land owned by others by force they did hack into our political system they’re doing it to other political systems, and they need to pay a price.” Vice   Mike Pence seemed to reinforce Trump’s effort to undermine confidence in the intelligence community. During a press briefing with House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday, Pence referenced Trump’s upcoming briefing with the intelligence community. ”We’ll be looking at the facts and the information,” Pence said. ”But I think, given some of the intelligence failures of recent years, the   has made it clear to the American people that he’s skeptical about conclusions from the bureaucracy, and I think the American people hear him loud and clear.” But Trump has gone beyond skepticism. He has sided openly with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, a fugitive from justice and someone most Republicans consider an enemy of the state. Ryan, the highest ranking Republican on Capitol Hill, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he didn’t share Trump’s approval of Assange. ”I think the guy is a sycophant for Russia,” Ryan said. ”He leaks he steals data and compromises national security.” According to Molly McKew  —   an expert on information warfare and a   consultant who has advised the governments of Georgia and Moldova  —   the   community can’t quite figure out Trump’s unwavering devotion to the Russian line. But theories abound. ”I think the discussion in the region and intelligence services that deal with Russia,” McKew said, ”is that his behavior looks like someone who may be compromised or may be concerned about something and nobody knows what that is  —   if it’s financial ties or financial leverage, if it’s something more than that. I don’t know. I think there’s a lot of different things. I think there probably are   relationships with Russians and Russian oligarchs that we don’t understand, that we don’t see.” Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, a Trump supporter and a harsh critic of Putin, argues, though, that people should give Donald Trump a chance. ”I don’t think the rubber has met the road on this yet,” said Bolton, who is reportedly under consideration for a job in Trump’s State Department. ”It’s one thing to exchange niceties and compliments before a president actually takes office. It’s another when you confront concrete Russian behavior. That’s the real test.” Bolton said the   will draw his conclusions once he receives his full briefing by the intelligence community Friday. What those conclusions will be will send an important signal to Republicans on Capitol Hill, and to the Russians, who, McKew said, are also unsure about the new disruptive  . ”I think they’re as nervous about Trump as the rest of us,” she said. ”And I think that’s potentially a very big opportunity for Trump if he chooses to use it. I don’t know what happened in the election. I don’t know what his relationship with Russian financial interests or others are. None of us know any of that. What we do know is he will be the American president very soon. And if he wants to operate as a man defending our country’s interests, he needs to have a smart, aggressive Russia policy that limits what Russia is doing to us and exposes what that is.” That’s why the Friday private briefing for Trump is so important. His reaction to what he hears will be the first clue about whether the new president wants to stand up to Putin when he works against the interests of the United States."
107,"For a revolutionary, Deepali Vishwakarma is more quiet and reflective than you might expect. She’s in her 30s, small, with a round face that holds intense brown eyes and a shy grin. Vishwakarma is a lay counselor in the state of Madhya Pradesh, India  —   a   community member who goes out daily to fight what novelist William Styron once called a ”howling tempest in the brain.” She’s part of an effort by the Indian nonprofit group Sangath to provide mental health treatment to poor people in India and to show that people with much less training than a psychiatrist or psychologist can deliver effective care. Vishwakarma had 40 hours of training for her role as a counselor. So her counseling is definitely revolutionary. And some mental health observers wonder if it might work in the U. S. But it’s a controversial approach. Critics say the use of lay counselors means that patients receive substandard care. Tell that to Vishwakarma. In a typical week, she may meet with 25 people, and in her several years as a counselor, patients who’ve stuck with her, as most have, have done well. The patients have been diagnosed with serious depression (or stress or tension, as it’s more often called in India) or alcoholism, and every so often, someone with schizophrenia. She’s been trained to listen and to assign specific tasks to her patients. She might tell someone who’s feeling really low to go for a daily walk, or go out and play soccer, or work in the garden or listen to the radio. For depression, it means thinking about anything other than that paralyzing howling tempest. For schizophrenia, it means helping people, many of whom are on medication, adjust to living in society. Vishwakarma’s biggest challenge is educating her patients. Worldwide, most people with depression don’t seek help, and Deepali’s patients are no different. ”The people don’t know they have depression because they don’t understand what depression is,” she says. ”They come in seeking help for not sleeping, not eating. We tell them no, when we cure your mental issues the symptoms go away. Then they accept treatment.” To run this program, Sangath  —   that’s a Konkani word that means support or partnership  —   gets funding from the Wellcome Trust and other donors, And it’s not the only health care group trying this experiment. Several other countries, including Ethiopia, Nepal, South Africa and Uganda, are working on the lay counselor approach as well. Thirty or 40 years ago, the U. S. was, too. Lay counselors were going to be the next big thing for depression treatment. There were lots of pilot programs, and medical journals carried the results of research trials. Most of the old research showed that lay counselors were just as effective for depression as counselors with lots more education  —   sometimes even more effective. A 1979 review paper in Psychological Bulletin analyzed 42 papers and concluded   paraprofessionals got results ”equal to or significantly better than those obtained by professionals.” In a 1985 rebuttal in the same journal, the best the opponents could come up with was that professionals did just as well, but not better. In India, the establishment of lay counselors was pioneered by psychiatrist Vikram Patel and colleagues at Sangath. The idea sprang from something Patel saw in Zimbabwe, where he worked as a psychiatrist in the  . Community members were being trained to give care to people with AIDS. Patel figured that maybe the same approach could be used for people with mental illness. Years into the project, someone at Sangath came across the U. S. research and told Patel about it. ”It completely blew my mind,” says Patel. ”There was an entire research enterprise.” At first, Patel and his colleagues thought they were starting from scratch. They ran focus groups to gauge community acceptance and conducted small trials and then larger trials comparing lay counselors to ”enhanced traditional care”  —   basically, diagnosis by a doctor or health worker at a primary health center, medication if necessary, and sympathy from the staff, but not ongoing counseling. ”I was very happy to get the first set of results,” Patel says. And the results got better and better. The medical journal Lancet has just published  two large studies that confirm earlier research showing that lay counseling works and is  . Lay counselors get paid on par with staff workers at charitable institutions  —   a little lower than they might get in private industry. Psychiatrists or psychologists periodically review the charts the counselors are taught to fill out, and check in on the patients. Patel recalls being criticized at international meetings for advocating for substandard care. His standard reply: ”We need to wake up.” Lay counselors are effective, he says, and they address the lack of mental health workers that is so common in poor parts of the world. But Derek Summerfield, a psychiatrist with the National Health Service who has published papers on violence and mental health, says that the symptoms displayed by the patients  —   like anxiety and unhappiness  —   are the result of poverty and cultural differences, not depression. In a debate with Patel at McGill University, he said ”these are people who are struggling to find lunch for their children.” Patel’s response is that poor people can get depression just as rich people do, and they’re just as deserving of attention. Lay counseling could not work, says Patel, without people like Vishwakarma. The lay counselors come from the same community as their patients. They speak the same dialect, and they identify with their patients. The counselors start with at least a 10th grade education. Vishwakarma had been an ASHA, an accredited social worker. But she says she didn’t know anything about depression or schizophrenia before going to intensive   training. Today, Patel says, the challenges are figuring out how to scale up the program, which is currently funded by the Wellcome Trust and other donors, and how to make sure that a   program will produce adequately trained counselors. ”We’re no longer asking can we use community workers, we’re asking how do we deploy them,” says Patel. Right now community counselors are available in two states in India, and more are likely to come online soon. The Indian Parliament is considering a plan that promises mental health care for all, using primary health clinics  —   and lay counselors. That’s not the case in the U. S. What happened after that flurry of papers, says Patel, was that ”suddenly the trail goes dry, and from the 1970s onward the literature dries up.” Patel’s suspicion is that the professional community was threatened by the use of paraprofessionals with comparatively light training. He’s been careful in his work in India to avoid competing with psychiatrists and psychologists. Instead they do the initial diagnosis and help with the training program. The medical officer at Vishwakarma’s clinic says he very much appreciates the support of the lay counselors. ”Before, we couldn’t treat these patients,” says Dr. Wilfred Mirand. ”After the patients were successfully treated I became confident.” The approach has American proponents such as Alan Kazdin, former head of the American Psychological Association. ”Seventy percent of the people in this country who need psychiatric services receive nothing,” he says. That number comes from several studies, including two published in the Annual Review of Public Health and JAMA Internal Medicine. ”The truth is that today, we are not treating everyone in need, and we cannot do so if we insist on    therapy, at a clinic, with a mental health professional.” Kazdin is an expert on parenting but has been interested in lay counselors as a way of expanding access to care for years. So why no change? ”There’s no incentive,” says Kazdin. ”The individuals who suffer from mental illness are not the best lobbyists, and there’s no industry behind this.” Terry Wilson, a psychology professor at Rutgers University, says it’s always challenging to introduce a culture shift. ”The problem is professionals here are concerned or worried that lay counselors are not going to be able to provide the expert level of care that they’d want.” But he thinks lay counselors could catch on here. ”Change takes time,” he cautions. Meanwhile, Vishwakarma soldiers on. Recently she took me to visit one of her patients, a woman who wasn’t sleeping or eating well. The woman had suddenly felt a sense of loss that she thought would somehow kill her. Vishwakarma gave her homework. Every day pick a number from one to 10 that indicates her mood and write that number down. Read her ”smile cards”  —   yellow cards with positive sayings. Take time to sing and listen to music. Sometimes her patient picks devotional songs sometimes she opts for Bollywood tunes. Without Vishwakarma, the woman says, ”I would have only worsened.” The patient is still worried about finding money for school fees for her three young children. But she has found ways to cope with her worries. To show me, she takes out her cellphone and plays a devotional song. With her    daughter at her side, she looks at Vishwakarma, hums along softly with the tune and smiles. Reporting for this story was supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting."
108,"  Donald Trump sat for a deposition on Thursday in a civil lawsuit related to his hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, D. C. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed to NPR via email. Even as Trump prepares to assume the presidency, he continues to have entanglements related to his   business dealings. A source close to the case confirms the videotaped deposition took place at Trump Tower in New York and lasted 90 minutes. The $10 million civil lawsuit, for breach of contract, was filed by Trump’s lawyers in August 2015 against celebrity chef José Andrés’ restaurant group, Think Food Group. Andrés pulled out of a plan to open an upscale restaurant at the hotel after   Trump disparaged Mexican immigrants. Think Food Group also countersued for $8 million. In countersuing, the restaurant group argued that Trump’s comments were hurting business: ”The perception that Mr. Trump’s statements were   made it very difficult to recruit appropriate staff for a Hispanic restaurant, to attract the requisite number of Hispanic food patrons for a profitable enterprise, and to raise capital for what was now an extraordinarily risky Spanish restaurant.” Trump’s lawyers had tried to avoid the deposition, arguing the   was ”extremely busy handling matters of very significant public importance.” But last week the judge in the case ordered Trump to sit for the deposition before the end of this week. While the civil case has dragged on for months, as recently as Thursday morning Andrés tweeted an offer to Trump for a way to settle the dispute. A number of lawsuits involving Trump and his businesses remain outstanding and are unlikely to be resolved before he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. That could mean having a president in office who is subject to ongoing litigation, a potential major distraction for the leader of the free world. There is a pretrial hearing scheduled for May 17 in a case against another celebrity chef, Geoffrey Zakarian, who pulled out of a restaurant project in the Old Post Office as well. Andrés endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton during the campaign and called on Trump to apologize to Mexicans and every ”person he has insulted.” Zakarian told the Village Voice in November that he nixed the project ”because my buddy Donald, he f***** up. He opened his f****** mouth.” NPR’s Peter Overby wrote in more detail about both cases late last year. Despite Trump’s boasts that he does not settle lawsuits, he has settled several, including a   fraud case against Trump University for $25 million. There’s also a question as to whether Trump can hold the lease on the Old Post Office building once he becomes president. He doesn’t own the building but is leasing it from the federal government. The agreement contains a clause that could prove problematic for Trump: ”No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”"
109,"  Donald Trump has suggested he may give his daughter and    some roles in his new administration, but a 1967   law makes doing so a lot more complicated. The law bars presidents from hiring relatives to Cabinet or agency jobs, although a federal judge has ruled that it doesn’t apply to White House staff jobs. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have played key roles in Trump’s campaign and his transition team and reportedly are preparing to move to a house in the Kalorama section of Washington, D. C. Either or both of them are also said to be considering some sort of White House job, perhaps in an informal or unpaid role. The   law was passed by Congress in response to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to appoint his brother Robert as attorney general, says Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. ”It was very controversial at the time. Lyndon Johnson in particular did not like that, and when he became president he helped shepherd this   law through the U. S. Congress,” West says. Not many presidents have sought to hire relatives since then, so the law hasn’t often been tested. But when President Bill Clinton appointed his wife, first lady Hillary Clinton, to head his health care task force, the move was challenged in court. A federal judge ruled that the law didn’t apply to White House staff jobs, making the appointment legal. The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment from NPR, but spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway cited that ruling when she was asked whether Trump would hire his children during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last month. ”The   law apparently has an exception if you want to work in the West Wing, because the president is able to appoint his own staff,” Conway said. ”The president does have discretion to choose a staff of his liking.” But just because it might be legal for Trump to hire his own children doesn’t mean it’s good politics, West says. West warned that it could spark a public backlash, much as Kennedy’s appointment of his brother did. ”People might accept the fact that it was legal, but they would not necessarily view it as ethical or wise,” West says. Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, notes that the   statute was one of a series of laws passed in the 1960s and ’70s, at a time of growing mistrust of the presidency. ”We shouldn’t forget why we have these [laws]. It was to try to purify the presidency to a certain respect, or to create more accountability in the people that they appoint,” he says. Americans need to know that presidents are not listening to people just because they’re related to them but because they’re the best people they can find, Zelizer says. Moreover, it can be hard for other staff members to say no to a president’s relatives, Zelizer says. ”And so you create an environment where people might be less willing to take on and challenge someone because they’re related to the president,” he says. Hiring the Trump children would also be complicated because they have played big roles in the Trump family businesses, he adds. ”If you load up the White House with family members, all of whom are working for this business, that problem will certainly not look good to many Americans. And the politics are as important as the law in this issue. How things look, how things appear matter very much,” Zelizer says. For Ivanka Trump and her husband, taking jobs in the White House would also come at some financial cost. Unlike Trump himself, they would almost certainly be subject to federal    laws, which would bar them from participating in decisions that would affect their financial interests. That could force them to divest themselves of some of their assets."
110,"Just before dawn Thursday, at Tokyo’s historic Tsukiji market, a familiar face walked away with the biggest fish in town. Kiyoshi Kimura won the first auction of the year at the market, just as he has for six years running. And to the winner go the spoils: a   Pacific bluefin tuna, which ultimately cost Kimura 74. 2 million yen  —   or about $632, 000. That comes out to more than $1, 300 a pound for Kimura, whose Kimura Corp. owns a restaurant chain called Sushi Zanmai. Still, it’s not the record for the seafood market’s annual first bluefin auction. That distinction also belongs to Kimura, who in 2013 bid a staggering 155. 4 million yen  —   which at that time came out to $1. 76 million. Every year, worldwide media hype attends the year’s opening auction at Tsukiji, which ”handled more than $4 billion in fish and produce in 2014” alone, according to The Wall Street Journal. NBC reports that it is the world’s biggest fish market. But conservation groups protest that attention should be paid to a different, and much darker, reality confronting Pacific bluefin tuna: the species’ dwindling population. ”People should be thinking about that when they see news about the auction,” Jamie Gibbon, officer for global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, tells the Guardian. In July, Pew called for a   moratorium on commercial fishing of Pacific bluefin tuna, citing a more than 97 percent drop in population from historic levels. The month before, about a dozen environmental groups petitioned the U. S. National Marine Fisheries Service to list the species as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Conservationists argue part of the problem is that when fisheries catch Pacific bluefin tuna, they’re mostly catching juveniles who have not yet reached the age of reproduction. That practice has always been around, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, but ”more fisheries specifically targeting juveniles started in the 1990s, increasing pressure on the juvenile population.” And even if the species gets an endangered listing in the U. S. as conservationists would wish, it’s not likely to make much of an impact on the species’ population worldwide. That’s because American fishermen don’t comprise a large portion of Pacific bluefin fishing worldwide, as Alistair Bland reported for NPR: ”Of the 37 million pounds of Pacific bluefin caught by fishermen in 2014, American fishermen caught just 2 percent, according to data provided by Michael Milstein, a public affairs officer with NOAA Fisheries. (Japan took about half and Mexico almost 30 percent. )” The Guardian estimates that Japan consumes 80 percent of the global bluefin catch. For now, the only major change looming for the Tokyo market’s annual New Year auction is its location: The city had planned to move the historic market to a new location to make way for a highway planned for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics  —   but the market was granted a reprieve when concerns were raised about soil contamination at the new site, which used to be home to a gas plant. The Tokyo government expects to have a clearer idea on the safety of the new site this year."
111,"Last year, NPR’s Ari Shapiro visited Toledo, Ohio, to talk to refugees settling there from Syria’s civil war. Recently, he returned to Toledo to check in on the community. Mohammed Al Refaai is a    butcher who fled Syria. He lives in Toledo, Ohio, with three other guys, who are also in their 20s, who decided they wouldn’t mind having a refugee for a roommate. In the year and a half since he moved in, he has learned English from the Americans including the lyrics to some Top 40 hits. In return, he taught them some of his favorite Arabic pop tunes. They generally avoid talking about more difficult things. But his roommates  —   Doug Walton, Andrew Trumbull and Johnny Zellers  —   made an exception during our recent visit to Toledo. While Refaai was at work, they talked about politics and whether he will ever be reunited with his family. ”Moh,” as they call him, won’t really talk about these things, Walton says. ”This is by far the most depth we’ve ever gone into it, and if Moh was here, we probably wouldn’t, because he doesn’t like the topic,” Walton says. Refaai’s story is atypical. He was the only one of his family allowed into the United States as a refugee. His siblings and parents are still in Jordan, waiting for approvals. They’ve been there since the family fled Syria in 2011. Refaai is now trying to get a Green Card so if they can’t come to the U. S. he can at least go visit them. The recent presidential election hit especially  —   and literally  —   close to home, Zellers says. ”We actually got a flier from Trump, and it had . .. three big issues,” he says. ”The third one was ’Stop the influx of dangerous refugees from Syria’  —   as . .. the biggest bullet point. I was like, ’No, we want more of ’em. . .. We have one, I have one in my house right now. . .. I can go say hi to him!’ ” The guys in this house lean conservative. They all take their Christian faith seriously. None of them voted for Trump it was a mix of Clinton and   votes. They didn’t even know who voted for whom until we all started talking about it. ”It is weird to have a vote in a situation that felt like we were voting for people who were helpless. Usually we vote on jobs or whatever, and so for me, I’m like, that’s not a big deal. I find a job. I’ll make things work, whoever gets elected  —   they’re not going to change things that drastically,” Trumbull says. The guys don’t own a TV, so on election night, they all went into Walton’s room and huddled around their phones with Refaai to watch the results come in. ”So we were all kind of together just like kind of hugging him and just kind of watching it all go down,” Walton says. ”He definitely kind of got sad a little bit just thinking of like, OK, maybe his family may not be able to like ever come here,” Zellers says. ”That’s like the biggest hope that he’s had like this past year. . .. Now Trump elected it’s like, oh, those chances go down like a lot.” An ”unusual” situation, Refaii is a butcher at a new Middle Eastern supermarket and restaurant in Toledo. When we met him a little over a year ago, he barely spoke any English. He had learned the terms that a butcher uses every day  —   chicken legs, chicken breast, steak, lamb  —   and that was about it. Today he looks confident. He doesn’t use an interpreter when he talks to us. He video chats with his family in Jordan about once a week. He shows them the snow on the ground in Ohio, and they tell him how proud they are that he’s learning English and working. ”I like it they come here, but I don’t know how. I need they be safe and close to me, my family, but I can’t do anything,” he says. ”I feel bad for they not with me, but I can’t do anything for help him.” We asked the State Department about Refaai’s situation. Just like a year ago, they told us they don’t comment on specific cases. But veterans of refugee work say his situation is not normal. ”This situation you’ve described is very unusual,” says Eric Schwartz, who ran the State Department’s refugee resettlement program earlier in the Obama administration. He’s now a dean at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He says once you’re over 21 like Refaai, your case is considered on its own. But even then, grown children are rarely separated from their parents and siblings. ”And it would be very unusual for them not to be departing and coming to the United States together,” he says. It might have just been an oversight. Schwartz says an immigration lawyer might be able to sort out what happened  —   but Refaai and his family don’t have one. [Editor’s note on Jan. 9: After this story was broadcast and published, Schwartz contacted NPR to note that hiring a lawyer is not required and that   refugee advocacy organizations often make case inquiries with the Department of State at no cost to the refugees themselves.] ”This is a program that involves so many tens of thousands of individuals that sometimes mistakes or problems do arise, and the way they get fixed is somebody asks about them and somebody presses them,” he says. Refaai fears that his window is closing as the days tick down to Trump’s inauguration. The office that issues Green Cards has told him to stop calling, and that has changed the way the other guys in this house think about their future. ”Before it’s just like ’Oh, Moh is here, his family will come and then I’m like, well, I’ll move on with our lives  —   we’ll all move away or get different jobs or, I don’t know, and then Moh will have his family. But now it’s like his family may never come,” Zellers says. Walton says Refaai won’t talk about that. ”He doesn’t even want to acknowledge that could happen because thinking about this family being broken up, that like leaves him lost in a sea in a way,” Walton says. ”But we don’t know what’s going to happen. So I don’t know what’s going to be asked of me as his brother, but I guess I’m just more aware that he may have more need for support than even he does now.”"
112,"Unexplained, short radio bursts from outer space have puzzled scientists since they were first detected nearly a decade ago. The elusive flashes  —   known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs  —   are extremely powerful and last only a few milliseconds. The way their frequencies are dispersed suggests they traveled from far outside our galaxy. About 18 have been detected to date. They’ve been called the ”most perplexing mystery in astronomy.” Scientists are still grappling with why these bursts happen. But researchers have now pinpointed the source of one series of the FRBs  —   to a dwarf galaxy billions of   away from Earth. And locating the source of the mystery bursts could hold clues to what is causing them, according to Shami Chatterjee, an astrophysicist at Cornell University. He’s the lead author in a paper recently published in Nature. Let’s talk quickly about one burning question: Could the source be aliens? Probably not, Chatterjee tells The  . ”Never say never, but we don’t think so. We can view this with physics that we know and understand.”   explanations involve a neutron star or an active galactic nucleus, though there are a slew of possibilities, he says. The story of this particular burst, called FRB 121102, took a wild turn when scientists found that its signal repeated. This immediately eliminated a number of theories about why it was happening  —   for example, it couldn’t be two neutron stars colliding. ”Because we know right away that it can’t be explosive. Whatever it is, has to survive this radio flash,” Chatterjee adds. The equipment used to detect FRBs is able to see only a tiny patch of the sky at any moment. The discovery that FRB 121102 repeated suggested that it was a good direction to point the detection equipment. ”If you go fishing in this spot in the sky, you might be more likely to get lucky than in other random spots in the sky,” Chatterjee says. In 2015, the team began using an interferometer  —   in this case, a network of 27 radio dishes called the Very Large Array that’s in New Mexico  —   which is capable of much higher resolution detection than other readings. ”It was a pretty intensive observational and computational challenge,” Chatterjee says. The interferometer captured data at 200 frames per second from this patch of sky, he says, resulting in a terabyte of data every hour that put a major strain on archival and computational resources. During the first 10 hours of recording this sliver of sky, they found nothing. They recorded 40 more hours  —   again, no bursts. Frustrated, the team also enlisted the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. This time, they got lucky. They captured nine radio images of bursts, allowing them to ”pin it down to an absolutely tiny patch of the sky” for the first time. In that patch of the constellation Auriga lies a dwarf galaxy a fraction of the size of our own, Chatterjee says, some 2. 5 to 3 billion   away. It’s worth noting that the sheer distance of the flashes’ origin makes ”catching it in the act” very relative, since the event that caused it happened billions of years ago. So what was that event? Chatterjee says there are many theories. It could be originating from an active galactic nucleus, which emits FRBs as blobs of plasma drift into its jets and are vaporized. Or it could be originating from a newborn magnetar  —   a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field  —   that is ”emitting these giant pulses as it spins.” It also could be the interaction between a magnetar and a black hole, or many other possibilities, he adds. A crucial question now, Chatterjee says, is whether all FRBs repeat like this one, or whether there are types that don’t repeat. ”They’re probably the same thing and we haven’t been lucky enough to observe the other ones repeating,” he says. ”But if not, hey, great, nature’s given us two fantastic mysteries instead of one fantastic mystery.”"
113,"There’s a new narrative solidifying in Washington:   Donald Trump distrusts the U. S. intelligence community because it’s been sounding the alarm on Russia’s interference in the November election. In turn, this feeds a growing sense of dread among U. S. intelligence professionals that the   and his inner circle will ignore or undermine the intelligence community at every opportunity. The intelligence community certainly has reason to be concerned. Trump’s goal to slash and restructure the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence was reported by the Wall Street Journal Wednesday, the same day the   raised doubts about U. S. intelligence in a tweet citing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. A day earlier, Trump elicited alarm after he tweeted disparagingly about a classified briefing he is due to receive this week. But it’s doubtful there will be a major conflagration between the president and the national security bureaucracy during the Trump administration. The intelligence community is likely to back down from a major conflict with its boss, the president, and its overseers, Congress  —   because the disincentives to upset one’s superiors are so numerous and ingrained. This is not the first time the intelligence community in general, or the CIA in particular, has faced scorn  —   or worse  —   from a president or  . Richard Nixon famously disliked the CIA and was skeptical of its analysis. Nixon once told his Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, ”Get rid of the clowns. What use are they? They’ve got 40, 000 people over there reading newspapers.” Within three months, Schlesinger pushed out 10 percent of the workforce. Following the   Church Committee investigation of the CIA for spying on   War activists, President Jimmy Carter’s fellow U. S. Naval Academy classmate, Adm. Stansfield Turner, dismissed hundreds of agency employees in a mass firing dubbed the ”Halloween Massacre” of 1979. (Turner later reflected in his memoir, ”In retrospect, I probably should not have effected the reductions of 820 positions at all, and certainly not the last 17. ”) Yet the agency survived to fight another day. The intelligence community has traditionally served as a convenient scapegoat when policymakers’ decisions go south. There’s an old saw in Washington: In this town, there are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure. We think of the Iraq WMD debacle primarily as an intelligence failure. And Trump’s communications staff certainly thinks so, as it resurrected the issue to dismiss a Dec. 9 Washington Post report that the CIA had assessed that Russia was trying to help Trump win the White House. ”These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” the Trump statement said. But remember, it was a policymaker’s decision to actually go to war in Iraq. So the intelligence community has played this role of whipping boy before and will very likely continue to play it in the Trump administration. And there probably won’t be a showdown. People will grumble, but will go back to work. Most intelligence collection and analysis is a job as potentially interesting or humdrum as anyone else’s. Despite the classified nature of the ”industry,” people still collect data, type on computers, fill out forms and try to make sense of the world around them. One can often forget that the intelligence community is made up of professionals who lead regular lives. Sure, they hold   clearances, but they have mortgages and car payments, lawns to mow, children to take care of, vacations to plan. They are civil servants with a secure,   American lifestyle that would be jeopardized if they quit their jobs. That said, there may be some who could try to undermine Trump by leaking embarrassing documents and committing criminal acts in the process. Certainly in an industry where millions of people hold security clearances, there will be some who could try unilaterally to take action (how’s January in Russia, Edward Snowden?) to effect change or cause disruption. A few people might also just quit in protest. But those willing to do this to stick it to the president are few and far between. Most people will not throw away their life’s work. Still, there’s a large exception that may arise if the president asks the intelligence community to do something that is   illegal and immoral  —   say, commit obvious war crimes. On the campaign trail, Trump claimed that ”torture works” and said he favored tactics like killing the families of terrorists. He later appeared to   on torture after discussing it with his defense secretary nominee, Gen. James Mattis. But if he changed his mind again, it would, of course, be members of the military or the intelligence community who would carry out these deeds. And in such a case, all bets are off. Treat the intelligence community badly  —   well, that’s par for the course. But if the events of the last 15 years have taught this generation of intelligence professionals anything, it’s that one’s sacred honor might be sacrificed for reasons beyond one’s control. Assuming there is no   conflagration between the new president and the intelligence community, a slow degrading of our intelligence capacity during a time of unprecedented global challenges may be a more likely  —   and worse  —     outcome. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, recently noted that right now, America is ”facing the most complex and diverse array of global threats that I’ve seen in my 53 years or so in the intel business.” Perhaps otherwise motivated intelligence officers with specialized skills will redirect their energies into other careers if they disagree with the direction of a Trump administration. The CIA publicly acknowledged in 2015 that it continues to struggle, despite numerous years of trying, to recruit and retain minority officers. If there’s, say, real   or   sentiment sweeping through the intelligence community because of the words and deeds of senior leadership, talented people will vote with their feet, ultimately damaging our   national security. So does this all end with a bang or a whimper? Or not at all? Clapper is confident, because of the intelligence community’s mission and professionalism, that it will be a ”pillar of stability” during the presidential transition. We’ll find out when the first national security crisis occurs under Trump’s watch. And if the past is any indication, a crisis (or two or three) will explode soon after he takes the oath of office. Aki Peritz is a former CIA analyst and   of Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda.  Follow him on Twitter @AkiPeritz"
114,"  Donald Trump continues to dispute the consensus of U. S. intelligence agencies that Russia used computer hacking to interfere in the 2016 elections. He does so even though other Republican leaders and analysts perceive a serious cyberattack that demands retaliation. If he persists in this posture, Trump may wish to rely on the precedent of previous presidents who entered the White House at odds with their own parties over a major issue in foreign relations. But can he find one? That’s a tough question. In recent decades, presidents have come to the Oval Office in something very much like lockstep with their parties regarding relations with Russia and other familiar adversaries. Presidents whose parties had their backs, Ronald Reagan, the predecessor Trump likes to cite as a model, came to office largely on a vow to get tough with Russia  —   then still the Soviet Union and making aggressive moves on several fronts (1981). In this stance, Reagan had the overwhelming support of his own party and from many Democrats as well. In fact, Reagan’s predecessor, Democrat Jimmy Carter, had canceled U. S. participation in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, in 1989 continued the pressure on the Soviets and was in office to see that regime replaced by a semblance of democracy in Russia. His term included the fall of the Berlin Wall and other symbols of what was long called ”the Red Menace.” The first President Bush did go to war, however, after Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait in 1990. But he had the backing of Congress, including nearly all of his own party and many Democrats as well. Foreign policy was not a big priority for President Bill Clinton, either as a candidate in 1992 or as a   president, but he had the backing of his Democratic troops when issues did arise, including the brief Kosovo War in the Balkans in 1999. George W. Bush took the oath in 2001 at a time when foreign policy was on a back burner in Washington. The terror attacks of that September changed all that, and Bush had the backing of both his own Republicans and most Democrats in sending troops to attack   in Afghanistan. Republicans were also strongly behind Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, as were some (but by no means all) Democrats. After those wars had become quagmires, Barack Obama arrived in 2009 with a promise to recalibrate the ”War on Terror,” especially by winding down the U. S. presence in Iraq. His party was very much on board for this, although some differences on the details emerged over time. His desire for a ”reset” with Russia reflected the desire of Democrats generally to lessen global tensions and concentrate on domestic issues. A common enemy, Finding a precedent for Trump’s party schism does not get any easier looking at the decades right after World War II. Although the Soviets were a major U. S. ally in that conflict, tensions began immediately over the postwar map of Europe and the Soviets’ intensive covert campaign to steal secrets for a nuclear weapon. The tensions came to be known as the Cold War, and extended soon to the Communist regime that took over China in the late 1940s. In the presidential politics of the Cold War era, candidates in both major parties vied to be the most outspoken in their  . Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952 vowing to ”go to Korea” to meet and defeat communist aggression there his former running mate Richard Nixon won in 1968 while uniting his party around his ”secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. Both had solid backing from Republicans across the board. Democrat John F. Kennedy rallied his partisans in 1960 to close ”the missile gap” he said we had with the Soviets, and his former vice president, Lyndon Johnson, campaigned on his determination to stop communism in Southeast Asia in 1964 (after Congress, dominated by Democrats, gave him carte blanche to do so). Returning to the era between the first and second world wars, it is difficult to find much daylight between a newly elected president and his party on a foreign policy issue. Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover had few real disagreements with their Republican backers. Like them, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected with a unified party preoccupied with the economy and social issues. In fact, if you plow your way through the rest of American history, you will be   to find presidents preparing their first inaugural addresses while engaging in a highly public dispute with their own party over the behavior of a foreign adversary. As a rule, international affairs have mattered to a new president when a foreign threat  —   real or perceived  —   has united that president’s party in support. No one expects a   to agree with his own party’s leaders on every issue. It would be especially surprising if that were the case with Trump, who entered the contest for the Republican nomination as an outsider and conducted his campaign largely on personal terms. Nonetheless, Trump and the GOP adapted to each other with notable success in the endgame of the 2016. Former rivals such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and leaders who had refused to stump with Trump (including Ryan) expressed their intention to vote for him. In the end, even most of the GOP voters who had reservations about Trump came home on Election Day and voted a party ticket. They did it knowing there would be disagreements down the road. But they might not have expected them to come before the new president had even been sworn in."
115,"The halls of the Kiambu County Hospital just outside Nairobi are empty. This is normally a bustling place but on Thursday entire wings are closed. Only in the emergency room are there a scattering of patients. Moms with babies sit languidly on metal chairs. Men with broken bones and some with serious injuries are just hoping to be treated. But they probably won’t be seen by doctors. A doctor’s strike that began last month in Kenya has now entered its second month. Physicians at public hospitals want more money and better medical equipment, but the government says it can’t afford to meet their demands. The strike has left millions of Kenyans without proper health care and has also overwhelmed some of the country’s private hospitals. The nurses at the public hospitals are not on strike, so they’re doing whatever they can. They’re the ones running the ER. But a patient who needs complicated care and can’t afford a private hospital is out of luck. The only doctor I found at the Kiambu hospital is David Kariuki, who is on strike but showed up to perform his administrative duties. ”The current strike is about better working conditions for doctors, especially those within the public health sector,” he said. A doctor right out of school in Kenya makes about $10, 000 a year in the public health system. To earn more money, many of them are lured abroad or into the private hospitals that many Kenyans can’t afford. That means, Kariuki said, that ”the public health care system continues to be strained, because you have fewer doctors to see a growing population, so everyone would get overworked” and more stressed out. And it’s not like there were a lot of doctors on duty before the strike: 5, 000 physicians in the public sector serve a population of nearly 50 million. In the emergency room, I find Masa Mawili, who came to the hospital because of his foot. It was so swollen that it hardly fit in his sandal, and the swelling extended all the way to his calf. He doesn’t know what caused the swelling. He said he had already seen the nurses but they couldn’t tell him what was wrong with his foot. So he sat and waited hours in the hope that a doctor would show up  —   some of them have been working despite the strike. On Wednesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta met with the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union for hours. Late at night, his government put out an offer: Some doctors would get a more than 100 percent raise, others significantly less. The doctors are supposed to respond by Friday, but they seem determined to hold out for the 300 percent raise that the government agreed to in a 2013 collective bargaining agreement but has since walked away from. But it’s not just about the money. ”The CBA [collective bargaining agreement] once signed will make sure more doctors are trained to improve on service delivery,” the union tweeted. At the hospital I visited, some patients sided with the doctors but others took the government’s side. Paul Kagiri, whose   son was given the OK to go to college after a physical at the hospital, said that what the doctors are asking for is ”very, very, very high.” The government can’t afford to pay them. And there are reports of people who sought help at public hospitals and ended up dying. Right now, he said, it’s time to think about the wanjiku  —   the ordinary people. ”Only the wanjiku right now is suffering a lot,” Kagiri said. ”And instead of wanjiku suffering why [don’t the doctors give back to the public?”"
116,"The vaquita is a small porpoise found only in the northern Gulf of California, in Mexico. Today, the species is critically endangered, with less than 60 animals left in the wild, thanks to fishing nets to catch fish and shrimp for sale in Mexico and America. The animal is an accidental victim of the fishing industry, as are many other marine mammals. But a new rule that takes effect this week seeks to protect marine mammals from becoming bycatch. The rule requires foreign fisheries exporting seafood to the U. S. to ensure that they don’t hurt or kill marine mammals.  If U. S. authorities determine that a certain foreign fishery is harming these mammals, the fishery will be required to take stock of the marine mammal populations in places where they fish, and find ways to reduce their bycatch. That could involve not fishing in areas with high numbers of marine mammals. Fisheries will also have to report cases when they do end up hurting mammals. This is what American fisheries are already required to do under the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). Up to 90 percent of seafood eaten in the U. S. is imported, most of it shrimp, freshwater fish, tuna, and salmon. The goal of the new rule is to ensure that seafood coming into the country didn’t harm or kill marine mammals. But can this new rule protect the vaquita? Zak Smith, a senior attorney with the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, thinks so. The vaquita is kind of a poster child for what happens when you don’t have this law in place,” he says. To understand the potential impact of the rule, Smith says, we should consider the laws that saved dolphins from tuna fisheries. For decades, dolphins  —   which swim with schools of tuna  —   were accidentally (and sometimes deliberately) killed by tuna fisheries. According to NOAA, over six million dolphins have been killed since the beginning of tuna fishery. Enacted in 1972, the MMPA required tuna fisheries to take measures to stop harming dolphins. Then, in the 1980s, the act was amended to ban the import of tuna from foreign fisheries that harmed dolphins. In 1990, the U. S. passed another legislation  —   the Dolphin Protection Consumer Information Act  —   that spelled out requirements for ” ” labeling on all tuna sold in America.  Smith says these laws have helped reduce dolphin deaths. But the new rule goes even further, he says, because it applies to all kinds of seafood and all marine mammals, not just tuna and dolphins. As an American consumer, ”I’ll know that anything I purchase in the U. S. met U. S. standards,” he says. A 2014 analysis from the NRDC estimated that hundreds of thousands of marine mammals are injured or killed every year by fisheries around the world. The U. S. government’s independent Marine Mammal Commission says unintentional encounters with fishing gear represent ”the greatest direct cause of marine mammal injury and death in the United States and around the world.” So the new rule could help protect many marine mammals worldwide, says John Henderschedt, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries Office of International Affairs. He says in some fisheries around the world, fishermen use nets that whales and dolphins easily get caught in. And some fishermen won’t take the time to make sure entangled marine mammals are released safely, he says. He adds that for some fisheries, the new rule will make them take stock of their marine mammal populations, and think about how to protect those animals for the very first time. The new rule is good for American fisheries too, says Ryan Steen, a lawyer representing the Hawaii Longline Association. ”If U. S. fisheries are going to be subject to the standards that are set by the [Marine Mammal Protection Act] then I think it’s only fair that their foreign competitors would also be subject to the same standards if they’re delivering fish into U. S. markets,” he says. ”It’s the fair thing to do and it’s the right thing to do.” But implementing the new rule could be tricky, cautions Linda Fernandez, an environmental economist at Virginia Commonwealth University. For example, the World Trade Organization could object to any bans on imports from a seafood exporter, she says. Fernandez says the push for   tuna holds a good lesson in this. In 1990, the U. S. banned tuna imports from Mexico because Mexican tuna fisheries didn’t meet American standards for protecting dolphins. The decision upset Mexico and it complained to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the predecessor of the World Trade organization. A GATT panel concluded that the U. S. was wrong to embargo Mexico imports simply because it didn’t like the way the tuna was harvested. ”In that case, the U. S. was unfairly treating trade partners based on how . ..they harvested the product,” Fernandez says. What the U. S. could do without violating international trade agreements, was label tuna as either ” ” or not.  It gave seafood exporters an incentive to get a ” ” label, she says. Judging from this history, she says, the WTO will be fine with a labeling system (which the new rule doesn’t require) but it probably won’t be fine with an embargo, which could happen under the new rule. Cost is also a big concern in implementing the rule, according to Lekelia Jenkins, a marine conservation expert at Arizona State University and a former NOAA employee. Jenkins says her number one concern is how much money NOAA will have to enforce it. ”We can write laws as much as we want,” she says. ”It does not mean that there will be appropriations to fund those laws. Rob Williams, a marine conservation fellow at the Pew Charitable Trusts, says the amount of resources that the U. S. invests will determine the effectiveness of the new rule. Some resources, he says, should be used to help other countries implement U. S. conservation measures. He says it took the U. S. 40 years to refine these measures. ”We should be exporting those lessons learned so that other countries don’t have to take 40 years to learn,” he says. Otherwise, he says, ”countries presumably will just find other markets for their seafood.”"
117,"Citing local regulations, Apple has removed The New York Times news app from its app store in China. The incident is the latest in the long history of media restrictions in the country, but also in the ongoing pattern of tech companies getting involved in the efforts. The New York Times reports that Apple removed both its   and   apps from the app store in China on Dec. 23, though other prominent publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times as well as the Times’ crossword puzzle and   apps remain available. Along with other websites, the Times has faced restrictions for years. The site has been subject of blocks since 2012, when the newspaper reported on the wealth amassed by the family of the   minister. Apple did not explain Thursday what distinguished the Times from other outlets. Spokesman Fred Sainz shared a statement: ”For some time now the New York Times app has not been permitted to display content to most users in China and we have been informed that the app is in violation of local regulations. As a result, the app must be taken down off the China App Store. When this situation changes, the App Store will once again offer the New York Times app for download in China.” Sainz did not elaborate on what legal standard was applied to warrant the removal of the news app, but the Times suggested it was under 2016 regulations issued for mobile apps: ”The regulations say apps cannot ’engage in activities prohibited by laws and regulations such as endangering national security, disrupting social order and violating the legitimate rights and interests of others.’ The cyberspace administration says on its website that apps also cannot publish ’prohibited information.” Over the years, numerous publications have faced blackouts in China, including Bloomberg, Time and The Economist. Users in China sometimes use software to circumvent the government’s firewall to surf the Web and access blocked sites. For tech companies, China is a massive, lucrative market and a major manufacturing hub, but operations there are tricky. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have been restricted. Apple’s own iBooks and iTunes Movies were blocked, as well, not long after they were introduced. For Apple, China is a key production location and sales market. But iPhone sales have slumped there in recent years. In May, Apple invested $1 billion in Chinese   app Didi Chuxing. The company has, in the past, removed other media apps from its App Store, but none as prominent as The Times, according to the newspaper. And it’s far from the first time that a tech company cooperated with the Chinese government to suppress content, as the industry generally complies with local regulations around the world. In 2016, The New York Times reported that Facebook quietly developed software that could prevent posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific parts of China, going further than the typical practice by U. S. Internet companies to block certain content after it’s posted. The newspaper also reported, just last month, on ”a hidden bounty of perks, tax breaks and subsidies in China that supports the world’s biggest iPhone factory”  —   billions of dollars’ worth of incentives at the heart of Apple’s phone production. In 2014, the radio program Marketplace reported on LinkedIn censoring posts from its members that were deemed sensitive by China’s government. In 2010, Google altered how users in China could access the site as it faced possible loss of license to operate in the country. Perhaps the most notorious case dates back to early 2000s, when Chinese authorities arrested and imprisoned dissidents, including a Chinese journalist, based on evidence provided by Yahoo. Yahoo settled a lawsuit by the dissidents’ families in 2007. In 2005, Yahoo bought what later became its most valuable asset: a stake in a Chinese   site Alibaba."
118,"A comparison of kid brains and grownup brains may explain why our ability to recognize faces keeps getting better until about age 30. Brain scans of 25 adults and 22 children showed that an area devoted to facial recognition keeps growing long after adolescence, researchers report in the journal Science. The area didn’t acquire more neurons, says Jesse Gomez, a graduate student in neurosciences at Stanford University and the study’s lead author. Instead the brain region became more densely populated with the structures that connect and support neurons. ”You can imagine a   by   garden, and it has some number of flowers in there,” Gomez says. ”The number of flowers isn’t changing, but their stems and branches and leaves are getting more complex.” To see whether that sort of change occurred elsewhere in the brain, the researchers also looked at a nearby area that responds to places, instead of faces. In this area, there was no difference between children and adults. The results suggest that brain development is more varied than researchers once thought. For years, scientists have focused on a process known as synaptic pruning, which shapes the brain by eliminating unused connections among neurons. Most synaptic pruning takes place in the first few years of life. ”After age 3, the textbooks are pretty silent about what’s going on in the brain,” Gomez says. The continuing growth in facial recognition areas may be a response to the need to recognize more and more faces as children grow older, says Kalanit   a professor in the psychology department at Stanford. ”When you’re a young child, you need to recognize your family and a handful of friends,” she says. ”But by the time you’ve reached high school or college your social group has expanded to hundreds or even thousands of people.” And recognizing all those people requires a lot of brain power,   says, because ”all faces have the same features and the same configuration.” Ongoing changes in the brain may also help children focus on different sorts of faces at different stages of development, says Suzy Scherf, an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University. ”Children’s face recognition early on is very much tuned to adult faces,” Scherf says. ”In adolescence it changes to be highly tuned toward adolescent faces.” Understanding how facial recognition develops throughout childhood could make it easier to figure out why some people have difficulty recognizing faces, researchers say. Gomez hopes to scan the brains of people with ”face blindness,” a disorder that can leave a person unable to recognize even familiar faces. And Scherf wants to know whether people with autism, who often struggle to recognize faces, have abnormal development in the facial recognition area of their brains."
119,"Director Damien Chazelle’s La La Land is an unapologetic musical that hearkens back to Hollywood’s glory days of song and dance. The passion and grandeur of the musical numbers might make you believe that Chazelle had always imagined himself working in the genre, but he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that’s not the case. ”It wasn’t until I actually started making experimental films and, ironically, documentaries in college that I think my eyes got   or awakened, to . .. old classic Hollywood musicals,” Chazelle says. ”There was something about them that felt like, ’Oh my God, here is an experimental movie in mainstream packaging.’ ” La La Land is a love story set in the present day, but the influence of old Hollywood and musicals of the past is all around. The film features Emma Stone as an aspiring actress and Ryan Gosling as a jazz pianist, both of whom are struggling to reconcile their showbiz dreams with reality. Chazelle says that the film’s song and dance numbers provide the audience with an insight into the characters that is often missing in film. ”In a weird way, movies are kind of limited by what you see in front of the camera,” he says. ”Musicals find this wonderful way around that, because the songs are . .. an expression of inner feelings that can’t be articulated any other way.” On what musicals do that   can’t, There’s something so brash and defiant and almost   about the idea of just breaking the normal rules of normal reality. Movies have kind of been engineered over the century to somewhat reflect reality usually, even if it’s a fantasy or something. There’s some kind of an assumption that things are going to follow a certain order, and musicals just break that. They break it in the name of emotion. That, I think, was a really powerful, beautiful idea to me, that if you feel enough you break into song. On the film’s opening number, which is set in a freeway traffic jam  We’re on this kind of elevated freeway ramp that’s in utter gridlock and . .. one by one characters start to kind of join in this collective number. The idea was to go from [an] individual car radio . .. and all these individual sounds build in and sort of layer into this one collective song that eventually explodes into   joyful unison singing and dancing before all the drivers return to their cars. The idea was to sort of introduce the world and, I think even more importantly, begin the musical with as   a scene as we could possibly imagine  —   really try to announce our intentions right off the bat with a bang. One thing that I think that has kind of been lost a little bit is the idea of choreographing dance for the camera. That to me was the beautiful thing about old Hollywood musicals from Fred [Astaire] and Ginger [Rogers] through the Gene   Donen pictures, to something like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. . .. There’s a wonderful barn dance set piece in the middle of that movie, which was a big reference for this. . .. It’s all about how the dance looks in relation to a single camera, not ”let’s do the dance like a live event and just film it with 15 cameras and then we’ll find it in the editing room.” So that long take aesthetic was there right from the beginning. And my choreographer, Mandy Moore, had to choreograph with that in mind, and the DP [director of photography] Linus Sandgren, had to kind of be involved in that choreography. So it was really the three of us and this troupe of dancers that Mandy and I brought together rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing for months. And often very theoretically, because the other problem with shooting on a freeway ramp is that you can’t really rehearse onsite very easily. And so we were able to find this elevated ramp that the city would let us shut down for a Saturday and a Sunday to shoot. On wanting to appeal to musical skeptics, You hear a lot, especially when you’re making a musical today, how much distaste for musicals exists in the world and how many skeptics there are, so . .. it was important to me to reach out to the skeptics, to have this movie not just play for a little coterie of musical   of which I would include myself. . .. There is that kind of needle scratch sometimes  —   you can even feel it in a theater when a song begins and it hasn’t been quite properly set up. So I always thought of the analogy of the frog in boiling water and the idea that if you drop the frog right away in boiling water it feels it and jumps out, but if you put a frog in room temperature water and then slowly boil it over the course of however long, it won’t realize that it’s boiling and it’ll just sit there and die. So I kind of wanted to put the audience through  —   this will sound morbid  —   but through the same sort of process where they kind of don’t even necessarily realize as it’s happening that they’re being sucked into a musical. On making Whiplash (a film about a musician who attends a   music conservatory) based on his own experience as a jazz drummer  At the point that I wrote Whiplash I had been paying the bills in L. A. mainly by writing genre pictures and sort of doing rewrites on horror movies and sequels and stuff that was very not personal to me. I was just trying to make a living. . .. Whiplash in some ways was the most autobiographical thing that I had written up to that point. . .. There was a phase in my life, it was mainly high school into college, where music and specifically jazz drumming, as you see in Whiplash, was everything for me. It had a lot to do with a very intensive jazz program at my high school that I was a part of, and a very demanding teacher, and certain emotions I felt as a young player where the kind of enjoyment and appreciation of the art of music was inextricably wrapped up in fear and dread and anxiety about getting something wrong. . .. I sort of thought . .. maybe I could kind of write those experiences as though it were a genre film, as though it were a thriller or a kind of war movie or a sports film, something where you expect to see a lot of physical violence and try to sublimate that violence into emotional violence, into the music and into the style. On what Whiplash and La La Land have in common, When I think about when I was writing Whiplash, a lot of what I was grappling with as well is how do you become whatever you’re supposed to become? I guess that’s there in La La Land, too. . .. You don’t know for sure whether you actually ”have what it takes,” and also you don’t know if that whole idea of having what it takes  —   is that actually its own kind of nonsense? Is talent even really a thing? Is it actually just the best musicians are the musicians that work the hardest? Or the musicians who listened the most? Or the musicians who are lucky enough to be at a certain place at a certain time and what we think of as a meritocracy is actually not? . .. I think all those questions were swirling around my head and are still, I think, to a certain extent."
120,"After multiple recent studies showing that feeding   foods to infants can reduce the risk of peanut allergies, there are new federal guidelines for parents about when to start feeding their infants such foods. The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that a panel of allergy experts recommends that parents introduce   foods into the diets of babies as young as 4 to 6 months. As the NIH summary for parents and caregivers states, introducing babies with severe eczema or egg allergy  —   conditions that increase the risk of peanut allergy  —   to foods containing peanuts at that age can reduce the risk of developing peanut allergy. However, the guidelines spell out that these infants should be evaluated by an allergy specialist before their parents or caregivers introduce them to peanuts. For infants without the risk factors of eczema or known food allergies, parents can stick to whatever   diet they prefer. As NPR’s Allison Aubrey reports, ”parents of infants used to be told to hold off on introducing   foods, sometimes until the toddler years, especially if there was a family history of allergies.” Experts thought this could reduce the chances of developing an allergy. But over the past few years, Allison says, several large studies such as this one and this one ”have found that babies at high risk for becoming allergic to peanuts are less likely to develop the allergy if they are regularly fed   foods in the first year of life.” As NPR’s Patti Neighmond has reported: ”The guidelines are largely based on dramatic findings from a large study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015. Researchers found that babies at high risk of developing a peanut allergy who were fed the equivalent of about 4 heaping teaspoons of peanut butter each week, starting at the age of 4 to 11 months, were about 80 percent less likely to develop an allergy to the legume by age 5 than similar kids who avoided peanuts. The benefit held up even after the children stopped getting the puree, a   study found. ”Allergic reactions to peanuts can range from hives or rashes to, in the most extreme cases, trouble breathing and even death.” The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has published the full text of the guidelines for the prevention of peanut allergies, as well as summaries for doctors and parents, on its website. Infants and small children should never be given whole peanuts due to the risk of choking, the NIH cautions. A video aimed at parents warns that even undiluted peanut butter can be dangerous for infants because it is thick and sticky. The American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology video, which features Northwestern University pediatrician Ruchi S. Gupta, recommends adding hot water to 2 teaspoons of peanut butter to make a warm puree. Feed a little bit of the puree to the child, and then monitor for about 10 minutes to make sure there is no reaction such as hives, rash or trouble breathing before continuing to feed the child   foods."
121,"As President Obama’s tenure in the White House draws to a close, he’s looking back on eight years of work  —   and ahead toward what he sees as a brighter future for the U. S. In a letter to the American public, Obama says he’s proud that the country is ”stronger and more prosperous” than it was eight years ago  —   and hopeful that the country will build on the progress he sees. The letter is paired with a set of ”Cabinet Exit Memos”  —   Cabinet members wrote about the work their teams have done, and the work they see that remains for the next administration. The secretary of the interior says new parks and public lands tell a more inclusive story of America the secretary of agriculture highlights a drop in rural unemployment the secretary of Veterans Affairs points out, as an aside, that the VA is still providing benefits to the child of a Union soldier  —   from the Civil War. Obama, for his part, begins with a summary of the woes the U. S. faced at the beginning of 2009, in the midst of a financial crisis and two wars. He describes economic growth, an increase in health insurance coverage, a boost in renewable energy production and troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other things. He describes the state of the country today as ”a situation I’m proud to leave to my successor,” whom he never names. ”And it’s thanks to you,” Obama writes to the American people, ”to the hard work you’ve put in the sacrifices you’ve made for your families and communities the way you’ve looked out for one another.” He says that ”change is never easy, and never quick,” and that he wishes he’d been able to enact gun safety measures and immigration reform. ”We still have more work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a dignified retirement,” he said. ”What won’t help is taking health care away from 30 million Americans, most of them white and working class denying overtime pay to workers, most of whom have more than earned it or privatizing Medicare and Social Security and letting Wall Street regulate itself again  —   none of which   Americans voted for.” Obama concluded: ”We will have to move forward as we always have  —   together. As a people who believe that out of many, we are one that we are bound not by any one race or religion, but rather an adherence to a common creed that all of us are created equal in the eyes of God. And I’m confident we will. Because the change we’ve brought about these past eight years was never about me. It was about you. It is you, the American people, who have made the progress of the last eight years possible. It is you who will make our future progress possible. That, after all, is the story of America  —   a story of progress. However halting, however incomplete, however harshly challenged at each point on our journey  —   the story of America is a story of progress. . .. ”It has been the privilege of my life to serve as your President. And as I prepare to pass the baton and do my part as a private citizen, I’m proud to say that we have laid a new foundation for America. A new future is ours to write. And I’m as confident as ever that it will be led by the United States of America  —   and that our best days are still ahead.” Obama is expected to deliver a farewell address on Tuesday in Chicago."
122,"On a cold night in January nine years ago, Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses. That first big step on the young senator’s unlikely path to the White House was fueled by an army of campaign volunteers, which Obama later called one of his proudest legacies. ”That’s what America needs right now,” Obama told campaign workers a year later, after he was sworn in as president. ”Active citizens like you, who are willing to turn towards each other, talk to people you’ve never met, and say, ’C’mon, let’s go do this. Let’s go change the world.’ ” There was nothing glamorous about the work those volunteers did for Obama: A lot of knocking on doors and making phone calls. But for many veterans of that first Obama campaign, it’s a time they’ll never forget. ”I’ll be friends with some of those people forever,” says Nathan Blake, who quit his job at a Des Moines law firm to work for the upstart campaign. ”We’ve got that shared experience that was   and historic and important, and good for our country.” It wasn’t obvious at the time that the man they were knocking on doors for eventually would make his way to the White House, but even in those early days, Blake was a ”true believer.” He had plenty of company. Brian Kirschling, who works at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Iowa City, was older than a lot of Obama campaign volunteers, and he’d never been politically active. But by 2007, Kirschling had decided it was time to roll up his sleeves  —   a decision he explains by quoting Dr. Seuss. ”His quote from The Lorax is, ’Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, noting is going to get better. It’s not,’” Kirschling says. Kirschling became a ”precinct captain” for Obama. Children’s books and a Disney video were key parts of his caucus night toolkit for attracting parents with young children. ”In the Iowa caucus,” he says, ”it’s about how many people are standing in your corner. I can tell you everybody in that room that had kids was in our corner.” Aletheia Henry was just out of graduate school in 2007 when she heard a story on the radio about a training camp Obama was running for campaign volunteers. She packed her car and drove from Ohio to Chicago, listening to a tape of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, along the way. ”By the time I got there I was really hooked,” Henry says. She wound up working as a field organizer for Obama in eight different states. ”I would show up in a city and not know anyone,” Henry recalls. But she’d be given the name of someone who’d volunteered to let her sleep on their couch. ”And they’d have me over and have dinner and talk a little and they’d let me stay there for weeks or months at a time and we’d work together on this democracy.” After Obama was elected, campaign workers went their separate ways. Nathan Blake spent time in Washington, working for the Agriculture Department. He’s now back in Iowa, doing consumer protection work for the attorney general. Brian Kirschling, who’d never done much before in politics, decided to run for his local school board. And in a crowded field of nine candidates he made a point of knocking on doors all over the city. ”Which is exactly what I remembered learning with the Obama campaign,” Kirschling says. ”It was uncomfortable at times to go into parts of the district that don’t necessarily agree with my opinion. But it allowed me the opportunity to stand on doorsteps or sometimes come into their house and have those conversations.” Aletheia Henry went on to run Obama’s successful reelection campaign in Pennsylvania. In 2016, she was an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign there, which was not so successful. ”I think these next few years are going to take a lot of conversation,” Henry says, recalling the motto of Obama’s 2008 campaign: ”Respect, Empower, Include.” ”I come from rural Ohio,” she says. ”I understand some of the frustrations that Trump supporters are feeling. We should talk with everybody about how we can work together to make our country a little bit better.” Many of those who worked to elect Obama years ago are disappointed with the man who will follow him to the White House. But they’re not giving up on the political process. Brian Kirschling says while it’s easy to be apathetic, the lesson he learned from the Obama campaign is that if you want to effect change, you have to be a part of it. ”I think it’s pretty cool that a guy who was a community organizer ended up energizing and empowering people across the country to get involved and do things that they might not have done before,” he says. Kirschling suspects he’s one of many people who were moved by Obama to try something different. Nathan Blake agrees. His social media feed is full of colleagues from the 2008 campaign who are still carrying on their mission  —   in politics, business, or   just as Obama predicted. ”It’s not surprising that that was inspiring to a lot of us and that we responded in a way that said, ’Yeah, this is something I want to do with my life.’ Figure out different ways, wherever I am, however I can do it, to continue being involved and live out this Obama legacy.” More than a library or foundation, Blake says, that’s this president’s lasting impact: an army of campaign veterans who continue to serve."
123,"Updated at 4:15 p. m. ET, Four people have been charged with hate crimes for allegedly carrying out an assault,   online, in which a man was tied up, hit and cut with a knife by several assailants. Authorities say the victim, who had been reported missing before the attack, has ”mental health challenges.” He was encountered by police on Tuesday evening and is recovering in the hospital. ”There was never a question whether or not this incident qualified to be investigated as a hate crime,” Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a news conference Thursday afternoon, citing the victim’s mental capacity, race and other factors. ”The actions in that video are reprehensible.” The Facebook Live stream showing the attack has been deleted. But multiple outlets have posted videos they identify as archives of the stream, recorded by a woman who frequently turns the camera on herself. The clips show multiple people taunting, threatening and hitting a man who is tied up in a corner. At least once, a man uses a knife to cut the victim’s hair, cutting into his scalp. On the video, the assailants, who are black, say ”F*** Donald Trump” and ”F*** white people.” They force the victim, who is white, to say ”F*** Donald Trump,” as well. The four people accused of the crime have each been charged with a hate crime, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, according to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. Other charges include burglary, robbery and possession of a stolen motor vehicle. As for the remarks about   Donald Trump, police Cmdr. Kevin Duffin said at a news conference late Wednesday that investigators are working to determine whether the statements are ”sincere or just stupid ranting and raving.” Chicago police found the victim in distress on the street before they were aware of the existence of the Facebook live stream, authorities said at the news conference. The four suspects were arrested after police were called to a residence near where they’d found the man and then connected the incident and the location. The victim, a resident of a Chicago suburb, apparently spent at least 24 hours in the company of his alleged assailants  —   one of whom he knew from school, police say. He had been reported missing on Monday. Police say he traveled into the city with his acquaintance in a stolen van. A GoFundMe account for the victim has been set up a public relations representative for GoFundMe says the website will be working with the campaign organizer to ensure all money raised reaches the victim. At Wednesday’s news conference, Johnson highlighted the ”brazenness” of the assailants, for not just carrying out the attack but broadcasting it ”for all to see.” ”It’s sickening,” he said. ”It makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that. I’ve been a cop for 28 years  —   I’ve seen things that you shouldn’t see in a lifetime  —   but it still amazes me how you still see things that you just shouldn’t [see].”"
124,"Fans are so geeked about Showtime’s coming revival of Twin Peaks that they turned a   promotional video into a viral hit.   David Lynch appears in a black suit and tie (seemingly reprising his role as FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole) wordlessly consuming a glazed doughnut while the show’s distinctive, mournful theme plays in the background. The video has drawn more than 500, 000 views. That blend of mystery and weirdness helped make Twin Peaks a hit back in 1990, and it’s made Showtime’s revival one of the most anticipated new TV shows of 2017  —   mostly because fans have no idea what the guy who made Eraserhead and Blue Velvet might do with the resources and creative freedom offered by a premium cable channel. Lynch was already an   director known for surreal, sometimes violent films when he and   Mark Frost developed Twin Peaks. (Frost was a writer on NBC’s pioneering cop drama Hill Street Blues, and had worked with Lynch on a movie about Marilyn Monroe that was never made.) Together, they cooked up a story about the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Wash. The FBI agent sent to investigate the case was Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper, a clean cut guy with an odd enthusiasm for trees, cherry pie and good coffee. Cooper constantly recorded detailed notes on just about everything for an unseen assistant named Diane. What followed was a series that redefined the boundaries of television. It mashed up genres, moving from a   murder mystery to a surreal, dreamlike supernatural story. It revealed the seedy, sometimes absurd underbelly of a placid, rural town long before Fargo would take that story to another level. And it sparked legions of fans obsessed with the show’s weird details, like the Log Lady, a woman who seemed to communicate with supernatural forces through a log she carried around. And now Lynch and Frost want to try it again. Showtime’s revival features MacLachlan and much of the series’ original cast, including Sherilyn Fenn, Ray Wise and David Duchovny. And yes, the Log Lady, aka Catherine E. Coulson, also appears on the cast list, though the actress died late last year. They’re joined by new names like Michael Cera, Amanda Seyfried, Trent Reznor and Naomi Watts. Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Laura Palmer’s best friend in the original series, isn’t on Showtime’s new cast list and neither is Heather Graham, who played Cooper’s love interest. In a press release, Showtime says Lynch will direct every episode of the new Twin Peaks, which picks up 25 years after Palmer was killed. One clue about the revival’s plot may come from Mark Frost’s new novel, The Secret History of Twin Peaks. The book depicts documents contained in a dossier with loads of information connected to Cooper’s investigation. Readers leafing through the pages see FBI memos, old photographs, newspaper clippings, fictional lost letters from legendary explorers Lewis and Clark, and much more, annotated with observations by a new agent attempting to determine who compiled all this stuff. Like Twin Peaks itself, the book creates an oddball world fans are encouraged to immerse themselves in. The mystery is mostly an excuse the savor the strange environment and its exquisitely crafted details. A look back at the old series (Amazon offers the program via streaming to Prime members and Showtime gave subscribers access on Dec. 26) reveals a lot that doesn’t hold up well. Twin Peaks is very clearly the bridge between the more workmanlike television shows of the 1970s and ’80s and the more filmic small screen work done today. Its nods to soap opera sometimes led to clunky scenes with awkward acting, and the show’s look wasn’t always as grand as its ambitions. Still, Twin Peaks is filled with iconic moments that continue to resonate with fans today, and it influenced shows as different as AMC’s The Killing and AE’s Bates Motel. The question now is: How will Lynch and Frost surprise fans with a new story at a time when so much of today’s high quality television already feels like a distant homage to Twin Peaks?"
125,"Dorlyn Catron’s cane is making its radio debut today  —   its name is Pete. (”He’s important to my life. He ought to have a name,” she says.) Catron is participating in one of the America InSight tours at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D. C. The museum offers    tours, led by specially trained docents, to blind and visually impaired visitors. Docent Betsy Hennigan stops the group of nine visitors in front of Girl Skating, a small bronze sculpture from 1907 by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle. The   girl is full of joy. The visitors  —   of varied ages, races and backgrounds  —   stand close together, hands on top of their long canes, facing Hennigan as she describes the artwork: The little girl careens forward, arms outstretched, her hair and her dress flow behind her. Carol Wilson trains the 12 volunteer docents. ”Sight isn’t the only pathway to understand art,” she says. Wilson suggests the docents invite visitors to imitate the pose of a sculpture and use other senses in their verbal descriptions. ”There’s a red in one of the paintings and I’ve said it’s like biting into a strawberry,” says docent Phoebe Kline. William Johnson’s painting Café depicts a man and a woman sitting    having a drink in a jazz cafe. ”There’s no way you can see music in this piece,” says Hennigan, ”but I ask them to imagine hearing jazz. . .. Can you smell cigarettes? Can you smell the alcohol?” Docent Edmund Bonder uses real music to help bring to life a painting of a young woman at a piano. He describes her fingers on the upper right part of the keyboard, and then plays some classical piano music on his smartphone right in the middle of the gallery. No one shushes him. ”I check with security personnel beforehand and let them know this is what’s going to happen,” Bonder says with a laugh. Sometimes   and blind visitors can actually touch the art  —   in   gloves. Kline learned something herself, when a   felt Hugo Robus’ sculpture Water Carrier. ”She ran her hands down the body of this female figure, and her first remark was: Oh, she’s pregnant,” Kline recalls. ”And I had never thought about that. But in fact, the figure does look like a pregnant woman. Here was a kid really showing me something that I had been looking at for 35 years, probably, and had never noticed.” The visitors move slowly through the museum, some ”seeing” in their imaginations, others, with low vision, getting really close to the artwork to see it better with magnifying devices. The docents take questions about the art and the artists. Visitor Kilof Legge listens intently. He’s taken lots of these tours. He has had macular degeneration since childhood and has deeply missed art. ”For the longest time I really felt angry when I came into a museum,” he says. ”And hurt and insulted, almost. Because these are public places and I felt I was denied access.” He says he is ”grateful and excited” to have the art world opened back up to him through tours like these. This was visitor Cheryl Young’s second American InSight tour. She was born sighted, so she has color memory. ”This experience . .. brought back another piece of my life that I haven’t been able to explore since my vision loss,” she says. Twice a month, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum helps blind and   visitors to see art in their minds’ eyes  —   and demonstrate that there are many ways to experience a work of art."
126,"It’s Monday, 8 a. m. and these teens have already mucked stalls in the barn and fed the goats, alpacas and miniature cows. They’ve rounded up eggs in the henhouse, harvested cabbages and a few   tomatoes, and arranged them in tidy tiers to sell in the Agriculture Store. Now they’re ready to put in a full day of classes. These are the Aggies. They’re the first kids to arrive at John Bowne High School in Flushing, Queens, in the morning, and the last to leave on the New York City buses and subways that shuttle them home in the evening. Some 600 of the city’s public school students are enrolled in Bowne’s specialized,   agriculture program. Like most of their schoolmates, the Aggies follow an ordinary curriculum of English, math and social studies. But they also learn the building blocks of diverse careers in the booming industry of agriculture, which sees almost 60, 000 new jobs open up in the U. S. every year, according to the USDA. The Aggies grow crops, care for livestock and learn the rudiments of floriculture, viticulture, aquaculture, biotechnology and entrepreneurship. While high schools in rural farming areas have long prepared students for these sorts of jobs, they can’t come close to meeting the demand. So some urban public high schools are stepping in to fill the void. Since 2007, students at the Food and Finance High School in midtown Manhattan have grown tilapia and lettuces in interconnected,   labs built by a Cornell University agriculturist. The city’s Harbor School on Governors Island has so far graduated three classes of aquaculture students, who have hatched trout and worked on oyster farms that supply restaurants. Bowne’s program is much older  —   it harks back to World War I, when city boys were recruited to fill in for upstate farmers serving overseas. Today, it attracts a diverse array of students, including many girls. Many are low income some have parents who hail from Central America and the Caribbean, where more than a few once grew their own subsistence crops. ”We’re trying to give these kids as many career opportunities as possible,” says Steve Perry, who has headed Bowne’s program for 20 years, and also graduated from it. ”But for a lot of them, we’re also home base.” Forty percent of Aggies go on to   programs at colleges like SUNY Cobleskill and Cornell, studying everything from animal sciences to food safety and farm management. ”It’s so annoying that everyone thinks we’re just farmers,” says Aggie senior Erika Jerez with a roll of her eyes. She’s sporting a sweatshirt from Rutgers University, where she hopes to study food processing next fall. ”But there’s so much more to ag than farming.” Fellow Aggie senior Jailene Cajilina says her parents farmed a piece of land back in Ecuador. Despite that, she admits that before starting at Bowne, she had a poor idea of how food was grown. ”Being in a city, you lose touch that someone out there is breaking their back growing these plants, having to slug it out with animals and the weather,” she says. Cajilina spent four years doing everything from weeding broccoli beds to interning at an upstate organic dairy, gaining firsthand knowledge of the physical and financial struggles of farmers. That’s not a life she’s eager to replicate. Instead, she plans to become a   veterinarian. ”A lot of these kids are focused on supporting their families,” explains Rebecca Cossa, a Bowne plant science teacher. And with so many farms starting up within city limits, she sees potential for future generations of Aggies to find   careers close to home. There’s also demand for ag teachers. The New York State Education Department got requests to help set up 65   programs statewide last year, some of which require certified ag teachers. It’s a number administrators expect to keep growing over the next decade. Natalie Arroyo already knows that education is the direction she’ll be heading when she graduates from Bowne this June. After an internship last summer in which she taught children about animals at a Fresh Air Fund camp, she says, ”To see someone who wants to learn what you know, and choose their career based on something you taught them, that’s really inspiring.” Says Mayorga, ”The kids in the STEM program at Bowne know about science and technology.” But the Aggies, she says, can grow their own food. ”That’s right,” says fellow Aggie Dayana Panora. ”The Aggies are ready for the zombie apocalypse!” Lela Nargi is a   journalist and cookbook author. Her writing has appeared in publications including Gastronomica, Civil Eats and Roads  Kingdoms."
127,"The Shins are back with the group’s first new album since 2012’s Port Of Morrow. Heartworms is set to drop on March 10 on Aural   Records. In making the announcement today, the band shared the joyfully infectious pop cut ”Name For You” and a lyric video. Frontman James Mercer produced Heartworms on his own, a first since The Shins’ 2001 debut album, Oh, Inverted World. He says the new music was inspired, in part, by growing older and parenthood. ”Name For You” is a hopeful ode of empowerment to Mercer’s daughters. ”Given all the drops in the ocean, better take it one sip at a time,” Mercer sings. ”Somebody with an antique notion comes along to tighten the line, they’re just afraid of you speaking your mind.” This is the second song the band has shared from Heartworms. In October, The Shins released a   video for the song ”Dead Alive.” Full track listing for Heartworms:"
128,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Natalie Hemby’s debut album starts out very country, risking corniness from the  . Southern gospel harmonies float over a   beat as Hemby, one of Nashville’s premier songwriters, sings of   traditions  —   picket fences, alma maters, ”the roots of my inheritance.” She’s waxing poetic about Puxico, Missouri, population 881, where the Nashville native spent summers fishing with her grandpa and attending its annual Homecoming festival. In 2011, Hemby began work on a documentary about Puxico that lovingly captures the town’s deep communal roots within an American moment when the rural is both overlooked and stigmatized. Celebrating small towns is a country staple. But Puxico the album, like the documentary in which its songs first appeared, doesn’t settle into clichés. Instead, Hemby and her producer (and husband) Mike Wrucke explore both the   missions of memory and its tendency to slip into fiction: its comforting haziness coming into focus when we need it as a balm for longing or a way of coping with the new. The songs on Puxico both enact and examine memory. Some place the listener in the middle of a flashback: ”Lovers On Display” captures the thrill of young love declaring itself ”Worn” considers the material things that represent   love ”Ferris Wheel” savors an annual ritual that becomes a metaphor for embracing change. In the subtly dynamic ”I’ll Remember How You Loved Me,” Hemby muses upon the specifics that slip from her mental grasp and the affinities that remain deep in her neural net. ”The feeling hangs around in the wall of your mind, like a secret that I keep in a box under the bed,” she observes. Our recollections are shadow forces that we treasure and sometimes hide. As important as Hemby’s insightful, evocative lyrics  —   the songs were   with several of her Nashville   friends, notably Trent Dabbs  —   is the sound of Puxico, which defies country classification in ways similar to the artists for whom Hemby often writes hits, like Miranda Lambert and Little Big Town. Wrucke, who’s produced albums for Nashville auteurs including Lambert and David Nail, places Hemby’s delicate voice  —   the calm intonation of a trusted friend  —   within airy arrangements whose sonic reference points are both subtle and varied. Greg Leisz, a national treasure on pedal steel, threads his instrument through these tracks like the voice of Hemby’s subconscious. Alison Krauss is an obvious touchstone for Hemby and Wrucke, but they also stretch toward   sources like Sheryl Crow or the U2 of No Line On The Horizon. Plenty of musical country keepsakes are displayed here, too, from the fingerpicking in ”Cairo, IL” to the nod in ”Grand Restoration” to ”Will The Circle Be Unbroken.” Hemby wants to celebrate those circles that make up most of our lives, away from our family legacies and back toward them. Puxico is a labor of love that’s also a deeply insightful compendium of the stories we tell ourselves in order to preserve it."
129,"Ford Motor Co. ’s decision this week to cancel construction of an auto plant in Mexico has shocked that country, causing the peso to slump and stirring up outrage toward   Donald Trump. Anger is high toward the incoming U. S. president in the state where the Ford plant was under construction  —   and was slated to employ nearly 3, 000 local workers. Usually the dusty construction site of the   Mexican Ford auto plant is full of activity. Now only one large tractor can be seen grading roads at the   site, located outside the small town of Villa de Reyes in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Guards at the site’s entrance say the mood is very tense and that the situation is deeply discouraging. ”We all thought this was a   project,” says Juan Gonzalez, who had hoped to stay on when the Ford plant opened in three years. Gustavo Puente Orozco, San Luis Potosi’s secretary of economic development, says the news, while not totally unexpected, came as a shock. Donald Trump began putting a lot of pressure on Ford to pull out of Mexico during the campaign, but Puente says Ford officials in Mexico kept assuring him the project was moving forward, and he says construction kept going. Ford says market forces prompted it to cancel the Mexico plant  —   small cars, like the Ford Focus that was to be built there, just haven’t been selling well, especially with low gas prices. The scrapped project adds to a rough start to 2017 for Mexicans. Gas prices in the country spiked by as much as 20 percent in some parts of the country on Jan. 1, when the government lifted   subsidies. The peso dropped nearly a full percentage point on the Ford news, and there are fears that inflation is going to rise above 4 percent this year. Protests have broken out every day since the gas prices spiked, with demonstrators blocking major highways and thoroughfares in states throughout the country. Near the scuttled Ford plant in the nearby town of Villa De Reyes, residents are directing most of their anger about Mexico’s woes at the American  . As music blares from a food stall in the town’s small outdoor market, housewife Maria de Jesus Ramirez Martinez gets visibly angry when asked about the Ford plant closure. ”Trump is blaming us Mexicans for everything . .. and it’s not right . .. it’s just not right,” she says. Ramirez says the town was counting on those jobs and that without them, more Mexicans will head north to the United States to find work. San Luis Potosi has been a bright spot in Mexico’s otherwise sluggish economy with so many international companies here, unemployment is officially below 3 percent, and the region has been growing at twice the pace of the country as a whole. On Villa de Reyes’ small town plaza, Salvador Guerra, now retired, says he doesn’t want to see the state’s gains be undermined by Trump, who’s not even president yet. ”Imagine what he’s going to do to us once he takes power,” says Guerra. And Guerra says he’s just as mad at Mexico’s leaders, who he says haven’t done enough to stand up to Trump. On Wednesday, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced a shakeup in his Cabinet, appointing a former finance adviser as the new foreign minister, who Pena Nieto says will push for a more constructive relationship. ”It should be a relationship that allows us to strengthen bilateral ties,” says Pena Nieto. And, he adds, one that doesn’t undermine the sovereignty or the dignity of Mexicans."
130,"When Donald Trump takes to Twitter, some companies shudder. This week, Ford Motor Co. said it would scrap a $1. 6 billion plant in Mexico in favor of expanding an existing one in Michigan. That happened on the same day the   tweeted criticism of General Motors for manufacturing its Chevy Cruze vehicles in Mexico. GM says only a small number of the cars produced in Mexico are sold in the U. S. but that’s a detail that may not register with the public. Economist Barry Bosworth of the Brookings Institution says of companies that produce consumer goods: ”They can’t afford bad publicity.” Bosworth notes that so far Trump’s targets are companies that are expanding or planning to build operations in Mexico. He has not singled out U. S. companies that built plants there long ago. ”He focuses in on these individual cases,” says Bosworth, ”but there doesn’t seem to be a rule.” In November, under pressure from Trump, heating and cooling firm Carrier Corp. a subsidiary of United Technologies, said it would keep hundreds of jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to a plant in Mexico. Who might be next? Bosworth says the Trump Twitter spotlight is shining the most on big companies with   household brands. Automakers are especially at risk because of the sector’s high volume of   trade, and because it is so vulnerable to consumer opinion. Bosworth says going after a maker of obscure chemicals or a small firm that makes car components doesn’t produce great headlines, nor does it move public sentiment. Trump’s focus is on finished products. ”If they’re not assembled, they can’t be identified in the terms of a specific model of a General Motors car,” Bosworth says. ”It doesn’t have the same public appeal.” Trump has talked tough on China trade as well, but Bosworth notes he has not gone after individual companies  —   Apple, for example, and its huge iPhone assembly operations there. China’s economy is almost as big as the U. S.’s, and it has the power to inflict lots of pain on U. S. companies, like Boeing  —   so interfering there could backfire for American workers. Bosworth says picking on Mexico is like fighting the weak kid on the playground: It’s less likely to elicit a retaliatory response. U. S. companies are the biggest foreign investors in Mexico, and U. S.  trade is worth about half a trillion dollars annually. ”It’s a much weaker economy,” Bosworth notes, ”much fewer options available to them.” Economist Derek Scissors at the American Enterprise Institute says retailers, banks and other service providers aren’t likely to be targeted. And, he says, he hopes the singling out of individual companies will stop once Trump takes office. ”When you’re president, you shouldn’t be bothering one company. You should be changing policies such as corporate taxes, to change the whole landscape,” Scissors argues. ”Getting down into the details can’t be done by Twitter.” He acknowledges that tweeting about trade does accomplish a few things. First, it appeals to Trump’s base. ”Probably the reason that he won the election is the effort to   manufacturing,” he says, ”not to accept it as inevitable that manufacturing will head overseas.” The tweets also telegraph a message, he says, not just to the specific companies Trump has targeted, but also to firms in other industries which might be thinking about expanding elsewhere besides Mexico. ”It’s not going to stop at very   manufacturers that consumers know about,” Scissors says. ”It will continue. He’s just sending the signal now to everyone, ’This is your chance to make an adjustment.’ ”"
131,"Wyoming has become a flash point in the debate over whether hundreds of millions of acres of federal public lands should be turned over to state hands. From Buzz Hettick’s place on the edge of the windswept college town of Laramie, it’s a short drive into the heart of these remote lands, vast tracts run by the federal Bureau of Land Management. On a recent, blustery morning, Hettick was scouting out an elk hunt in the Laramie range, a patchwork of private and public BLM land north of his home. ”A lot of wildlife uses public lands,” he says. So do big game hunters like Hettick. Hunting is big business in the rural West and Wyoming is no exception. A recent study estimated it brings in roughly $25 million into Albany County’s economy alone. Hettick is eager to show off this land  —   and talk about protecting access to it  —   to anyone who will make the trip. ”I just don’t see how people can look at this out here . .. and all they see is a dollar sign attached to it there’s a lot more than that,” Hettick says. When it comes to politics, those dollar signs and federal lands are inextricably linked in the West. There’s always pressure to lease more land to private producers of oil, gas, coal and, lately, wind. But avid sportsmen like Hettick, who lobbies for the national group Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, now see a new threat. ”Anytime there’s even a whisper of anybody that wants to transfer federal lands to the states, you’re going to raise the ire and the hackles of the outdoor community . .. in particular hunters and fisherman,” Hettick says. This time it’s more than just a whisper. At their party’s 2016 convention in Cleveland last summer, Republicans included a provision in the RNC platform calling for the transfer of ownership of federal land to states. One of the biggest questions surrounding this is whether a rural state like Wyoming with a small budget can really afford to manage all this land. Groups like BHA worry the   states would be forced to sell it, which could endanger access to hunters or anyone else who likes to enjoy U. S. public lands. It’s not yet clear whether   Donald Trump endorses the idea. But his son, Donald Trump Jr. is an avid hunter and member of Hettick’s group. The younger Trump is said to have been influential in his father’s pick of Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, who opposes the transfer, to be interior secretary. Nevertheless, Hettick isn’t hedging any bets. He says sportsmen are on offense. ”It’s the biggest battle that sportsmen are going to have to face in my lifetime,” he says. In Wyoming, that battle is starting in the legislature. Lawmakers are considering a proposed constitutional amendment that would lay the groundwork for Wyoming to own and manage federal public land by 2019, should the   Congress move ahead with the transfer. Hettick mobilized sportsmen from around the state to brave snowy roads and travel to the capital, Cheyenne, for a recent hearing. Clad in camouflage, they wore ”keep public lands public” stickers and lined up to testify against the proposed amendment. Cheers and woops erupted when one hunter at the hearing advised the committee that they didn’t support any of the bill’s language, ”because we don’t support the amendment.” Neither does Wyoming’s Republican Governor Matt Mead. In an interview with the Casper   recently, Mead questioned the legality of transferring federal lands in the first place. He also wondered how his state would pay for things like battling wildfires, a bill that’s usually picked up by the federal government. State Sen. Larry Hicks, who’s pushing the amendment, says he’s done the math. He says an   state like Wyoming can afford to take over the land because of the increased tax revenues the state will be able to reap from it. ”We run about a $3 billion budget and we’re sending a billion dollars of federal minerals back to Washington, D. C.,” Hicks says. ”That’s a 25 percent increase in our state revenues right off the bat.” His math may not take into account the booms and busts of natural resource prices. But for Hicks, this is about a lot more than economics. It’s a cultural battle. He says rural communities that depend on mining, logging and drilling on federal lands are suffering. ”A lot of people just feel like they have no more voice,” he says. People are moving out and schools are shutting down. Hicks says the federal government is too restrictive. ”It’s detrimental,” he says. ”There are multiple generations of families and they feel like that their heritage and their lifestyle has been stolen from them.” Republican or Democrat, bashing the federal government is popular political sport in Wyoming. And like any relationship, Wyoming’s relationship with Washington, D. C. is complicated. In quite a few small towns here, the federal government is the largest employer. And the state depends heavily on federal dollars for everything from highways to health care to education. A report commissioned by the legislature’s own committee considering the constitutional amendment noted that if the transfer goes forward, the state would automatically lose close to $30 million in federal dollars earmarked for infrastructure in counties that have large amounts of   federal public land. ”I see very little evidence that there’s a groundswell of support for it in the state of Wyoming,” says Greg Cawley, a political science professor at the University of Wyoming. Cawley has studied   government movements in the West, dating back to the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s. ”Every time the federal government does something that irritates Western ranchers, miners, what have you, this issue of transfer of the lands to the states is brought up again, dusted off and put forward,” he says. But there’s one big thing that makes this time around a little different, according to Cawley: the unpredictable political mood in the country right now. For a lot of Westerners, that hit home a few days before the election when a jury acquitted militia leader Ammon Bundy and his followers who led an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon. The Bundys said they were protesting federal ownership of public land. ”What we used to call, maybe five or six years ago, the fringe right . .. they’re starting to become more mainstream now,” says Buzz Hettick of BHA. ”That’s why we have to really ramp up the pressure we put on our politicians.” Hettick pledges that sportsmen will pressure Washington in even bigger numbers if the federal lands transfer proposal moves forward in Congress. But today, out in the Laramie range, he’s focused on a smaller quest. He’s hopped out of his pickup and set up his scoping lens on a tripod. ”If you look over at the top of this hill right over here . .. looks to be at least eight or 10 elk right there,” he says, his jaw a little clenched from the cold wind. The trip out here can be notched as a success. There are elk in these hills, maybe he’ll bag one just yet this season."
132,"”Free” is a word with a powerful appeal. And in the past year or so it has been tossed around a lot, followed by another word: ”college.” Both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent a lot of time talking about free tuition. And this week, the promise has been taken up by one of the largest public university systems in the country: New York state’s. Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a proposal that would offer free tuition at   colleges for students from families earning less than $125, 000 a year. Called the Excelsior Scholarship, his plan  —   which needs approval by the Legislature  —   would grant full rides to qualifying students as long as they attend one of the state’s public   or   colleges. Cuomo’s proposal, in the lexicon of ” ” policymaking, is what’s called a ”last dollar” program. As NPR Ed explained this summer, that means students who are already eligible for federal Pell Grants must use them to pay for school. After that money is gone, the state pledges to fill in the gap. This method is the cheapest for the state, since students can draw on federal money first before taking state aid. With this type of plan, a larger share of funds from the new program is likely to go mainly to families who are relatively well off. As Robert Kelchen, a higher education scholar at Seton Hall University, explains on his blog: The benefits of the program would go to two groups of students. The first group is fairly obvious:   and    families. In New York, $125, 000 falls at roughly the 80th percentile of family income  —   an income level where families may not be able to pay tuition without borrowing, but college enrollment rates are quite high. The other group that may benefit, says Kelchen, are   students who are enticed by the clarity of the promise of ”free.” But New York’s proposal, like others, is likely to be controversial. In reality there’s no free college, just as there’s no free lunch. The real policy discussion is about how to best distribute the burden of paying for it  —   between individual families and the public at large  —   and, secondly, how to hold down the cost of providing it. All while leveraging the power of ”free” responsibly. Fueling a bubble, For many conservatives, the answer is simple. An education makes individuals richer, and individuals should bear the cost. ”The state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,” said Ronald Reagan, back when he was running for governor of California. In recent times, the conservative position is perhaps best expressed by economist Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. In his books, articles and public appearances, Vedder argues that federal student aid is creating a bubble that allows colleges to raise prices indefinitely, and the only way to stop the cycle is to cut off public funding. Kevin Carey, now the director of the higher education policy program at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, made pretty much the same argument in the New Republic in 2012. He compared public universities to apple vendors: You, the apple vendor, look at the situation and say, ”Hey, the market price of an apple is still $1. Wouldn’t it be great if I could charge $1 for apples, but still get 40 cents from the government for every apple I sell?” . .. So you start raising prices by 3, 4, or 5 percent above inflation annually. In a world with no public subsidy at all for education, the only option left for free tuition would be something like the Starbucks plan  —   large corporations or wealthy donors footing the bill. And that kind of ”free” comes, generally, with a significant catch  —   like requiring students to work for a certain employer. The public piggy bank, At the other end of the political spectrum are those who see a large public obligation to pay for the education of citizens, to promote democracy, meritocracy and equal rights, among other things. They just can’t agree on how. Once upon a time, public university in this country actually was free, for the most part. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, from New York to California, states opted to charge no tuition or nominal fees. Here’s the catch. Until World War II, college was also pretty sparsely attended. In 1940, only about 5 percent of the population, most of them white men, had a bachelor’s degree. And the U. S. was the most educated nation in the world! The small numbers made tuition relatively cheap to subsidize. But starting with the GI Bill, the United States moved to a new model of ”mass” higher education. The expansion continued through the 1960s, with the Higher Education Act of 1965 establishing federal   programs. Suddenly, most high school graduates  —   men, women, black, white, new immigrants  —   aspired to a college degree. In defiance of the laws of economics, as the supply of college graduates went up, so did the demand for them, year after year. A college degree pretty much always meant you made more money. Graduates also paid more taxes, so the government got its money back in the long term  —   $6 for every dollar spent on the GI Bill, by some estimates. No such thing  Starting in the 1970s, there was a backlash to all this free money. In the economic slump, federal and state subsidies to higher education tightened. Enrollments declined. Loans, which were cheaper for the government, began to replace grants. Public universities responded to the decreased state subsidies by raising tuition. They responded to the increased availability of loan financing by raising tuition. They responded to the continued robust demand for higher education by raising tuition. They responded to the pressure to expand, adding new programs and majors and building bigger campuses, by raising tuition. Since 1978, public university tuition has climbed every single year, two or three times faster than inflation. Average student loan debt for a bachelor’s degree: $29, 400. Sara   of Temple University sums up the results of all this in a paper she wrote for the Lumina Foundation: Talented students are forgoing college because of the costs, students who start college are unable to complete because they cannot afford to continue, and even students who finish degrees may not realize all of the expected returns because of sizable debt burdens. The United States is no longer the most educated nation in the world  —   it’s the 12th. Most of the countries ahead of it have   public university options than the U. S. Perhaps most damning, the high cost of college in this country helps ensure that in too many cases, wealth trumps merit. The success rate in college for the   but   students is slightly better than the success rate for the     students. Found money,    college costs are hurting the most vulnerable. There are many different efforts to pacify the giant octopus. The new proposals bank on the fact that the federal government already spends lots of money on student aid: $47 billion in grants a year, $101 billion in loans (which are repaid) and another $20 billion in tax credits. The total of state, federal and private money going to defray the cost of tuition  —   that’s distinct from state appropriations directly to institutions  —   is $247 billion per year. Seems like with that kind of dough, there ought to be ways of buying better access and more equity. There’s substantial evidence that   students are less likely to even aspire to college because they think it’s too expensive. It affects things like their choice of math classes as early as sixth grade. That’s why so many of these programs have the word ”promise” or ”hope” in the name. The   bureaucracy is complicated to navigate. ”Free college” is a promise everyone can understand. Redeeming America’s Promise calls for offering a full scholarship to a public   or   college to every academically qualified student from families making no more than $160, 000 a year. Part of the money, they say, could come from Pell Grants and tax credits, which would no longer be needed. (This math has been challenged).   a scholar who studies access to higher education, argued in her paper last year for the Lumina Foundation that the federal   budget would and should go to pay for two years of universal free public college for all comers, including books, supplies, even a living stipend for those who need it. The fine print, Unfortunately, most attempts to defray the cost of college come with unintended consequences. For a good example, look no further than Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship. This statewide program, dating from 1993, offers high school graduates who meet certain requirements scholarships at a state university. At one time, about a dozen states had created similar models. According to this early look at the impact of the HOPE program, by Susan Dynarski for the National Bureau of Economic Research, ”Georgia’s program has likely increased the college attendance rate of all   to    by 7. 0 to 7. 9 percentage points.” Not too shabby. However, ”the evidence suggests that Georgia’s program has widened the gap in college attendance between blacks and whites and between those from   and   families.” Wait a minute. So a free tuition plan, instead of helping   and minority students, actually left them further behind? Yes, and that result has been seen in other states. It happens because these state programs require certain high school GPAs and test scores, and require that students maintain a certain GPA in college. And proportionately more   white kids meet those bars. Nothing left to lose, Most of the conversations about free college, as we’ve seen, are really about moving around piles of government money and other funds. Some folks are starting to talk about whether we can meaningfully lower the cost of delivering a college education, instead of or in addition to paying for it differently. Most of those conversations have something to do with technology. Some thought Massive Open Online Courses would be the Holy Grail: free,   college for everyone! But in that case, ”free” led to lower commitment. Completion rates for MOOCs hover around 5 to 7 percent. Blended programs, which are   and combine online learning with assistance from real people by phone or in person, seem to be able to hold down costs and get good results at the same time. Like Western Governors University, a nonprofit whose   program was the National Council of Teacher Quality’s   program in the country in 2014. It manages to charge less than the average public university without taking any public subsidy. The unique thing about education, and what makes it so hard to control the price, is that it’s not just a service or a good. It’s a process, and the learner takes an active role in creating its value. A college education may never be free, but for many people it will remain priceless. A version of this story was published on NPR Ed in June 2014."
133,"Updated 5:30 p. m. ET, The intelligence report on Russia’s interference in the U. S. elections concludes that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered an ”influence campaign” that aimed to help   Donald Trump. ”Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” the public version of the report from the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency states. ”We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for   Trump.” This is the first time the U. S. government has leveled these accusations directly at Putin, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reports. ”It’s obviously a big deal to level that kind of charge at the head of state of a foreign country,” she says. The report does not weigh in on whether this ”influence campaign” changed the outcome of the U. S. election. Here are some of the report’s key findings: You can read the public version of the report here: On Oct. 7, the U. S. first formally accused Russia of hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other U. S. political organizations. ”We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s   officials could have authorized these activities,” the joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Since then, intelligence officials have doubled down and expanded upon the accusations. ”We stand more resolutely on that statement,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, as NPR’s Brian Naylor reported. In December, the FBI threw its weight behind the CIA’s assessment, as NPR’s Carrie Johnson reported: ”The entire intelligence community, in fact, is now in alignment that the hacks were partly motivated to try and install Trump as president.”   Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed the assessment. Earlier Friday afternoon, he received a briefing on the intelligence report from Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey at Trump Tower in New York. In a statement, Trump called the meeting ”constructive” and added that he has ”tremendous respect” for the work of the intelligence community. He did not specifically blame Russia, saying it was one of a number of countries including China that are ”consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our government institutions, businesses and organizations.” Trump also stated that the hacks had ”absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Remember, the report specifically states that it did not ”make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election.” It did say that the Department of Homeland Security ”assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.” Prior to today’s briefing, Trump told The New York Times he believes the continued attention on the cyberattacks is politically motivated. ”They got beaten very badly in the election. I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan,” Trump told the Times. ”They are very embarrassed about it. To some extent, it’s a witch hunt. They just focus on this.” The White House announced sanctions against Russia last month in response to the cyberattacks."
134,"Updated at 3:31 p. m. ET after briefing, After casting doubt on the legitimacy of U. S. intelligence (even referring to it as ”intelligence”)   Donald Trump was briefed Friday by the nation’s top intelligence officials on their investigation into Russia’s hacking attempts and interference in the U. S. presidential election. Director of National Security James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey briefed the   on their findings at Trump Tower early Friday afternoon. In a statement after the meeting, Trump called it a ”constructive” meeting, but none of it seemed to convince him that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s and Clinton campaign officials’ emails and broader attempts to try to influence the election. Instead, he noted ”Russia, China” and ”other countries” are ”consistently” trying to hack into U. S. installations. And he made sure to get in this point: ”There was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” Trump and his team continue to express doubts over accepting even the basic premise that Russia is responsible for the hacks and seem focused on the politics of opponents’ motivations. Earlier Friday, Trump dismissed the focus on Russian hacking as a ”political witch hunt.” ”China, relatively recently, hacked 20 million government names,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Times. ”How come nobody even talks about that? This is a political witch hunt.” Trump was talking about a breach of Office of Personnel Management computers two to three yeas ago. Other federal agencies and government outlets have been compromised as well  —   and those were reported on. But none of those events saw emails leaked publicly by a foreign adversary with the intent to influence an election. Trump and his team continue to defensively rail against the ”mainstream media,” seemingly believing that the real goal is to delegitimize Trump’s win. Trump is going to be the next president. He won. But national security is bigger than politics. Trump has expressed his anger on Twitter that a part of the report was leaked to The Washington Post and NBC News on Thursday night, including that U. S. intelligence ”picked up senior Russian officials” celebrating Trump’s win on election night, and that the U. S. has identified the Russians who provided the stolen Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, which published them. Trump tweeted that he is asking House and Senate committees to investigate the leak. Seventeen American agencies agree that Russia is responsible for hacking DNC and Clinton campaign official emails and leaking them to WikiLeaks. NPR has also confirmed that intelligence officials agree that Russia was doing so in an effort to undermine American democracy and with the hope that their efforts would elect Trump  —   though they didn’t expect it would actually happen. The intelligence report, which was presented to President Obama on Thursday, is expected to show the extent of Russia’s attempts to influence the election’s outcome. At a Senate hearing Thursday, Clapper said that hacking the committee’s computers and campaign chief John Podesta’s emails was just part of the Russian campaign, saying, ”It also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news.” Trump, who has been skeptical of reports of Russian involvement in the election, questioned how NBC got ”an exclusive look into the top secret report he [Obama] was presented.” Appearing on CBS This Morning, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called it ”disappointing” that there were leaks of the report to the media before ”we actually have a report on the alleged hacking.” Conway also asserted that ”people want a lot of America to see, to believe that Russian hacking influenced the election.” On CNN, Conway continued to express doubt about the evidence, even contending that ”the idea that somehow conclusive evidence has been out there in the public domain, provided to the   is  —   is simply not true.” That ignores the fact that Trump has been declining daily intelligence briefings and is one of two people, President Obama being the other, who could ask to see all of the evidence. The 17 agencies stated unequivocally Oct. 7, two months ago, that Russia was behind the hacks  —   and that the move was ordered by the highest levels of the Russian government. Conway also insistently contended, despite the findings of the intelligence community and without having seen the evidence, that Russia didn’t want Trump elected. ”The Russians didn’t want him elected,” she boasted in that same CNN interview. ”You know why? Because he has said very clearly during the campaign and now as   that he is going to modernize our nuclear capability, that he’s going to call for an increase in defense budget, that he’s going to have oil and gas exploration, all of which goes against Russia’s economic and military interests.” So what’s really going on here? It appears what’s getting under the skin of Trump and his officials is their view that the real implication with all this is to imply, if not say outright, that Russia handed Trump the election, thereby delegitimizing his presidency. ”They got beaten very badly in the election,” Trump told the Times. ”I won more counties in the election than Ronald Reagan. They are very embarrassed about it. To some extent, it’s a witch hunt. They just focus on this.” Conway contended Friday morning in that CNN interview that ”people are conflating alleged Russian hacking with the actual outcome of the election. It’s just nonsense.” Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer echoed that frustration on Fox this past weekend, when he said there was ”zero evidence” that Russia influenced the outcome of the election. ”The way the mainstream media is playing it up is that [Russia] had an influence on the election,” Spicer said. ”There is zero evidence that they actually influenced the election.” Whether the leaked emails actually mathematically helped Trump is likely immeasurable, but that is beside the point. Trump has refused to acknowledge Russia’s role. Instead, he has consistently, over several months, in fact, cast doubt that it was Russia at all, blaming it on a   man possibly in New Jersey, or maybe it was China or maybe no one understands ”the computers” at all. ”I think we oughta get on with our lives,” Trump said. But what Trump, as the future president, seems to have trouble accepting is that this is a national security issue, not a political one. Instead, the Trump team continues to focus, be driven by and be defensive about the politics. Trump’s team seems incapable of compartmentalizing and messaging on this basic point: that accepting the premise that Russia is responsible is not the same as saying it handed Trump the presidency. Maybe Trump began some acceptance of this Friday. He also told the Times, ”With all that being said, I don’t want countries to be hacking our country.” Trump said he had ”tremendous respect” for the intelligence community, but right now, the country is in a very strange position of having an incoming American president who, it seems, would rather believe adversaries over American intelligence when it contradicts his predisposed world view  —   or is in line with his domestic political opponents."
135,"Updated at 8:00 p. m. ET Saturday, The U. S. Attorney has charged Esteban Santiago, the man in custody for carrying out the deadly shooting at Fort   International Airport in Florida on Friday afternoon. At least five people were killed and six others were injured in the shooting, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. The suspect, Esteban Santiago, had been taken into custody ”without incident” by a sheriff’s deputy immediately after the shooting, Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference. Israel had said earlier in the day that ”at this point it looks like he acted alone.” The charges issued include: ”Performing an act of violence against a person at an airport,” ”using and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence” and ”causing the death of a person through the use of a firearm in the course of a violation.” The maximum penalty carried with these charges is a possible death sentence. Santiago will have his initial appearance Monday at 11:00 a. m. before United States Magistrate Judge Alicia O. Valle in Fort Lauderdale. Authorities said Santiago took flights from Alaska to Minnesota, finally landing in Fort Lauderdale, where he took a firearm out of his checked baggage and ”began indiscriminately shooting,” as Israel put it. Santiago was interviewed extensively by FBI and Broward County sheriff’s office officials, Sheriff Israel said. George Piro, special agent in charge of the Miami field office, said at the news conference that it was too soon to say what the motive behind the attack was. ”We’re not ruling out anything, including the terrorism angle,” he said, adding that it was ”too early to truly know why he came to Florida.” Piro confirmed reports that Santiago, 26, had voluntarily gone to the FBI office in Anchorage in November and spoken with agents. News reports have said the suspect complained that an outside force was controlling his mind. Piro noted that the suspect stated that he didn’t intend to harm anyone. ”We looked at his contacts,” said Piro, ”did interagency checks and closed our assessment.” He says the agents turned Santiago over to local police, who took him for a mental health evaluation. NPR has not confirmed any details of the suspect’s mental health issues. Piro didn’t confirm news reports that Santiago was involved in a fight before the shootings. ”I’m not aware of an incident on the flight or at baggage claim,” he said. Sheriff Scott Israel described the weapon used in the attack as a   handgun and said it was too early in the investigation to say how many rounds were fired. The sheriff said the attacker didn’t make any statements while shooting. In addition to the victims who were killed or wounded by bullets, Israel said, some 30 to 40 people were taken to hospitals with other injuries. The airport aviation director, Mark Gale, estimated that authorities will have helped about 10, 000 people with transportation, food and lodging because of the incident. Police Chief Jesse Davis of Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport says Santiago departed the Alaska facility on a Delta flight, having left a firearm in his checked baggage, as required. Davis tells NPR’s Richard Gonzales that Santiago did not draw attention to himself at the airport, was not previously known to the airport police and apparently was traveling alone. According to NPR’s Tom Bowman, Santiago is a    former soldier. Tom tells our Newscast unit: ”Military records show Santiago received a general discharge  —   rather than the top honorable discharge  —   from the Alaska National Guard in August because of poor performance . .. ”Santiago received an honorable discharge from the Puerto Rico National Guard in 2013 and served with those soldiers in Iraq in 2010 and 2011. He was a combat engineer, a job that includes clearing roads and detecting mines.” Tom reports that a U. S. official familiar with the investigation says, while serving with the Alaska National Guard, Santiago ”was AWOL on a number of occasions, would miss drills and was interviewed by Army criminal investigators at times for what they called ’strange behavior.’ ” Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who traveled to Fort Lauderdale on Friday afternoon, told reporters he had not asked the federal government for resources and had not attempted to contact President Obama. The governor said he had reached out to   Donald Trump and Vice   Mike Pence, who take office later this month. Later, Scott’s press office announced that he spoke with Obama following the news conference. National Security Council spokesperson Ned Price said the president ”extended his sincere condolences to the families and other loved ones of those killed,” said his ”thoughts and prayers are with the wounded,” and gave assurances that federal authorities would continue to help in the investigation. Israel said authorities were not releasing any information about the identities of those killed and injured. The sheriff’s office tweeted that those who were injured had been taken to a local hospital. Israel and Gale both said there was no evidence any shots had been fired elsewhere in the airport or by anyone except the suspect in custody. Previous reports had indicated there might have been additional shots fired on the airport property. Broward County Fire Rescue told the local CBS affiliate in Miami that a shooting was reported around 1 p. m. ET. The sheriff’s office tweeted that it received a call about a shooting at the airport around 12:55 p. m. The airport said on Twitter that: ”There is an ongoing incident in Terminal 2, Baggage Claim.” The airport has four   terminals, of which Terminal 2 is the smallest. It serves Air Canada and Delta Airlines. People who said they were inside the airport described seeing people running. Among those inside was former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who tweeted that ”everyone is running” after shots were fired, and that police said there was one shooter and multiple victims. Shortly after 1 p. m. Fleischer tweeted that police were not letting anyone out of the part of the airport he was in. Television images showed hundreds of travelers standing around the part of the airport where the planes park. The airport said it had temporarily suspended all services and asked travelers to contact air carriers directly about flight information. The Federal Aviation Administration said a ground stop was in effect at the airport due to the incident. In a statement about two hours after the shooting was reported, the FAA said flights were ”not arriving or departing” from the airport. The airport reopened Saturday at 5 a. m. according to The Associated Press, with many flights delayed or canceled. This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We’ll move quickly to correct the record and we’ll only point to the best information we have at the time."
136,"North Korea got 2017 off to a menacing start. In his New Year’s address, supreme leader Kim Jong Un warned that the nation was in the ”final stage” of preparations to test an intercontinental ballistic missile. A day later,   Donald Trump said the North would never develop a nuclear weapon capable of striking the U. S. ”It won’t happen!” Trump tweeted. Bombast aside, independent arms control experts agree that North Korea is moving rapidly to develop an ICBM. And many suspect it will test a missile capable of reaching the continental U. S. later this year. ”They are very far along in their ICBM testing project,” says Melissa Hanham, an East Asia researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. ”Probably we will see that they will do a flight test in 2017.” If the test were successful  —   a big if  —   North Korea would join a small club of nations with ICBMs, including superpowers like the U. S. Russia and China. North Korea is a notoriously closed society, but the government periodically releases images and videos of its missiles. Analysts pore over that scant material and use it to cobble together a mosaic of the North’s weapons program. Those reports, combined with public statements by officials in South Korea and the U. S. provide some sense of the North’s progress. And there was a lot of progress in 2016, Hanham says: ”There were so many tests, I need crib notes.” North Korea tested a new rocket engine, based on a Soviet design, that is more powerful than anything it has used before. It also tested a heat shield of the type needed to protect a nuclear warhead as it   Earth’s atmosphere. In June, it successfully fired a new Musudan missile. The Musudan’s range of up to 2, 500 miles is short of what’s needed to reach the U. S. but it appears to use some of the technology that would probably go into a larger ICBM. That ICBM has yet to be tested. Known to analysts as the   or   (”one of the challenges with North Korean missiles is that they don’t tell us what they’re called,” says Hanham) it first appeared in a military parade in 2012. Back then, the missile was so kludged together, it looked to some experts like it could be a decoy. But in the years since, photos of the ICBM showed features that suggest it is becoming a real weapon. The missile began as a clunky,   design, says David Wright, a rocketry expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. It has since been redesigned as a simpler   affair. With the new engines tested this year, it would have a range of about 7, 500 miles, Wright says. ”That would start to bring things like Washington, D. C. into range.” Can Trump stop the test? Neither Hanham nor Wright thinks there are easy solutions available to the  . Attacking the missile before it’s launched would be an act of war. If the ICBM is tested to the south, as happened with North Korea’s space launches, then it will be out of range of the main U. S.   system based in Alaska. Smaller   interceptors are also unlikely to be able to shoot it down, Wright says. That leaves diplomacy, says Hanham. But Kim Jong Un has shown little willingness to negotiate. ”There are no good options, really,” Hanham says. ”That’s why previous administrations have struggled with it for so long.” A flight test will not mean that North Korea can conduct a nuclear strike on U. S. soil. For one thing, the North’s track record in testing new missiles is pretty bad, says Wright. He estimates the odds that this new ICBM will work are ”probably less than 50 percent.” And while the individual components may all be there, they still need to be combined into a single weapon, he adds. Many analysts believe the North has miniaturized its nuclear bomb. But Wright says it’s less clear whether a North Korean nuke could survive the   of a missile launch. Similarly, its   system for bringing the weapon back to earth could be highly inaccurate in its current design. Perfecting an ICBM as a weapon may take several more years. Still, Hanham believes that 2017 may be a watershed year for the North. Even an unsuccessful ICBM test would send a clear message. ”That’s going to be really scary,” she says, ”not just for the region, but the American public.”"
137,"Donald Trump is still two weeks from his presidential inauguration, but new Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer sounds ready to do battle with a   Senate, House and White House. ”We’re going to hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire,” the New York Democrat told NPR’s Audie Cornish on All Things Considered while sitting in front of the fireplace near his desk. ”Our job is going to be to hold Donald Trump and the Republican majority accountable.” Schumer hasn’t quite moved into his suite of Capitol offices. Boxes are heaped in corridors and naked hooks poke from the walls of Schumer’s ornate chambers on the second floor. Just outside the windows is the inaugural podium being built and beyond it, the National Mall. Inside, amid the clutter, the new Senate minority leader is wasting no time defending Democratic policies and programs from the incoming administration and its congressional allies, even if he has less leverage than he had hoped to have. Schumer hinted at the Democrats’ relatively weak position, as Republicans move quickly to repeal Obamacare. He repeatedly said Democrats would not cooperate with any Affordable Care Act replacement if the GOP pushes ahead with repeal, but then allowed that ”there might be a thing or two” in competing Republican plans he finds appealing. He also brought negotiations into the open by putting public pressure on GOP senators from Maine and Alaska to vote against repeal. ”Now they want to eliminate the funding of Planned Parenthood,” he said, referring to a plan by House Speaker Paul Ryan to include such provisions in legislation undoing Obamacare, ”so people like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are having some qualms about this.” Schumer hinted at some of the legislative maneuvers Democrats may employ to stymie Obamacare repeal. ”We’ll have an amendment on the floor of the Senate, as we debate ACA,” he explained, ”that quotes Donald Trump and says we’re opposed to cutting health care  —   Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security for that matter.” Before his intelligence briefing today, the   told the New York Times that the attention devoted to Russian attempts to influence the election is ”a political witch hunt.” Schumer called that ”flip and glib.” ”Before you even get the briefing, you come to a conclusion  —   that’s not the way to govern,” he said. ”And I have said . .. that we can’t have a Twitter presidency. This is serious stuff, this governing, and to just be flip and glib and tweet . .. you’ve got to do a lot more. And certainly any president  —   Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative  —   should keep an open mind until they get the briefing.” Schumer also responded to Trump’s calling him a ”clown.” ”I didn’t tweet back a name  —   that’s derogating the debate,” Schumer said. ”I said I understand your anguish, Mr.   because you don’t know what to replace the ACA with. But instead of calling names, roll up your sleeves and come up with a replacement. So I’m not going to descend to  .”"
138,"Bernie Sanders thinks he has a pretty good idea why Hillary Clinton and Democrats lost in the 2016 election. ”Look, you can’t simply go around to wealthy people’s homes raising money and expect to win elections,” the Vermont senator, who gave Clinton a surprisingly strong run for the Democratic nomination, told NPR’s David Greene in an interview airing on Morning Edition. ”You’ve got to go out and mix it up and be with ordinary people.” That picks up on a criticism of Clinton devoting too much time to fundraising  —   and not enough to    campaigning in traditionally Democratic states, like Michigan and Wisconsin. In the general election, Clinton never visited Wisconsin after she became the nominee and visited Michigan late in the game. The two Upper Midwestern states swung narrowly to Trump: Wisconsin by slightly more than 20, 000 votes and Michigan by slightly more than 10, 000. During the primary, Sanders boasted of his   donations. ”The Democratic Party swallowed the bait,” he argued. ”They became hooked on big money.” The Vermont senator added that he believes Democrats have lost touch with the needs of everyday Americans. ”I happen to believe that the Democratic Party has been not doing a good job in terms of communicating with people in cities, in towns and in rural America, all over this country,” he said. Some have blamed Sanders, in part, however for Clinton’s loss. Young voters were drawn to his campaign, but many chose a   candidate in the general election. Although Sanders campaigned for Clinton, at times he had a hard time voicing   support for her. The kind of harsh criticism he leveled of Clinton on her Wall Street speeches and decrying her as part of the status quo, rather than building up her beliefs and policies (that certainly stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump) has irked party loyalists. That’s especially true, considering that although Sanders ran in the Democratic primary and caucuses with Democrats, he has declined to put the ”D” next to his name. He is back in the Senate as an independent. Sanders believes Trump’s message resonated with workers, like the ones in Wisconsin and Michigan, who were hit hard by the economic recession and haven’t yet recovered. It was a connection Democrats were largely unable to maintain. ”One of the reasons that Mr. Trump won is that we have millions of people who have given up on the political process, who don’t believe that Congress is listening to their pain,” Sanders said. ”What the Democratic Party has got to do is start listening.” In that way, Trump and Sanders are alike. Both tapped into the   current that permeated the 2016 election. When asked if he thought he would have been able to win the general election against Trump, Sanders brushed it off. ”I don’t think it helps to relive history,” said Sanders, whose campaign team touted polling during the primary that showed him faring better against Trump in    matchups. ”The answer is I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s not worth speculating about. We are where we are.” Sanders sees Trump’s   tendencies as a potential opportunity, at least when it comes to the fight to preserve Medicare and Medicaid. Trump promised repeatedly throughout the campaign that he would not cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security if elected. Sanders wants to hold Trump accountable for that promise, regardless of what Republicans in Congress want to do. Sanders says Trump has a choice: ”Either he can have the courage and get up in front of the American people, or do it through a tweet, and say, ’You know what? Hey, I was just kidding. I was really lying. ’” Or Trump can tell his fellow Republicans that they’re wasting their time on legislation that cuts those programs. ”That would be the right thing to do,” Sanders said. ”And I look forward to Trump telling the American people that that is what he intends to do.” To press the issue, Sanders, along with congressional leaders, is calling on his colleagues to organize Jan. 15 rallies protesting threats to the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid."
139,"Right now, a big chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a frozen thread. British researchers monitoring the crack in the Larsen C ice shelf say that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent. ”After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement Thursday by the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area. The crack in question has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When the fissure reaches the far side of the shelf, an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off, leaving the Larsen C 10 percent smaller. ”This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Luckman wrote. Ice shelves are important because they provide a buffer between the sea and the ice that sits on land, in this case on the Antarctic Peninsula. Without a healthy ice shelf, water from melting glaciers can flow straight to the sea, raising the sea level. It’s normal for the front of an ice shelf to crack and break off, known as calving. But it’s unusual for that to happen faster than the ice shelf can refreeze. Some scientists worry that the missing piece will destabilize the whole ice shelf. A smaller ice shelf, Larsen B, completely splintered in a little over a month in 2002, a process that started with a similar crack. Another ice shelf, Larsen A, had disintegrated a few years before. ”Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B,” wrote Luckman. ”If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed,” he told BBC News. Larsen C is Antarctica’s   ice shelf."
140,"Michelle Obama used her last official White House speech to deliver a passionate pep talk to the nation’s young people, especially immigrants, Muslims and others who might feel slighted by the incoming Trump administration. ”Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t matter,” the first lady said, ”or like you don’t have a place in our American story, because you do.” Obama spoke at a celebration of school counselors from around the country. The annual event is one of a number of steps along with ”college signing day” that Obama and her husband have taken to encourage students to pursue higher education. ”Because let’s be honest,” the first lady said. ”If we’re always shining the spotlight on professional athletes or recording artists or Hollywood celebrities, if those are the only achievements we celebrate, then why would we ever think kids would see college as a priority?” A graduate of Harvard Law School like her husband, Michelle Obama stressed that to preserve and protect their freedoms, young people should get a good education, so they can be active and productive citizens. She added young people should not lose hope, even when they encounter the inevitable obstacles. ”It is our fundamental belief in the power of hope that has allowed us to rise above the voices of doubt and division, of anger and fear that we have faced in our own lives and the life of this country,” Obama said. ”Our hope that if we work hard enough and believe in ourselves, we can be whatever we dream, regardless of the limitations that others may place on us.” At times, others have tried to place limits on Michelle Obama herself. In a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey last month, Obama described her surprise at being tagged during her husband’s first White House campaign as an ”angry black woman.” ”Wow, where did that come from?” Obama told Winfrey. ”I thought, ’Let me live my life out loud so that people can then see and then judge for themselves.’ ” After eight years in the White House, the first lady has won a favorable judgment from most Americans. She enjoys higher favorability ratings than her husband does. On Friday, she encouraged young people to be focused and determined, not afraid. ”When people see us for who we truly are, maybe, just maybe they, too, will be inspired to rise to their best possible selves,” Obama said. With her voice breaking, Obama recalled how her own father worked hard at a city water plant, hoping that one day his children would go to college and have opportunities he never dreamed of. ”That’s the kind of hope that every single one of us  —   politicians, parents, preachers, all of us  —   need to be providing for our young people,” Obama said. ”Because that is what moves this country forward every single day. Our hope for the future and the hard work that hope inspires.” ”That’s my final message to young people as first lady,” she said as the audience in the White House East Room stood and applauded. ”Lead by example with hope, never fear. And know that I will be with you, rooting for you and working to support you for the rest of my life.”"
141,"Counselors play a big role in helping students succeed: They help with scheduling, college applications and with issues like mental health. Since 2015, first lady Michelle Obama has honored a school counselor of the year in a ceremony at the White House. Friday, the honor goes to Terri Tchorzynski of the Calhoun Area Career Center in Battle Creek, Mich. where she works with   and   drawn from 20 public high schools in Calhoun County. Tchorzynski started her career as a high school English teacher, before getting her master’s degree in counseling  —   a role she says she ”always knew she wanted.” NPR Ed caught up with Tchorzynski about her work in Michigan and the important role she sees counselors playing in schools. Is it true that school counselors don’t like the term ”guidance counselor” anymore? Can you explain that? We use the term ”school counselor” now. We cringe when we hear the term ”guidance counselor.” It’s kind of that   model from years ago, the, ”I’m gonna guide you towards your college or career.” It’s from when people didn’t really understand what was going on with the whole realm of school counseling. But now with a school counselor, we’re much more than just the guidance counselor. So what is the role of a school counselor? There are three ways to break it down. First is college and career readiness, preparing our students for what life looks like after high school. If it’s college, then getting them focused on FAFSA completion, college scholarships and being academically ready. If it’s for a career, figuring out what pathways are appropriate for them and what careers are available to them that fit their interests and their skills. Second, we work in the   domain. This is more dealing with behavior, or with personal problems that students may have that impact their education. So we help them through those things so they can be successful in school. Third, we’ll call the academic domain. This is working with attendance or grades, or making sure students have enough credits to graduate high school. So we are people that work in mental health, that work in the academic domains, that work in college and career readiness. We use data! How do you use data? Can you give me an example? We use a lot of data in our building, so that our stakeholders have a clear picture of what we’re doing in the counseling department. Here’s an example about modifying behavior. At the beginning of every single school year we do presentations for every single one of our students about bullying and harassment, because we know that it’s an issue in our schools and it’s an issue with our students and we want to make sure that it’s addressed early. And then we start monitoring behavior referrals. Before we started all this, the behavior referrals were not set up a certain way. But as a counseling department, we wanted to know specifically, if there’s a behavior issue that’s connected to bullying or harassment, we want it marked. So we can start identifying if there are issues in certain programs  —   we don’t have classrooms, instead we call them programs. We created this tag in our student data system, so any time a referral went through about bullying and harassment, we were flagged. We could see when and where there were incidents and tailored our interventions based on that data. We’ve pulled out certain groups and done some positive support groups for specific students too. What’s one thing you’ve learned as a school counselor? A lot of times it’s very easy to get centered in on the students who come to your office all the time or the students that are very outgoing. They’re the A students that just want additional support. But there’s a large population of students that just don’t know to ask for help. Maybe they are     and so they don’t even know what they need to know in order to go to school. So I think it’s so important for counselors to think about the students that maybe don’t have a voice. We need to be the voice for students that don’t have the voice. It’s my job as a counselor to make sure that all these students, regardless of race, ethnicity, income or what kind of backgrounds they come from, it’s my job to give them the same support. So sometimes I may be more intentional about reaching out to those students because I know they won’t be the ones that are coming to me first. So I guess the advice is  —   be proactive. We’ve reported about the mental health crisis in our nation’s schools  —   and it’s important to note how important counselors are in helping students with those types of problems. Oh, definitely. Having our students and our families understand that that’s part of our role, is important. Some people just don’t understand that it is a part of what we do. It’s not just writing letters of recommendation and telling students where they should go to college. There’s also a big part of our jobs as counselors that focuses on the   side . .. there is a huge need for that now. We have those community contacts, so if I have families that are uncertain about local community agencies and how they can help, part of my role is to connect them with those agencies. What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far? As a school counselor I think the   part is really hard. It’s hard because students go through a lot of difficult things in their lives. And so when you’re dealing with student tragedies  —   student death or violence  —   or just the things some teenagers have to face, that’s really difficult. In my setting as a school counselor, there’s only so much that I can do. The more we can connect with outside agencies, that helps too, so then I can refer them out to a community agency that can help them even further. But that’s a difficult part of the job. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, because it’s challenging and sad. There’s a lot of things that our students have to deal with that are really difficult. Can you give me some examples of the things that have come up in the last seven years? Last year was a really difficult year for us. We had quite a few student tragedies. We actually lost one of our students to a car accident, and that obviously impacted all of us in our building. We have students that do   and suicide, unfortunately. A lot of what I see nowadays with teenagers is just homelessness and poverty. I have a lot of students that are   or    and for whatever reason, they just they can’t live in their home, and so they need to find somewhere else to live. Sometimes, they’re living with different friends, living day to day. That’s always a struggle, because as a counselor, I want them to be successful, but at the same time, they’re dealing with poverty and homelessness and trying to figure out where they are supposed to stay that night. So what keeps your spirits up? I just know that as a counselor, that’s why I’m there. That’s my role. The more students can trust me, and know that that is part of what I do and that I can help support them, the better. I always tell them, ”I don’t have this magic pill that makes everything go away.” But I’m a resource for them to help them in whatever it is that they need. Unfortunately, school counselors can be rare. In Michigan, where you’re from, the student to school counselor ratio is 732 to 1. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of 250 to 1. Clearly, that’s far from the norm. What are your thoughts on that? When you think about the personnel you have in your schools, school counselors are the ones that play the role in regards to impacting academic behavior and attendance. So if you don’t have a school counselor in your building, then there is a certain person that plays all of those roles and puts all those pieces together. It’s so important for people to understand that counselors are needed at every single level, kindergarten through 12th grade. Elementary students have just as many needs, so it’s just as important to establish early what a school counselor can do for students, In Michigan, elementary school counselors are very rare. In our county I think we have one school district that has one. In my own kids’ school, they have one that will float between three or four buildings. Counselors just can’t offer the services that are needed for those students when they just have such large caseloads."
142,"Prolific Indian actor Om Puri, who for decades appeared in films all over the world, has died at age 66 in Mumbai. Reports say Puri suffered a heart attack at his home early on Friday. Puri had roles in more than 300 movies in his career, NPR’s Rose Friedman reports for our Newscast unit. Rose says he began acting in Indian art house cinema in the 1970s and soon branched into British and American films, including Gandhi in 1982 and Charlie Wilson’s War in 2007. He appeared in the 2013 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in which he played a father struggling to pass on a sense of empathy to his Wall   son. Most recently, he starred alongside Helen Mirren in The   Journey, a 2015 film about a displaced Indian family that settles in a French village and opens a restaurant. Puri was a crossover star, as evidenced by the breadth of people mourning his death. The BBC reported that even media in Pakistan, with whom India’s relationship is often tense, are celebrating his life and career. The BBC wrote, ”[Puri] had recently spoken out against the ban imposed by India on Pakistani actors working in Bollywood films, following tensions over Kashmir,” telling an Indian TV channel, ”Pakistani artists are not terrorists.” In 2004, Puri received an honorary Order of the British Empire, an award established by King George V and given to individuals who have made distinguished contributions in their field. In 1990, he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honors, the Guardian wrote. Puri’s professional life was wildly successful, but his personal life had been turbulent in recent years. He separated from his wife, Nandita, after she wrote his biography in 2009, called Unlikely Hero: Om Puri. The book revealed explicit details about his sexual forays as a young man. Puri is survived by Nandita, whom he married in 1993, and their son. Less than a month before his death, Puri took to Twitter to reflect on his life and career:"
143,"It’s a fantasy that goes back centuries: a message in a bottle, carried ashore from   lands. Authors, artists and children alike have dreamed of such a gift from the sea. This time, though, it’s not a bottle that washes ashore. It’s eggs  —   thousands of little toy eggs. That’s what happened on the German island of Langeoog this week. Perched just off the North Sea coast, it found itself buffeted by an invasion of multicolored plastic eggs  —   much to the delight of local children, because the eggs contained toys. Police for the Lower Saxony region of Germany tweeted the evidence. Der Spiegel reports that police suspect the eggs came from a freighter that lost part of its cargo during an intense storm, which the BBC calls the worst to hit Germany’s northeastern coast since 2006. At any rate, what was lost now has been found, by many of the community’s littlest residents. The local mayor, Uwe Garrels, soon allowed the town’s local kindergartners to go pick up the toys, according to Deutsche Welle. ”The surprise eggs have found their way to freedom,” Garrels said, according to the news service, which cited broadcaster NDR. Of course, the joy of the moment wore off soon. ”At first I thought this was a wonder, because everything was so colorful and so on, but then we realized that this is a huge mess in the end,” Garrels said, according to The Associated Press. He also noted the plastic bags and other materials that have washed ashore on the island. (All of which, it must be said, can cause some very real problems for wildlife.) Still, all these little eggs contained an extra treat with their toys. Like the immortal bottle, they bore notes from afar. There was just one problem for the German children who received them: They were written in Russian."
144,"A Canadian doctor who is opposed to a widely used drug for morning sickness has fired another volley. Writing in the journal PLOS ONE, Dr. Navindra Persaud in the department of family and community medicine at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, notes that an unpublished study that supported use of the drug, conducted in the 1970s, is seriously flawed. On the one hand, this paper is a triumph for scientific openness. Pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies often guard this information, making it difficult for scientists to draw independent conclusions about   research. And there are stories about drugs that have managed to get onto the market based on overly rosy interpretations of study results (think Vioxx, the   drug that was later pulled after it was linked to higher risk for heart disease). Academic researchers have been pushing for greater openness when it comes to raw data. But because the study was never published, it wasn’t even subject to the scrutiny of peer review back in the day. The study plays a peripheral role in determining the safety and efficacy of the drug, which was approved by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration in 2013. That new drug application made its case based on other studies, not the flawed data from decades ago. But the FDA did review the previous history of this drug, including the study that Persaud has called into question, and considered it supporting evidence. The FDA had no qualms about the safety of this drug, marketed in the United States as Diclegis. It’s a combination of two common    medications: an antihistamine and vitamin B6. There’s actually a long backstory about this pairing. In the 1950s, a somewhat different formulation that had three principal ingredients was marketed as Bendectin. In the   the drugmaker dropped one of the ingredients. But that came off the U. S. market in 1983. Lawyers saw the drug as a potentially rich target for product liability cases, and the drug company ultimately pulled the drug off the market to avoid lawsuits, rather than out of actual safety concerns. The Canadian company, Duchesnay, continued to market a generic version of the drug, rebranded as Diclectin in Canada. (It also makes Diclegis.) For every two pregnancies in Canada, doctors write one prescription for Diclectin, according to Persaud. The drug was heavily promoted by a prominent Canadian researcher, Dr. Gideon Koren, at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He received funding from Duchesnay. According to an   story in Maclean’s magazine, Persaud felt Koren had gone too far in pushing this drug. ”We are trying to provide patients and doctors with access to complete and accurate information so that they can make informed decisions,” Persaud told Shots in an email. ”This information may lead regulators like the FDA and Health Canada to revisit previous decisions,” he added. ”Patients and their clinicians may also make different decisions based on this information.” The FDA told Shots that it is reviewing the PLOS ONE paper. The drug has not been as heavily used in the United States (though the company did hire Kim Kardashian to promote it on social media, which drew a rebuke from the FDA). The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says pregnant women with morning sickness shouldn’t reach hastily for the pill bottle. It recommends first that women take a multivitamin eat dry toast or crackers drink fluids avoid bad smells, and take other basic steps to reduce morning sickness. Only if those measures fail does the group recommend a doctor’s visit to ask about the prescription. And women taking that step should be aware that, while the FDA approved the drug (to be prescribed only after simpler measures have been tried and found wanting) reviewers there weren’t impressed by its effectiveness, noting ”the treatment effect is small.” Using a   measure of nausea and vomiting called the PUQE score (who says scientists are humorless!) women taking Diclectin reported a 4. 7 point improvement, versus a 3. 9 point improvement for women taking placebo. So the drug was only marginally better than a placebo, but that was good enough for FDA approval.  You can email Richard Harris at rharris@npr. org."
145,"Russia’s recent cyber adventures have the hallmarks of an old Soviet specialty: disinformation. While many Americans have just awoken to the world of disinformation  —   sometimes known as ”fake news”  —   in the recent presidential election, Moscow’s efforts date back decades and have become increasingly prominent over the past decade as techniques have been updated for the digital age. The spread of disinformation through active measures was a central tactic of Soviet information operations as a way to influence foreign governments and their populations, undermine relations between nations, and weaken those who opposed communism. Dezinformatsiya, as Russians call it, is meant to instill fear and confuse audiences, blurring the lines between truth, falsehood and reality. Disinformation can spread conspiracy theories and reinforce ”filter bubbles” that isolate readers and viewers from alternative viewpoints and can create a cloud of confusion and paranoia. Spreading disinformation, I recently led an independent study on how Russia uses disinformation to influence ethnic Russians who live in former Soviet Union states. In our report, we highlight how disinformation is effective because it is quick, cheap and yields high rewards. We assessed that Russia has a number of tools in its disinformation toolbox  —   including its   Russian and   television network Russian Television, platforms such as the Sputnik news service that enable audiences outside Russia to subscribe to their services free of charge, and the deployment of trolls in the blogosphere and on social media. In some instances, Russia’s troll armies manage multiple fake accounts, and each account posts articles on social media 50 to 100 times a day. Even before the explosion of social media, the effects of Russia’s modern disinformation efforts could be seen during the 2008   war, when Russia used picture defacement to spread fake images and news stories. Russia hacked into Georgian infrastructure and the official website of   President Mikhail Saakashvili. More recently, in Ukraine, Russia spread many conspiracy theories and fake stories in 2014, during the Crimea crisis and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. In the latter case, Western sources have pointed to a Russian missile being involved and believe it was fired by either the Russians themselves or Ukrainian separatists allied with Moscow. Possible consequences, If unaddressed, Russia’s disinformation tactics will have at least three significant consequences for global stability. First, Russia’s disinformation machinery could inspire other countries, terrorists, transnational criminal organizations and individuals to emulate this behavior. An immediate effect could be attempts to disrupt the coming elections in Germany, France, Serbia, and the Netherlands. Different groups act for different reasons. Some purveyors of disinformation, like the Islamic State, have ideological motives. Others look at it as an easy way to make an extra dollar. In Macedonia, for example, young people found it lucrative to set up websites to share fake news that interfered with the U. S. election. Their motives were more economic than political. Second, disinformation can bleed into conspiracy theories that can instantly spread on social media and may have major national security implications. In December, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad tweeted incorrectly that Israel was threatening Pakistan with nuclear weapons after this disinformation appeared on AWD News, a   website. While the Israeli Defense Ministry questioned this claim, the defense minister’s tweet was reposted hundreds of times, spreading fake content within a matter of seconds. Earlier in December, stolen emails containing a brief exchange between John Podesta and the owner of a pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, in Washington, D. C. led to a fake news story that a child sex ring was being run out of the restaurant. A North Carolina man then drove to Washington and fired a gun, saying he wanted to rescue sex slaves he was convinced were harbored at the restaurant. Identifying disinformation, Third, Russia’s disinformation campaigns help highlight one of the biggest and most dangerous challenges in Western society: an inability to think critically about information. In a   news cycle and   universe, media consumers have developed an unprecedented need to access, process and spread information, be it true or not. But the youth in particular have a limited ability to identify fake news content. If information seems newsworthy and provides high entertainment value, few people will think hard before tweeting it out or posting it on Facebook. The challenge is further amplified when notable figures spread disinformation via social media, reinforcing the virtual conspiracy bubble. And when disinformation comes from those believed to be credible  —   such as friends, family and colleagues  —   it is even more likely to be treated uncritically, as factual information. Countering Russia’s disinformation will require a set of actions including debunking fake news, messaging and creating counternarratives for targeted populations both in the U. S. and globally who are sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies and strengthening individual and media literacy programs around the world. The muddling mix of rumors, lies and news has dominated our conversation to the point that we are no longer certain what is true. Citizens, news and social media outlets, both organizations and users, cannot fall victim to disinformation. We have a responsibility to think critically about the information and stories that are disseminated. Without doing so, we will continue to empower Russia and others to spread disinformation and propaganda, risk our security and create distrust in our society. Vera Zakem is a research scientist who leads initiatives on European stability, media and information influence at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization in Arlington, Va. The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not represent the views of CNA or any of its sponsors."
146,"After a woman was   and died of her injuries in New Delhi in December 2012, the Indian government tried to set up swift and judicious ways to report and address such crimes. Fast track courts were set up, social workers and police were given sensitization training. Women were told things would be better when they stepped out.   four years and the country is buzzing angrily at how much has not changed. Women bringing in the new year in downtown Bangalore, the country’s cosmopolitan IT hub, were surrounded and groped by mobs of pushing, shoving, handsy men. Photos and videos captured that night show young women trying to push through crowds of up to 300 men pressing in on them. Some of the women were crying, some yelling, others were being defended by their friends. Many of the women said they used their shoes to beat off gropers. A short distance away, an emcee walked out of his event and stumbled upon 25 men threatening a group of women. According to some women on the scene, not only was the harassment frightening, the apathy of cops who looked away and didn’t intervene was worse. In the days that have followed, the official stance on the mass harassment has done somersaults. First the police vowed to punish the offenders and called on the victims to file police complaints. Three days later, the police said they found no street camera footage to support the claims of sexual harassment, although the police commissioner has since said there is ”credible evidence” of the attacks. And then came the remarks of home minister G. Parameshwara, one of the highest ranking officials in the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital. He went on record to say: ”Youngsters . .. try to copy the Westerners not only in the mindset but even the dressing. So some disturbance, some girls are harassed, these kind of things do happen.” On January 3, Abu Azmi of Mumbai, the state leader of a political party, said on national TV: ”If my sister or daughter is roaming around on December 31 with random men who aren’t their husband or brother, I don’t think that’s right.” He added, ”If there’s petrol near fire, it will burn. If there is sugar, ants will come.” His words were highlighted in angry tweets. Trisha Shetty, a lawyer, is the   of SheSays, a nonprofit group that educates young women about their rights, especially in the areas of sexual violence. She said the responses from officials were reprehensible. ”We reject this sense of entitlement men have over women’s bodies, sexuality and spaces,” she said. And, she added, the display of such parochial mindsets from people in charge of ensuring safety in public spaces is a huge setback for women. Meanwhile, on social media the #NotAllMen hashtag started to trend the next day defending men who didn’t do it, arguing that women were generalizing their anger. Japleen Pasricha, who runs the Feminism in India platform, was a critic of #NotAllMen tweets: ”The #NotAllMen tag detracted from the conversation, hijacked the narrative, and moved it away from how to deal with what’s happening. We’re not saying all men do this, but we do know all women are harassed.” To counter it, Feminism In India and Pasricha dusted off the globally used #YesAllWomen hashtag. Their tweet inviting Indian women to share their stories of public harassment, assault and abuse has been retweeted more than 900 times, with at least 1, 000 responses, says Pasricha. Sharing stories publicly may not change too many minds (although one Twitter troll changed his handle to ”I’m sorry” after being taken to task for sexism) m says Pasricha, ”But, mainly we wanted to take the narrative back.” A petition has been floated demanding unconditional apologies from the politicians, and on January 21 solidarity marches will be held in seven cities: Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata, organized and supported by 18 organizations, including Take Back the Night and Why Loiter, under the umbrella hashtag #IWillGoOut2017, Will a march make a difference? In late 2012 and early 2013, protests and vigils took place across the country, but soon other issues overtook demands for women’s safety. ”In the wake of the Nirbhaya case [the 2012 rape] the nation was in fervor  —   taking to the streets, debating on various media outlets,” the organizers of the #IWillGoOut march told me in a collectively authored email. ”Some blamed her and her partner. Some fathers vowed to never send their daughters out again because the world was cruel to them. Is this how we deal with assault? By limiting the freedoms and mobility of half the population?” What’s more, cases of sexual attack are on the rise. Data shows that police reports of assault on women rose 92 percent from 42, 968 in 2011 to 82, 422 in 2015. But conviction rates declined by 5 percent. In Karnataka, the rate of conviction is 1. 2 percent. Sukriti Gupta,   at the Academy For Earth Sustainability, an environment education organization, said she’s still hopeful of making a difference. ”I strongly believe reclaiming public space, making our voices heard, is important to remind and encourage others, especially women, that there is a support system out there  —   that we have a right and a place in our country, at night, regardless of what we wear.” Plus, she said, ”the visual nature of marches can cross socioeconomic barriers and provide food for thought for those who are normally not engaged in   press such as women and young girls living in more conservative families and slum areas.” The organizers of the march told me that the Bangalore harassment was not an isolated incident: ”It is a visible part of systemic inequality that prevents, hinders and shames half the population from moving around their cities, their homes. It is time to stake a claim in our landscape and our rights to own the streets and go out!” India’s tourism minister expressed the opposite perspective in August 2016. After high profile rape cases across the country, some involving foreign tourists, in August 2016 Mahesh Sharma advised foreign visitors to avoid wearing skirts and venturing out at night: ”For their own safety, women foreign tourists should not wear short dresses and skirts,” he said, because ”Indian culture is different from the Western.” This attitude toward safety seems to have been a contentious issue even a century ago. The Twitter account for the Why Loiter group has shared a quote from 1905 that mocks how keeping women safe means locking them up rather than changing or punishing the attitudes that endanger them."
147,"Maintaining a   relationship can be difficult, but Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim and Jamie Smith have managed to do it  —   and they’ve become megastars in the process. They make up the band The xx, and they’ve been making music together since they were kids. The band’s two singers, Croft and Sim, met in preschool in a London suburb when they were only 3 years old. ”They had music classes, and I remember sharing a xylophone in that music class,” Sim says. ”I’ve also got pictures of it, so I’m sure I’m building memories off a picture.” Croft says another old photo of the two of them sticks out to her. ”There’s one of us standing on a bench as if we’re sort of on a stage. Oliver’s on the side that he stands on [when we perform] and I’m on the side that I stand on, which is quite a beautiful coincidence, I think,” Croft says. Their friendship with the third member of The xx, producer Jamie Smith, began a bit later, when the trio was 11 years old. The three formed a   and insular crew. ”I was starting out a new school, and Romy and Oliver had come to a new school as well,” Smith says. ”There were only a few people there that I liked, so I was quite happy just to stay us. I think just keeping your closest friends around is the best.” The trio released its debut album, xx, in 2009, and has sold millions of records since then. All three bandmates have grown in different ways: Smith released a solo album under the name Jamie xx Sim gave up drinking Croft got engaged. Now, the group has a new album called I See You coming out Jan. 13. Croft says one song on the new record, called ”Test Me,” touches on the challenges of close friendships. She says the lyrics describe ”a sort of hard time in our friendship, between Oliver and I  —   and a time when all three of us were quite distant from each other emotionally and geographically.” But Croft says those challenges led to some important changes. ”It sort of represents a new time of us actually talking about things rather than just pushing them down, and I think that was a good thing,” Croft says. ”Sometimes we would say things to each other in the music before we could say it to each other.” Croft, Sim and Smith shared these and other stories with NPR’s Ari Shapiro. Hear their full conversation at the audio link."
148,"On a bright Sunday afternoon last November, Anastasia Popova was picketing outside the Russian Embassy in Washington with a dozen other activists. ”Russia will be free! Russia will be free!” they chanted at the hulking white building on the other side of the street. The forlorn group of protesters held up signs calling for the release of a jailed Russian activist, Ildar Dadin, and displayed photographs of other people they called political prisoners in their home country. Under somewhat different circumstances, Popova, 29, might have been sitting inside the embassy looking out. She aspired to become a diplomat, but after getting involved in opposition politics in Russia, she had to make a choice. ”They told me: ’You can’t work for the government in the daytime and prepare protests against that government in the evening,’” Popova said. She chose politics  —   and joined the staff of Ilya Ponomaryov, one of the lone opposition voices in the Russian parliament. A time of uncertainty  Five years ago, Russia was in upheaval. Vladimir Putin’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term as Russia’s president was fueling street protests in Moscow and other cities. Politicians like Ponomaryov saw a potential opening to begin liberalizing Russia’s tightly controlled political system. Hopes for a thaw were soon dashed. Putin, who had been president from 2000 to 2008, and prime minister from 2008 to 2012, won the presidential election in March 2012. Many protest leaders found themselves facing lawsuits and jail time. In 2014, Ponomaryov was the only member of parliament to vote against annexing Crimea, which Russia had just seized from Ukraine. Russian authorities then started building a criminal case against him. Ponomaryov moved to the United States, and before long, Popova says she got a warning that she, too, should leave the country  —   immediately. ”That was the end of October 2014. And that was my personal Halloween, you know, when I found myself in the U. S. with just a suitcase, and I had no idea where to go next,” she said. A long tradition, Popova follows in a long history of Russian political exiles dating back to the 1800s. In the past century, there have been spurts of immigration from Russia to the U. S.: Jews escaping persecution, Russian aristocrats fleeing revolutionaries, and dissidents getting the boot from the communist regime. Russian applications for political asylum in the U. S. have increased for the fourth straight year, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Radio Free Europe. In the last fiscal year, 1, 912 Russians applied for asylum, the highest level in more than two decades. Exiles granted asylum may be safe from persecution abroad. But they’re also cut off from their homeland. ”Once they’re out, it’s actually quite difficult for them to have an influence back again,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. ”They run the risk of harming contacts, even family members, if they engage in overt political activity that in some way is involving organization of protest movements still in Russia itself.” Hill said that the Internet affords little help to effect change at home. ”I think social media does add a different ingredient, but what it creates is a sort of a parallel alternative community,” she said. ”It doesn’t necessarily translate to action on the ground.” Remaining in Russia, Someone who’s still trying to take action inside Russia is Ilya Yashin, an opposition leader refusing to leave. In late October he visited the U. S. to build bridges to members of Russia’s   diaspora. ”Sure, I agree, the risks are high. And from a certain point of view it probably is crazy to oppose Putin inside Russia. But somebody has to do it,” Yashin said in an interview in an Alexandria, Va. coffee shop. ”The Putin regime is happy to get rid of its opponents and does everything it can so that we leave,” Yashin said. ”That’s the reason I see my mission to do everything so that Putin’s critics stay in Russia. That’s why I haven’t left.” Yashin said many political activists left Russia after his friend, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was assassinated outside the Kremlin in February 2015. As for Popova, she said exile was her only option. ”I believe that being in the U. S. and telling the U. S. government the truth about the political situation in Russia is more useful than just being tortured in jail,” she said. When it comes to dealing with Russia in the future, Popova had a message for   Donald Trump: Negotiate hard, don’t make any concessions as a sign of good will, and keep expectations low."
149,"The official Electoral College vote tally just concluded, but some Democratic House members decided to put on a bit of a show. More than half a dozen members rose at different points to object to the results of the election, citing Russian hacking, the legitimacy of the election and electors, voting machines, voter suppression and more. Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts was the first to rise. Amid grumbling from other members, Vice President Biden, who presided in his role as president of the Senate, gaveled the body to order. He noted that any objection must be in writing, signed by a member of the House and a member of the Senate. He asked McGovern if he had fulfilled all three. McGovern admitted the objection was not signed by a member of the Senate, and Biden threw it out. ”In that case the objection cannot be entertained,” Biden said, and Republicans stood and cheered. Jamie Raskin of Maryland interrupted later. Biden cut him off, read the requirements again and asked if his objection was signed by a member of the Senate. Raskin, too, admitted it was not. This went on with others. Biden grew increasingly curt. At times, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan could be seen laughing behind him. ”It is over,” Biden chided. Three protesters were escorted out of the House chamber. NPR’s Susan Davis reports that at least one was arrested. NPR’s Ron Elving notes that it all was a similar scene to one that played out in January 2001 after George W. Bush’s election, the Florida recount and the Supreme Court decision that stopped it. The vice president, who had to play Biden’s role then, was none other than Al Gore himself. The objectors were all from the House, many from Florida. After overruling several objectors the same way Biden did, Gore jokingly noted that it was becoming somewhat painful. ”This is going to sound familiar to you,” he noted, ” —  to all of us. ...”"
150,"A golden statue commemorating the plight of ”comfort women”  —   a euphemism for the Korean women and girls forced by the Japanese to work as sex slaves in   brothels during World War II  —   has caused a diplomatic row between Japan and South Korea. At the end of December, activists placed the golden statue of a young woman sitting in a chair in front of the Japanese Consulate in the southern city of Busan, South Korea. Local authorities initially removed the statue, citing a lack of permits, The Korea Herald reported. But after public outcry, authorities allowed the statue to be replaced and the district mayor held a press conference to apologize. Now, Japan is taking countermeasures. Speaking at a news conference Friday, Japan’s chief Cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, announced that the country is withdrawing both its ambassador to South Korea and the consul general at Busan. Suga also said Japan is pulling out of some   economic talks, according to state broadcaster NHK. Calling the situation ”extremely regrettable,” Suga said the statue is a break with the landmark deal in 2015 between the two countries over comfort women. That deal was billed ”final and irreversible,” ostensibly smoothing over the persistent source of strain between the two countries, as we reported. It ”included an apology from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a billion yen (roughly $8. 3 million) fund to support the 46 surviving Korean women.” But some activists spoke out against the deal, as the BBC reported: ”Critics say it was reached without consultation with victims, did not contain Japan’s acknowledgement of legal responsibility, and did not provide direct compensation to the victims.” Suga also accused South Korea of violating ”the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which requires host countries to protect diplomatic missions from the impairment of their dignity,” NHK reported. Korea’s finance ministry said it ”regrets” that Japan suspended economic talks, including those focused on a potential currency swap deal, the Korea Herald reported. ”It is desirable that the two countries continue bilateral economic and financial cooperation regardless of political and diplomatic relations,” the ministry added. The Associated Press reported that another statue by the same artist has stood in front of Japan’s embassy in Seoul since 2011, prior to the agreement. And the BBC says that ”another 37 are thought to exist in South Korea, while in Australia a similar statue has sparked a row between Korean and Japanese community groups.”"
151,"  Donald Trump has promised to step back from his business interests when he takes office. He says he’ll let his two adult sons take the helm and that he won’t make any new deals while he’s president. While he’s unwinding some of his roughly 500 business deals involving about 20 countries as Inauguration Day approaches, many others are moving forward, causing concern about conflicts of interest. Most of the projects are licensing deals, says Joshua Kurlantzick, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. ”They pay Trump a fee and someone builds the resorts and they slap his name on it,” he says. ”So it’s not like he’s got his own skin in the game or he’s possibly going to be involved in shaping the resorts.” Still, Kurlantzick and others say any involvement by Trump in a project, even if it’s just his name, can create a conflict of interest  —   complicating any national security, foreign policy or economic concerns the U. S. has with a particular country. For example, in a $150 million project in Manila, Trump had received up to $5 million for the use of his name. This is in a country where human rights concerns have been raised as a result of President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal   campaign. More than 6, 000 people have been killed since Duterte took office in June. Robert Manning, a former National Intelligence Council official now with the Atlantic Council, says Trump has been reluctant to criticize Duterte’s human rights policies. ”Whether his business interests are a factor in that, I don’t know how you ascertain that. I think it would certainly give [Trump] a motivation,” he says. To further complicate things, Duterte recently named Trump’s main business partner in the $150 million Manila Trump Tower deal, Jose E. B. Antonio, as the Philippines special envoy to the U. S. on trade and economic policy. Manning says it won’t be illegal for Trump to interact with Antonio in his capacity as trade representative. ”It’s the sticky question of deciding where national interests stop and business begins, and vice versa,” Manning says. Trump has promised to keep his hands off his business empire while president. But Kurlantzick says Trump’s sons will have to build up strong relations with powerful people to help keep overseas projects moving. And this could be problematic. Kurlantzick cites an example in Indonesia, where the Trump Organization is involved in two resort projects. One of Trump’s Indonesian contacts was Setya Novanto, the speaker of the House of Representatives. He had to step down in December 2015 after being accused of corruption. ”He briefly gave up his post, which was like the equivalent of [House Speaker] Paul Ryan, last year, because he was caught on an audio trying to get a $4 billion payment from an American mining company,” Kurlantzick explains. In September 2015, during the presidential campaign, Novanto went to New York to meet with Trump  —   and accompanied him at a news conference, where Trump praised him as ”an amazing man” and a ”great man.” Stephen Gillers, an ethics professor at New York University Law School, says Trump needs to be careful not to erode public confidence. ”What we want to make sure of is that the deal our president cuts is solely for the benefit of the United States, that there’s no other interest that could be affecting his judgement, and that includes his own financial interests,” he says. The only way for Trump to do that, Gillers says, is to divest himself from all his business interests when he becomes president."
152,"  Donald Trump is nominating Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer, to be the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some who know him say Clayton is a good man for the job, but critics say his ties to big financial firms create too many conflicts of interest. The big question is whether Trump has chosen a fox to guard the henhouse. Clayton works as a lawyer for a firm that has represented Goldman Sachs for decades. He also represented Ally Financial and other financial firms when they struck settlements related to wrongdoing in the subprime mortgage scandal. And Clayton’s wife currently works for Goldman Sachs. ”I do think that having a chairman of the SEC whose spouse works at Goldman Sachs or another large investment bank is a serious problem,” says Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and the former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush. Painter says Goldman and other big banks had their business models severely restricted by the   Wall Street Reform Act, and there is already pressure building to scale back that law during the Trump administration. ”The decision about whether to repeal   or how to enforce   and rulemaking under    —   all those decisions will have an enormous impact on Goldman Sachs,” Painter says. ”And to have Goldman Sachs have a controlling influence over the career of the SEC chairman’s spouse, I think could be an untenable situation.” Still, Painter says he is withholding judgement until he watches the nomination hearing process. Maybe there’s a way to resolve that and other conflicts. And he says just because Clayton is a Wall Street insider, that doesn’t mean he’d be a bad SEC chairman. ”There are plenty of good Wall Street people who could actually aggressively regulate Wall Street. They know where the bodies are buried they know where the reforms are necessary,” Painter says. So, is Clayton that kind of Wall Street insider  —   or the kind that would be soft on enforcement? ”What I understand about him is that he’s a very, very capable lawyer, very knowledgeable, practical and very ” says Bill McLucas, who was head of enforcement for the SEC under the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And, McLucas says, if Clayton makes it through the congressional hearing and vetting process, if past SEC chairs are any guide, ”once they are confirmed it is rare that the public interest is not their guiding principle.” Still, there are plenty of skeptics. Former Rep. Barney Frank says he sees more of the same here  —   a series of nominations by Trump of people who are too beholden to Wall Street. ”It is one more example of the biggest    I believe, in American history  —   namely Trump winning by claiming he was going to stand up to Wall Street and be tough and then becoming the best friend Wall Street and the opponents of regulation have ever had,” Frank says. Frank says the   law that bears his name gave the SEC strong powers to protect the financial system as well as everyday Americans who are buying stocks or buying their first home. But, he says, ”You cannot make laws that are  .” Frank says he’s worried that even if Republicans don’t have the votes ultimately to repeal laws such as   the appointments Trump is trying to make could still severely weaken regulation. And, Frank says, that could make the financial system and everyday Americans less protected from wrongdoing."
153,"Tilikum, possibly the most famous orca in the world, has died, according to SeaWorld Orlando. He was the subject of the influential documentary Blackfish, and outcry over his story prompted SeaWorld to stop breeding orcas in captivity. Tilikum was estimated to be 36 years old, SeaWorld said in a statement, which is old for a captive killer whale. He faced ”very serious health issues,” the park says, and had been declining for months. The orca died Friday morning surrounded by trainers and veterinary staff. A necropsy is required to determine the official cause of death, but he had suffered a ”persistent and complicated bacterial lung infection,” the park says, which had been treated by a range of medicines and therapies. Tilikum was 22 feet long and weighed more than 11, 000 pounds, according to The Associated Press. He was born off the waters of Iceland, captured and performed in captivity for decades  —   first at the   Sealand of the Pacific and then at SeaWorld Orlando. A prolific breeder, he sired more than 20 calves. But he became notorious for aggressive behavior. In the ’90s, he was implicated in two deaths: a trainer who drowned and a man who was found dead in his tank. Then, in 2010, he killed SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau, holding her underwater until she died of drowning and blunt force trauma. In the immediate aftermath of that incident, the question was whether Tilikum would be put down, and whether he would return to performing, as he did in 2011. But then a 2013 documentary called Blackfish changed the narrative around aggressive behavior by orcas, and by Tilikum in particular. In the film, former trainers at SeaWorld criticized the park’s practices as harmful for orcas and dangerous for trainers. They argued that animals such as Tilikum behaved aggressively because of the stress and trauma of captivity. As NPR’s Greg Allen reports, animal welfare groups have long protested against marine parks holding killer whales in captivity at all. When Blackfish came out  —   and aired on CNN, where it reached millions of viewers  —   the public joined in the outcry. The park has denied allegations that it mistreated orcas, but it did shift its position on captive breeding. Greg reports: ”Orcas are an intelligent, social species that spend much of their life in family groups and in the wild range over thousands of miles. Advocates say holding these huge mammals in a tank is cruel. . .. ”Activists stepped up their campaign against SeaWorld following the release of Blackfish. Attendance dropped at the park, a decline the company attributed in part to public reaction to the film. In response, SeaWorld’s new CEO Joel Manby announced the company was ending its orca breeding program  —   making this the last generation of killer whales at its parks. . .. Following SeaWorld’s decision to end its orca breeding program, [Jeffrey] Ventre and three other former SeaWorld trainers issued a statement. ’We’d like to send love to Tilikum,’ they wrote. ’In the end, his message was heard.’ ” Members of the public and former SeaWorld trainers also called for Tilikum to be released back into the wild, but SeaWorld says its captive orcas could not survive in the open sea. Tim Zimmerman, who wrote about Brancheau’s death in Outside magazine and was a producer on Blackfish, told Greg there was a deep well of public sympathy for Tilikum. ”I think that’s the most amazing thing that comes out of Tilikum’s story,” he said. ”He killed three human beings. And yet when you learn about his life story, he does become the victim and you do sympathize with him.”"
154,"Officials in the West African nation of Ivory Coast say soldiers have overrun police stations and seized the country’s   city, Bouake. It has been six years since the West African nation emerged from a civil war, during which Bouake was the headquarters of the rebellion. NPR’s Ofeibea   said there were also reports of gunfire in two other cities, Daloa and Korhogo, and that it wasn’t clear whether the attacks were a mutiny by current or former troops. As Ofeibea reported for NPR’s Newscast unit: ”Troops reportedly seized weapons from police stations and took up positions at the entrance to Bouake. One soldier says former fighters integrated into Ivory Coast’s army were demanding bonuses of $8, 000 apiece  —   plus a house. . .. ”A statement from Ivorian Defense Minister   Donwahi has called on soldiers to remain calm and return to their barracks, to allow, he says, for lasting solutions to the latest crisis in Ivory Coast, which has recently been burnishing its democratic credentials.” A member of the national assembly representing Bouake, Bema Fofana, told the BBC that ”the soldiers did not appear to have a leader or spokesman, making it difficult to negotiate with them,” the broadcaster reported, and that ”most of the soldiers were former rebels who were integrated into the army after the civil war.” The BBC also reported that a resident who asked not to be identified said soldiers armed with automatic rifles ”fired at the offices of the state broadcaster in the city.” ”They are heavily armed and parading through the city of Daloa,” a student named Karim Sanogo told The Associated Press. ”Security forces have abandoned their posts. Everyone has returned home to seek shelter.” Earlier this year, a terrorist attack in a tourist city on the country’s coast threatened the fragile peace sought after the civil war. In March, militants from   in the Islamic Maghreb killed more than a dozen people at beach hotels, as we reported. ”This country, once an oasis of peace, security, stability and prosperity, is emerging from a devastating decade of political violence and a civil war,” Ofeibea reported at the time. ”The economy was on the rebound.”"
155,"An overwhelming majority of people disapprove of Republican lawmakers’ plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act without having a ready replacement for the health care law, according to a poll released Friday. And judging by the   and lobbying in the first week of the new congressional session, many health care and business groups agree. A poll released Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 75 percent of Americans say they either want lawmakers to leave Obamacare alone, or repeal it only when they can replace it with a new health care law. Twenty percent of those polled say they want to see the law killed immediately. But Drew Altman, CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, says the poll shows lawmakers don’t have a strong mandate to repeal Obamacare. ”Most of the American people said they’re either against repealing it or they’re against repealing it unless Republicans put a replacement plan on the table,” Altman says. ”They want to see what comes next before they seen the ACA repealed.” Americans are about equally divided over whether Congress should repeal Obamacare, the poll shows. But of the 48 percent who want the law rolled back, about 60 percent want lawmakers to wait until they have an alternative plan. And Obamacare isn’t even people’s top health care concern. The vast majority  —   67 percent  —   say their top priority is finding a way to lower their health care costs. The poll findings come just days after Republicans in the Senate took the first step toward repealing President Obama’s signature health care law. They voted on Wednesday to move ahead with a budget resolution that will allow them to take funding away from Obamacare, which will effectively gut the law because the subsidies to buy insurance, and the penalties for not doing so, will disappear. Republicans say they intend to vote on repeal, but give the law time to sunset while they come up with a replacement that will give the millions of people covered under Obamacare access to insurance through some other vehicle. On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . said the replacement legislation would pass by the end of the year. But doctors, hospital groups, insurers and analysts are skeptical of that strategy. In letters, press releases and advertising campaigns, many organizations have made it clear that they want to see a replacement for the Affordable Care Act in place, or at least outlined, before Congress repeals the current law. A report released Dec. 6 by the American Hospital Association and Federation of American Hospitals warned that a repeal could cost hospitals hundreds of billions and said ”any reconsideration of the ACA should be accompanied at the same time by provisions that guarantee similar coverage to those who would lose it.” A letter sent Tuesday from the American Medical Association urged lawmakers to release details of their Obamacare replacement before repealing the current law. ”Patients and other stakeholders should be able to clearly compare current policy to new proposals so they can make informed decisions about whether it represents a step forward in the ongoing process of health reform,” the letter said. Dr. Andrew Gurman, president of the American Medical Association, says people should be able to evaluate the proposed Obamacare replacement before the current law is thrown out. ”People in this country need to understand what it is they’re being asked to substitute for what’s there now so they can have an informed opinion about whether it’s better or not,” Gurman says. And repeal and delay? ”We have a concern that that creates uncertainty in insurance markets and uncertainty in people about whether they’re going to have continuity of coverage,” Gurman adds. He says he and his members talk with lawmakers regularly. A separate study released Thursday projects that a straight repeal of the law could kill 3 million jobs across the country by 2021. That study, by the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, finds that about a third of those lost jobs would come from health care, and the rest would be in other industries such as retail, construction, finance and insurance. Total business output could be cut by as much as $2. 6 billion over four years, the report says. California, Florida and Texas would be most affected. Leighton Ku, the report’s lead author, says the debate over ACA repeal has focused almost completely on insurance coverage and has ignored the broader economic impact. ”The payments you make to health care then become income for workers and income for other businesses. And this spreads out,” Ku says. ”Health care is almost a fifth of the US economy, so as you begin to change health care, there are repercussions that go across all sectors.” Ku says he can’t estimate what economic impact Obamcare replacement would have because Republicans have yet to lay out their plans. ”It’s a mystery,” he says. Editor’s note: The Kaiser Family Foundation supports Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program that produces news reports heard on NPR and published on NPR. org."
156,"The Justice Department is issuing new guidance to federal agents on how to secure eyewitness identifications, an initiative designed to reflect decades of scientific research and bolster public confidence in the criminal justice system, NPR has learned. The policy has two major components: It directs U. S. investigators to document or record an eyewitness’s confidence in an identification at the very moment the ID is made, and it encourages federal agents to conduct ”blind” or ”blinded” photo arrays of suspects in which the agent leading the session doesn’t know which photo represents the prime suspect. ”We view this as an important step in doing everything we can to ensure the greatest reliability possible for the evidence we’re using at trial,” Deputy U. S. Attorney General Sally Yates said. Yates said the department based its guidance on research that supports the idea ”of just how important it is to get as much detail as possible about just how sure that witness is that this is the guy” long before any trial or court proceeding begins. Authorities also are leery of the idea that a person leading a photo array could, intentionally or not, provide cues to an eyewitness about whom they should select out of a photo lineup. Such practices have been blamed for encouraging faulty eyewitness identifications and contributing to the problem of wrongful convictions. That’s why DOJ is urging law enforcement to conduct   blind photo displays. ”If you don’t know, it’s virtually impossible verbally or nonverbally . .. to potentially be able to cue the witness,” Yates said. The guidance from Yates marks the first departmentwide policy for DOJ agencies, and it applies to such law enforcement components as the FBI, DEA, ATF and the U. S. Marshals Service. ”This DOJ memo reflects a series of best practices recommended by scientists based on research conducted over the past,” said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of a book about wrongful convictions. ”It adopts the recommendations of the 2014 National Academy of Sciences report. And it sends an important message that accuracy matters in criminal cases.” Garrett added that the procedures for lineups ”are well designed to be practical and to apply in many different types of criminal cases where eyewitnesses are important.” You can read the guidelines here."
157,"In the kitchen at Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, just north of downtown Detroit, Linda Carter and Shawnetta Hudson are in the final stages of making their newest jam creation:   preserves. Carter is meticulously wiping down tables while Hudson seals the lids on jars. Then comes the logo  —   a beautiful graphic of a black woman with afro hair made of strawberries. The kitchen is small and basic, but for the past year it has served as the hub of a   product called Afro Jam. ”The name Afro Jam and the logo are empowering, independent and strong,” Carter says. ”That’s what we want our community to be.” Carter, the food safety manager at the farm, recruited Hudson from the local community to help her keep up with making and selling the product. Strawberry, peach and blueberry are Afro Jam’s best sellers. ”Strawberry jam, that’s my thing,” says Hudson. ”And when Linda and I work together, we’re on point at all times.” Staying ”on point” is a goal of Carter’s. The jam venture has to be profitable. So in the past year the small group of about a   women, rotating volunteers and three paid employees has made an aggressive push to sell the spreads at summer festivals and farmers markets.   is a product of One Mile, a neighborhood arts and culture organization, and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating healthy local food sources for the surrounding community. The farm is a project of Northend Christian Community Development Corporation  —   both are managed by Jerry Hebron. It has a vegetable garden and an apple orchard. Hebron also oversees a weekly farmers market in the summer. Roughly 83 percent of Detroit’s population is black, an aftereffect of white flight that began in the 1950s. As the people left Detroit, so did the supermarkets  —   especially in poorer, blacker neighborhoods. Fresh fruits and vegetables became much harder to come by for many city residents. As a result, gardens started popping up in Detroit, which currently has roughly 1, 500 urban farms. Some are large and operate at an industrial scale others are single lots that have been turned into vegetable gardens for a few families. The idea for Afro Jam was born out of a need to generate revenue year round while also keeping the community involved, says Hebron. ”The community is at the root of everything we do,” she says. So Hebron began spreading the word at the farmers market: They wanted to start a new line of jams using old family recipes. Recipes for making preserves poured in  —   including some that had been handed down for generations. Constance King, 67, heard the call and was excited to share her mother’s recipe with the folks from Afro Jam. ”My mother brought her jam recipe [from the South] with her  —   it belonged to her mother and to her mother’s mother,” King says. ”I felt proud about being able to share that recipe. It’s a beautiful way of keeping my mother alive.” A lifelong resident of Detroit, King loves the city’s rich   history. Making biscuits and jam, she says, was part of the Southern black experience  —   they’ve been a staple at the Southern supper table since at least the   century. ”This [growing fruits and vegetables] is a good idea, it’s something we can do with all of this empty land,” King says. ”Our neighborhood used to be full of families  —   there was not a vacant block. There were hardware stores, delis and grocery stores. It was a   community.” King’s family is originally from Georgia but moved to Detroit in the 1940s during the Great Migration, when millions of   left their homes in the rural South in search of better jobs and an escape from harsh segregationist laws. Hebron says that among black Detroiters, the tradition of making homemade jams has largely fallen by the wayside in the modern era. Oakland Avenue Urban Farms used heritage recipes from seven different families  —   unearthing them from hiding places in attics and   recipe boxes. In the fall of 2015, the ladies of the farm set out to make their first batch of jam. Some of the recipes they received took days to make and weren’t practical for production. Carter and Hebron settled on strawberry jam as their first batch, which took several days and four people to make. ”We bonded over making jam, laughing and sharing old family stories,” Hebron says. ”Gathering is what it’s all about,” Carter says. ”There is nothing greater than bringing people together over food.” Proceeds from the jam venture go to Northend Christian CDC, a nonprofit that’s aimed at revitalizing Detroit’s North End historic district, where One Mile and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm are based. For Hebron, Carter and the rest of the women who make Afro Jam, this is a way to preserve the legacy of Detroit’s black families. ”It’s one of the most amazing projects I’ve ever worked on,” Hebron says. Martina Guzman is a journalist based in Detroit. She’s currently the race and justice journalism fellow at the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University."
158,"Talladega College isn’t known for its football team  —   because it doesn’t have one. But it does have a band  —   the   Marching Tornadoes. It is the pride of the campus in this small town about 50 miles east of Birmingham. The Presidential Inaugural Committee included Talladega’s band on its list of participants in the traditional inauguration day parade. But the invitation to Washington, D. C. stirred angst for some  —   because of   Donald Trump’s divisive campaign rhetoric. Talladega was founded by former slaves 150 years ago and was the first college in Alabama to accept   students. A debate erupted on campus and around the nation as to whether Talladega should go. Yesterday, college president Billy Hawkins announced the Marching Tornadoes will participate. Band member Darrious Hayes agreed with the decision. He’s been in the band since 2014, his freshman year, and sees the trip to the inauguration as an opportunity. He says this will be his first visit to the nation’s capital. ”The alumni don’t want us to go because of Trump,” says Hayes. ”But we’re saying it’s not because of Donald Trump. It’s because of the experience.” Participation in this inauguration is not popular for some Talladega alums like Shirley Ferrill, a 1974 graduate. She says what Trump said on the campaign trail is not consistent with the values of Talladega College. ”To have them take part in anything that smacks of support for Donald Trump makes me sick,” says Ferrill, Some members of other groups like the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir have had similar concerns about performing in the inauguration. For Ferrill, this issue is bound up with Talladega’s history. ”I do care what others think about the college’s participation,” she says. ”I care about the reputation Talladega has established over 150 years and I think that reputation would be damaged by the college participating.” Ferrill launched an online petition calling for Talladega to decline the invitation. More than 1, 600 people signed it. No college administrators would answer questions about the decision to go. A Talladega spokeswoman did say it’s a good opportunity for students. The Talladega Marching Tornadoes played at an NFL game in New Orleans last year. But this performance at the 58th Presidential Inauguration will be its biggest ever."
159,"Starting next week, Norway will become the first country to switch off its nationwide FM radio network and convert completely to digital signals. The change was announced in 2015, and will take months to be fully implemented. The Norwegian government decided to make the transition in part because digital radio can provide many more channels for the same price  —   eight times as many, to be precise. Norway currently has room for just five national radio stations on its FM system  —   three public broadcasting channels, and two commercial channels. Other national radio stations, as well as some regional and local stations, are already using the digital system. Supporters of the switch also say digital radio will sound clearer than FM, or frequency modulation, and that the signal will be clearer in places where fjords and mountains interfere with FM signals. As we reported in 2015, the Norwegian government also says that digital radio is less likely to fail in extreme conditions, which lawmakers saw as an advantage for emergency preparedness. The CEO of Digitalradio Norway says the country’s FM network is antiquated and would need massive investments to maintain  —   so, to allow investment in digital radio, the FM network needs to be shut down. But NPR’s Frank Langfitt reports that the public in general isn’t happy about the decision to abandon FM entirely. ”A recent poll shows that   of Norwegians are against ditching FM,” he reports. ”Among the concerns: people may miss warnings for emergencies that are broadcast on FM. ”In addition, two million cars in Norway  —   a country of just five million people  —   don’t have digital audio broadcasting receivers. ”A digital adapter for an FM car radio costs about $170.” Reuters reports that the shutdown of FM signals will begin in the northern city of Bodø on Jan. 11, and extend across the country by the end of the year. Some local stations, however, will continue to transmit over FM signals until 2022, The Local reports. Norway’s transition to an   radio will be closely watched by other countries considering the same move. ”Among other nations, the U. K. plans to review the need for a switchover once digital listening reaches 50 per cent,” the CBC reports. ”That could be reached by the end of 2017 on current trends, Digital Radio U. K. spokeswoman Yvette Dore said.”"
160,"When Kayla Wilson was 15, her mom  —   Wendy Founds  —   was in prison serving a   term for felony drug charges. When Founds was 15 she started using drugs, and at some point became addicted to methamphetamines. ”When I asked Mom how she got started she told me that after her   died she was just mad at the world and mad at God, and that’s when she told one of her   that she wanted to get high,” Kayla said during a 2006 visit to StoryCorps with her grandmother, Teri Lyn  . When Founds got busted, she was at home, Kayla explained. ”And I think they were making dope and it had spilled on my younger sister. And it was just so heartbreaking to understand that this is what’s going on and this is how it’s going to be. When I saw her in prison it was horrible because you see her come out of the door in that white suit. And her hair was gone. And she loved her long hair and I just had to cry. And then having to say bye and holding onto her knowing you couldn’t take her with you was the most horrible experience I’ve ever had.” Back then, Kayla hoped that when her mom got out of prison, she would get to be a child for a change. ”Not have to worry about being the mature responsible adult,” she said. ”I think that it’ll really be nice.” Founds was released from prison in 2008. Ten years after Kayla’s StoryCorps visit,    Founds joined her daughter at StoryCorps to talk about the past. Like what she remembers about the day she got out of prison. ”I remember how you smelled, it was vanilla,” Founds said. ”And I remember the relief of, our lives get to really start from this point forward.” Kayla, now 25 and a high school teacher, remembers her mom’s apology. ”I think that was a defining moment for us, because I got to tell you what I’d always wanted to tell you which was that, you know, you can never make up for that time,” she said. Founds cried for days after that conversation, but says what she heard helped her become a better mom. Kayla also admitted wishing her mom was different back in those days. ”I can remember, you know, writing in diaries about how much I hated you because you chose drugs over me,” she said. But in the end, she forgave her mom. ”When you finally decided to get clean, it was obvious you were sincere,” she said. ”And you’re my mom, and as my mom, I loved you. I wanted that relationship. ”Sure would have been great to have [it] growing up, but I’m happy you’re here and I’m happy we’re where we’re at today,” Kayla continued. ”And I think what we’ve got is awesome considering where we’ve been. So I’m excited to see what happens next.” Founds, who lives with Kayla, helps counsel other parents struggling with addiction. She was granted a pardon by Gov. Asa Hutchinson for her felony convictions on March 4, 2016. Audio produced for Morning Edition by John White and Madison Mullen. StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps. org."
161,"The final chapter of the Obama economy drew that much closer to its end on Friday, with the final jobs report of the 44th president’s time in office. That report showed the 75th straight month of job growth, with employers adding 156, 000 jobs. Solid, but nothing flashy. In that way, it was emblematic of how the job market has generally fared since the worst of the Great Recession’s aftermath: chugging along, slowly but surely recovering. With the final Obama administration jobs day in the books, it’s a good time to look at how American workers have fared. Donald Trump will inherit a job market that is vastly rehabilitated from devastating lows just a few years ago. However, it has also undergone profound changes that have scarred many American workers. Unemployment: How low can it go? As Obama prepares to leave office, the unemployment rate is at 4. 7 percent, less than half of the peak it reached in October 2009. That decline is the result of a prolonged period of job growth. The administration has grown fond of showing off its prolonged run of job growth every month. For some perspective, here’s how big that job growth was: Obama averaged 109, 000 jobs per month. That’s far better than either President Bush experienced, but it’s well below the 242, 000 that Bill Clinton presided over in the roaring 1990s. For Reagan, it was 166, 000. Of course, President Obama came into office as the economy was plunging into a recession (a plunge that also drags down George W. Bush’s number). But even if you average out Obama’s 75 straight months of job growth, you get 199, 000 jobs per month, still shy of Clinton’s economy. In other words, the Obama recovery has been moderate, but remarkably steady. The question is how long that steady climb can continue uninterrupted. The unemployment rate is already near a   low, as Steven Russolillo at the Wall Street Journal pointed out this week, and there is some question among economists how low it can go. Wages finally climbing, Having a job is one thing. Having a job that pays well is another. And slowly through Obama’s tenure, those wages have inched upward. In fact, wages were one bright spot of Friday’s jobs report. Average hourly wages were up by 2. 9 percent in December. After several years of hovering around 2 percent, that’s welcome growth. Aside from meaning more money in workers’ pockets, wage growth serves as yet another sign of a tightening labor market, signaling that employers are willing to pay more to attract workers. Rising wages may inspire the Federal Reserve to take its foot further off the gas pedal in the coming months (that is, allow interest rates to rise)  —   a reminder that the economy isn’t exactly under the president’s control. (More on this later.) Labor force participation is low, but what does it mean? This one became a flashpoint in the presidential election, with Trump at times pointing out how much the labor force shrank under Obama. The main measure of this is the labor force participation rate  —   that is, the percentage of people who are either working or looking for work (that is, who are in the labor force). That figure was at 65. 7 percent in January 2009, at the start of Obama’s presidency, and today is at 62. 7 percent  —   a steep drop. And today, the figure is well below its 2000 high of 67. 3 percent. But it’s not clear how bad or how benign that change is. Many Americans are out of the labor force and entirely happy about it. Quitting work to retire, for example, is a totally nonalarming reason to leave the labor force. But then, there may be many people who, facing a tough job market, have given up looking for work. That’s not good, and it also happened for many Americans both during and after the recession. In the aftermath of the recession, economists have tried to figure out exactly how many people are voluntarily versus involuntarily out of the labor force. As of 2014, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that half the decline in the participation rate at that time had come from ”  trends” like aging  —   as baby boomers age, that means a large chunk of the population will naturally retire. But that left half of the decline a result of economic weakness and a slow recovery, in the CBO’s estimation. Should the participation rate hold steady or creep upward during a Trump presidency, that could keep the unemployment rate from dropping, as only Americans who are looking for work are counted as ”unemployed.” That would be one of those cases where a slightly higher unemployment rate could be a good thing. Improvement for   workers,   job growth over the course of the Obama presidency has far outstripped   job growth, as FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman has pointed out. Of course, some of those people working part time want to be working part time, and some don’t. Another bright spot here is that the share of those workers who are involuntarily part time has fallen off. However, that figure is still a fair bit higher than it was prior to the recession (and that level was itself, in turn, higher than it was before the prior recession). That’s one place where there could still be some improvement  —   there are still about 1 million more of those involuntary   workers than there were prior to the recession. An economy more about doing than making, Politicians of both parties love to talk about manufacturing. Obama pushed manufacturing initiatives throughout his presidency, and Trump built much of his economic message during the campaign around singing the praises of America’s manufacturers. But when it comes to employment, the   share of the economy has continued to fall. Throughout the past few decades, the share of Americans who make things  —   people in manufacturing, mining, logging and construction  —   has fallen off, and that trend continued during the recent recession, finally flattening out toward the end. We present this chart over a longer time frame, which makes it a little bit of a cheat  —   this isn’t exactly a measure of Obama’s ”record on jobs.” Nor is it necessarily a measure of economic weakness in fact, manufacturing has, thanks to technological advances, maintained strong output while shedding workers. It’s a reminder that all the usual macroeconomic indicators (unemployment, wages, labor force participation, GDP) can quantify a lot of things in the economy, but you have to dig in to learn about the quality of that economy  —   what exactly is going on behind those numbers. This decline in   jobs doesn’t signal that the economy is getting worse or better  —   it’s just changing, in this case to become more focused on providing services, instead of goods. All of this is to say that Trump inherits a job market that is humming along comfortably, given how poor of shape it was in only recently. But it’s also an economy that has sharply moved away from manufacturing and other   industries  —   the very ones he pushed the most in the election. That change has hurt plenty of Americans, despite the job market’s improvement. Trump has tried to claim credit for several hundred   jobs here and there (credit that he doesn’t always deserve, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has reported) but bringing manufacturing employment back in a sizable way seems like a tall order for any president. Furthermore, alternative work  —   like driving an Uber or Lyft  —   continues to grow quickly as a share of the economy. That change could eventually require policy attention, as more workers take jobs that don’t come with benefits. But there’s another big caveat here. Presidents get lots of credit and blame for the economy’s performance, despite the fact that they don’t really have firm control over that performance. (If they did, why would recessions ever happen?) Yes, a president can push an economic agenda and in some cases push particular policies that end up having a sizable impact on the economy (see: the 2009 stimulus package, which undeniably had a positive impact). But they also need Congress to enact those policies. Not only that, but the Federal Reserve has its own set of controls  —   a set to which the president does not have access, despite some conspiracies of politically motivated Fed  . So, like Obama, whatever happens to the economy under Trump, he may not deserve whatever credit he may claim (and the same goes for whatever blame is thrown his way)."
162,"Updated at 5:30 p. m.  The Office of Government Ethics is raising alarm over the pace of confirmation hearings for   Donald Trump’s nominees, saying Saturday that they have yet to receive required financial disclosures for some picks set to come before Congress next week. In a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,  . Y. and Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  . released Saturday, OGE Director Walter Shaub wrote that ”the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me” and that the current schedule ”has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews. ”More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings,” Shaub continued. ”I am not aware of any occasion in the four decades since OGE was established when the Senate held a confirmation hearing before the nominee had completed the ethics review process.” Shaub explains in the letter that the Ethics in Government Act requires that presidential appointments confirmed by the Senate obtain OGE certification of their financial disclosures prior to any congressional hearings. Such a process is ”complex” and ”” he notes, and takes ”weeks, not days” to ensure that the Senate has a clear picture of any possible conflicts of interest. A Senate GOP source, however, noted that in the past the OGE paperwork hasn’t always preceded hearings. For example, in 2001, Rod Paige, George W. Bush’s nominee for Secretary of Education, had his hearing over a week before the committee received the OGE paperwork. Senate committees are set to begin confirmation for several Trump nominees for Cabinet positions and other posts next week so that they can be voted on and sworn in as soon as possible after Trump takes office on January 20. Democrats have already charged that Senate Republicans are trying to hurry through hearings for the  ’s Cabinet, and the warning letter from the federal ethics watchdog gives that argument more weight. Schumer said in a statement that the OGE letter ”makes crystal clear that the transition team’s collusion with Senate Republicans to jam through these Cabinet nominees before they’ve been thoroughly vetted is unprecedented.” ”The Senate and the American people deserve to know that these Cabinet nominees have a plan to avoid any conflicts of interest, that they’re working on behalf of the American people and not their own bottom line, and that they plan to fully comply with the law,” Schumer continued. ”Senate Republicans should heed the advice of this independent office and stop trying to jam through unvetted nominees.” In a statement, the Trump transition team dismissed the OGE letter as overtly political and argued that ”the transition process is currently running smoothly.” ”In the midst of a historic election where Americans voted to drain the swamp, it is disappointing some have chosen to politicize the process in order to distract from important issues facing our country,” the Trump statement read. ”This is a disservice to the country and is exactly why voters chose Donald J. Trump as their next president.” Shaub said that his office would ”continue expediting our ethics reviews of the  ’s nominees to meet reasonable timeframes without sacrificing quality.” ”It would, however, be cause for alarm if the Senate were to go forward with hearings on nominees whose reports OGE has not certified,” he continued. ”For as long as I remain Director, OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore conflicts of interest.” In November, Shaub raised eyebrows when the OGE Twitter account posted odd tweets urging Trump to fully divest from his business interests. NPR later reported that it was Shaub himself who had personally directed the tweets. Tamara Keith contributed. "
163,"Updated at 5:52 p. m. One day after five people were killed at an airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. more details are coming to light on the suspected gunman: Esteban Ruiz Santiago, a U. S. military veteran. The    was arrested by police shortly after the shooting began at the airport’s baggage claim area. He is now at a Broward County jail, where authorities say he is being held on suspicion of murder. Authorities say there is no indication that Santiago worked with anyone else in planning or executing the attack. Santiago, who served as a combat engineer in the National Guard in Puerto Rico and Alaska, was discharged from service last year for unsatisfactory performance. Santiago was reported for several infractions like AWOLs, or absences without leave. During Santiago’s time with the Puerto Rico National Guard, he was deployed to Iraq from April 2010 to February 2011. The U. S. pulled troops from the country at the end of that year. His aunt, Maria Ruiz Rivera, tells The Record of New Jersey that after he returned, she noticed changes in his mental health. ”He lost his mind,” Ruiz Rivera told the newspaper in Spanish. ”He said he saw things.” Over the course of 2016, Santiago was repeatedly reported to Anchorage police for physical disturbances, according to the city’s police chief, Christopher Tolley  —   including two separate reports of domestic violence and strangulation in October last year. The next month, Santiago walked into an FBI office in Anchorage ”to report that his mind was being controlled by a U. S. intelligence agency,” said FBI special agent Marlin Ritzman, at a Saturday press conference. Tolley described them as ”terroristic thoughts,” in which ”he believed he was being influenced by ISIS.” Ritzman offered more detail: ”During the interview, Mr. Santiago appeared agitated, incoherent and made disjointed statements. Although he stated he did not wish to harm anyone, as a result of his erratic behavior our agents contacted local authorities, who took custody of Mr. Santiago and transported him to the local medical facility for evaluation.” Shortly after that, Ritzman said, ”The FBI closed its assessment on Mr. Santiago after conducting database reviews and interagency checks.” Agents found no ties to terrorism in during their investigation. In the course of the encounter at the FBI office, Tolley says Santiago had left a firearm in his car, along with his newborn child. When Santiago was checked into the mental health facility, his weapon was ”logged into evidence for safekeeping.” That weapon was returned to Santiago in December. Authorities said that as of Saturday they cannot confirm whether it was the same firearm Santiago used in Friday’s attack. Santiago arrived at the Fort   International Airport on Friday afternoon, having traveled on a Delta flight from Anchorage, with a layover in Minneapolis. Jesse Davis, police chief at the Anchorage airport, says Santiago checked a   handgun with TSA according to proper protocol, without drawing attention to himself. Upon landing, he retrieved that handgun from baggage claim, loaded the weapon in the bathroom and then opened fire in Terminal 2 of the Fort Lauderdale airport, according to authorities. ”He just kind of continued coming in, just randomly shooting at people, no rhyme or reason to it,” one witness told MSNBC, saying Santiago ”went up and down the carousels of the baggage claim, shooting through luggage to get at people that were hiding.” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel says it was approximately 70 to 80 seconds before a sheriff’s deputy confronted him. ”Indications are that he came here to carry out this horrific attack,” Piro said Saturday. ”We have not identified any triggers that would have caused this attack.” Piro added: ”It’s way too early for us to rule out anything.”"
164,"If you’ve never laid eyes on a dogfish  —   or tasted one  —   you’re not alone. Yep, it’s in the shark family. (See those telltale fins?) And fisherman Jamie Eldredge is now making a living catching dogfish off the shores of Cape Cod, Mass. When populations of cod  —   the Cape’s namesake fish  —   became too scarce, Eldredge wanted to keep fishing. That’s when he turned to dogfish  —   and it’s turned out to be a good option. The day I went out with him, Eldredge caught close to 6, 000 lbs. (Check out the video above.) ”It’s one of the most plentiful fish we have on the East Coast right now,” Brian Marder, owner of Marder Trawling Inc. told us. Fishermen in Chatham, Mass. caught about 6 million pounds of dogfish last year. So, who’s eating all this dogfish? Not Americans. ”99 percent of it” is shipped out, Marder says. The British use dogfish to make fish and chips. The French use it in stews and soups. Italians import it, too. The Europeans are eating it up. But Americans haven’t developed a taste for it. At least, not yet. The story of the dogfish is typical of the seafood swap. ”The majority of the seafood we catch in our U. S. fisheries doesn’t stay here,” explains Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, who leads the Seafood Watch program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And while we export most of what is caught off U. S. shores, what do Americans eat? Imported fish. About ”90 percent of the seafood we consume in the U. S. is actually caught or   overseas,” Kemmerly says. To sustainable seafood advocates, this swap doesn’t make much sense. ”We’re kind of missing out on the bounty we actually have here,” Kemmerly says. And, it’s not just dogfish. The Environmental Defense Fund has launched a campaign called Eat These Fish to tell the story of a whole slew of plentiful fish caught off our shores. The group is trumpeting the conservation success of U. S. fisheries. Some species have been brought back from the brink of extinction through a system of quotas and collaboration between fishermen, conservationists and regulators. They point to fish such as Acadian Redfish and Pacific Ocean Perch. ”If people start to buy these fish more, we can really drive some more economic success to   fishermen,” says Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund. Sustainable seafood advocates want Americans to   our   habits. ”We import salmon, tuna and shrimp,” says Nancy Civetta of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. But ”we do not eat the [fish] we’re bringing to shore, right here!” Civetta says it’s good that fishermen have a market for their dogfish in Europe, but she argues we should be eating it here, too. She says a strong domestic market would strengthen the fisheries, making them less vulnerable to shifting preferences overseas. ”If we continue to import and buy from other countries, then our fishing industry could wither away,” Civetta says. And this would be a loss for coastal communities, she argues. So, is it possible to turn Americans onto dogfish? Chef Bob Bankert at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst thinks so. The university has contracted with Sea To Table, a company that connects domestic fishermen with chefs, universities and other buyers, to purchase dogfish. The campus serves 55, 000 meals a day and has made a big commitment to buying locally sourced foods. ”Being in western Massachusetts, we love to support the Massachusetts fisheries,” Bankert says. I watch as he grills dogfish fillets  —   ”it tastes great,” he vouches as he flips one over. We were curious to see if students agreed. We hung out for an afternoon as students sampled dogfish tacos, dogfish sushi and an Asian flash fry made with dogfish fillets and drizzled with wasabi mayo. ”Oh, it’s so good  —   amazing!” student Ruth Crawford told us as she finished off a taco. I asked her what the biggest appeal was. ”It’s new, it’s local, so healthy,” she told us. Some students were a bit turned off by the display of the whole dogfish  —   with its menacing shark appearance  —   that was showcased on the dining line. ”That’s scary looking,” one student told us as he walked by. Dining hall manager Selina Fournier says that’s where the storytelling comes in. When they saw the fish here today, she says, a lot of them didn’t know what to make of it. But once they learned more about   where it comes from, who caught it   and they got the chance to taste it, ”the whole association really . .. brings [the story] to life.” It’s not just universities that are promoting locally caught fish. Chefs, environmentalists and eaters across the country are embracing the concept of eating fish caught in a way that won’t lead to overfishing or environmental problems, while also supporting local fishing communities. The National Restaurant Association has named ”sustainable seafood” as one of its top 20 food trends for 2017. Sea to Table is about to launch a    online fish market. It’s scheduled to launch by the end of January. And this means that soon, Americans will be able to get dogfish and many other types of   species from U. S. fisheries delivered to our front doors. This story was reported as part of a collaboration with the PBS NewsHour."
165,"House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Thursday that Republicans will  —   once again  —   vote to cut off federal tax dollars for Planned Parenthood. They are planning to include the measure as part of a bigger upcoming bill to repeal pillars of Obamacare. This isn’t the first time that they have tried to pass this type of legislation  —   President Obama vetoed a similar bill last January. But with a Republican president about to take office, the party now has the best chance in more than a decade to get it signed into law. They also have a powerful legislative tool on their side: special budget rules that will let them offer their proposal on a measure that needs only 51 votes  —   meaning a Democratic filibuster can’t stop it. But the path to victory might not be totally clear, as   Trump’s position on abortion has wavered and allies of Planned Parenthood vow not to go down without a fight. Here are four key points to keep in mind as the parties gear up for a fight on Capitol Hill: 1. Planned Parenthood is not directly funded by the government, but it does receive payment from federal funds, This is a key distinction. While Planned Parenthood is not funded directly by the government, it does receive payment and grants from federal programs. Planned Parenthood’s clinics provide a number of health services, mostly for   women. And so consequently, the organization often bills Medicaid for reimbursement. It also receives funding through Title X, a federal grant program for family planning services. However, neither Medicaid nor Title X fund the abortion services, which many people associate with Planned Parenthood. Medicaid does have some narrow exceptions for this in the case of rape, incest or life of mother. And this gets at the heart of one of the nation’s longest running and divisive political debates  —   not only to what extent the federal government should direct its fiscal policy on women’s health matters, but whether abortion should be legal at all. 2. Planned Parenthood has become increasingly polarized: targeted by the GOP, championed by Democrats, Planned Parenthood has been a political target for years. But recently, the partisan polarization has gone beyond abortion rights and into any federal funds going to the organization. Republicans have more vehemently opposed Planned Parenthood in recent years for facilitating the transfer of fetal tissue for medical research. Concern over this practice led Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa to recently refer several Planned Parenthood affiliates to the FBI and the Department of Justice for further investigation. The issue of tissue transfer also became the subject of a select committee review, which released a heavily critical report this week. 3. Republicans aren’t quite sure Donald Trump is on their side  Republican lawmakers are confident in their effort, because for the first time in a decade, the party will control both chambers of Congress and the White House. But Donald Trump has a mixed record on Planned Parenthood. During the campaign, he praised the organization for doing ”very good work” for ”millions of women.” But he’s also supported cutting off federal funding. That said, Trump’s political inner circle is very much in favor of defunding the organization. Vice   Pence, for example, is a longtime leader in this effort with zero ambiguity in his record. He offered legislation to this effect when he was in the House. Speaker Ryan is also personally very much in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood. But Ivanka Trump may be the person to watch. She has been a moderating force for her father on many women’s issues. 4. Planned Parenthood is gearing up for a fight, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards took to Twitter to respond to the GOP’s efforts saying, ”Not without one hell of a fight, they aren’t.” Richards may well be pointing to Senate Democrats’ past successes at defeating this type of legislation. They’ve succeeded in the past, in part, because of Republican allies  —   Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski  —   who they will likely need to lean on again. Beyond Capitol Hill, Planned Parenthood has   experience organizing and a loyal constituency. It is also a sponsor of the women’s march planned to protest Trump’s inauguration this month in Washington, which some estimates project as many as 200, 000 women may attend. Plus, to an extent, it has public opinion on its side. Public polling has consistently shown that the majority of Americans oppose cutting off all funding for Planned Parenthood. So, there is certainly at least some potential political risk for Republicans."
166,"Emil Girardi moved to San Francisco on New Year’s Eve in 1960. He loved everything about the city: the energy, the people and the hills. And, of course, the bars, where Girardi mixed drinks for most of his adult life. About 10 years ago, the    New York native had a stroke and collapsed on the sidewalk near his Nob Hill home. Everything changed. ”I didn’t want to go out of the house,” Girardi recalled, adding he only felt comfortable ”going from the bedroom to the dining room.” He’d started to fear the city’s streets  —   and growing older. An    friend worried about his isolation and called a San   nonprofit called Little Brothers, Friends of the Elderly. The organization works to relieve isolation and loneliness among the city’s seniors by pairing them with volunteers. Little Brothers matched him with Shipra Narruhn, a computer software trainer who has volunteered with various organizations over the years, and became involved with Little Brothers after her mother’s death. The organization started in France after World War II and now operates in several U. S. cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Cathy Michalec, the executive director of the local nonprofit, said older adults often become less mobile as they age. Cities like San Francisco, because of hills, crowded streets or old housing stock, are difficult for many seniors. That can lead to isolation and loneliness, Michalec said. ”Those 50 stairs you used to be able to go up and down all the time, you can’t go up and down all the time,” she said. ”The streets are crowded and sometimes unsafe. . .. Sometimes, our elders say, it’s easier to stay in the house.” Across the nation, geriatricians and other health and social service providers are growing increasingly worried about loneliness among seniors like Girardi. Their concerns are fueled by studies showing the emotional isolation is linked to serious health problems. Research shows older adults who feel lonely are at greater risk of memory loss, strokes, heart disease and high blood pressure. The health threat is similar to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to AARP. Researchers say that loneliness and isolation are linked to physical inactivity and poor sleep, as well as high blood pressure and poor immune functioning. A 2012 study showed that people who felt lonely  —   whether or not they lived with others or suffered from depression  —   were at heightened risk of death. It also showed that 43 percent of people over 60 felt lonely. ”If someone reports feeling lonely, they are more likely to lose their independence and they are at greater risk of dying solely from being lonely,” said Dr. Carla Perissinotto, a geriatrician and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who authored the study. There can be many causes of loneliness, Perissinotto said, including illness, hearing loss or life changes such as retirement or the loss of a spouse. ”The usual social connections we have in younger life end up changing as we get older,” she said. Narruhn recalled that she and Girardi would just visit at his apartment, in the beginning. She’d tell him about her travels and her adult daughter. He’d tell her about his adventures in San Francisco. He described what the city was like as a young gay man, and told her about the friends he had lost to AIDS. They talked about music, books and cooking. ”I could tell from talking to him that he had a lot of interests,” she said. ”At one time, he was very sociable.” Gradually, Narruhn started bringing him music from Italy, India and Mexico. Girardi liked the songs he could snap his fingers to. Finally, Shipra convinced him to go out to lunch  —   and to visit a hidden,   staircase in San Francisco with her. ”Shipra came to see me, and came to see me and came to see me,” he said. ”Finally, she said, ’You have to get out of the house. ’” Soon, they were going to jazz shows, on walks and to the park. Narruhn said she invited Girardi to do eclectic things with her  —   chakra cleansings, Reiki healing sessions  —   and he was always game. Over time, his fear subsided. So did his loneliness. ”After she took me out of the house, then I didn’t want to stop,” Girardi said. There isn’t much research about the effectiveness of programs such as Little Brothers. But Perissinotto said they can help seniors build new social connections. Other efforts to address loneliness include roommate matching services in various states and, in the United Kingdom, a   hotline. ”Maintaining connections, that   thing, is actually really important,” Perissinotto said. ”It’s hard to measure, it’s hard to quantify, but there is something real. Even though we don’t have the exact research, we have tons of stories where we know it’s [had] an effect in people’s lives.” AARP Foundation also recently launched a nationwide online network to raise awareness about social isolation and loneliness among older adults. The network, Connect2Affect, allows people to do a   test and reach out to others feeling disconnected. AARP, the Gerontological Society of America and other organizations are hoping to help create more understanding of isolation and loneliness and to help lonely seniors build more social connections. ”Loneliness is a huge issue we don’t talk enough about,” said Dr. Charlotte Yeh, chief medical officer of AARP Services. ”There is a huge stigma.” One afternoon in November, Narruhn came by to take Girardi out to one of their favorite restaurants on Polk Street. The waiter greeted them by name. Over Italian food, they planned several more visits together. Girardi said he doesn’t fear growing older anymore. He’s surrounded by his new family. And by good music, he said, and ”snapping fingers.” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. You can follow Anna Gorman on Twitter: @annagorman."
167,"Why do you do what you do? What is the engine that keeps you up late at night or gets you going in the morning? Where is your happy place? What stands between you and your ultimate dream? Heavy questions. One researcher believes that writing down the answers can be decisive for students. He   a paper that demonstrates a startling effect: nearly erasing the gender and ethnic minority achievement gap for 700 students over the course of two years with a short written exercise in setting goals.  Jordan Peterson teaches in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto. For decades, he has been fascinated by the effects of writing on organizing thoughts and emotions. Experiments going back to the 1980s have shown that ”therapeutic” or ”expressive” writing can reduce depression, increase productivity and even cut down on visits to the doctor. ”The act of writing is more powerful than people think,” Peterson says. Most people grapple at some time or another with   anxiety that saps energy and increases stress. Through written reflection, you may realize that a certain unpleasant feeling ties back to, say, a difficult interaction with your mother. That type of insight, research has shown, can help locate, ground and ultimately resolve the emotion and the associated stress. At the same time, ”  theory” holds that writing down concrete, specific goals and strategies can help people overcome obstacles and achieve. ’It Turned My Life Around’ Recently, researchers have been getting more and more interested in the role that mental motivation plays in academic achievement  —   sometimes conceptualized as ”grit” or ”growth mindset” or ”executive functioning.” Peterson wondered whether writing could be shown to affect student motivation. He created an undergraduate course called Maps of Meaning. In it, students complete a set of writing exercises that combine expressive writing with  . Students reflect on important moments in their past, identify key personal motivations and create plans for the future, including specific goals and strategies to overcome obstacles. Peterson calls the two parts ”past authoring” and ”future authoring.” ”It completely turned my life around,” says Christine Brophy, who, as an undergraduate several years ago, was battling drug abuse and health problems and was on the verge of dropping out. After taking Peterson’s course at the University of Toronto, she changed her major. Today she is a doctoral student and one of Peterson’s main research assistants.  In an early study at McGill University in Montreal, the course showed a powerful positive effect with   students, reducing the dropout rate and increasing academic achievement. Peterson is seeking a larger audience for what he has dubbed ” .” He started a   company and is selling a version of the curriculum online. Brophy and Peterson have found a receptive audience in the Netherlands. At the Rotterdam School of Management, a shortened version of   has been mandatory for all   students since 2011. (These are undergraduates  —   they choose majors early in Europe). The latest paper, published in June, compares the performance of the first complete class of freshmen to use   with that of the three previous classes. Overall, the ” ” students greatly improved the number of credits earned and their likelihood of staying in school. And after two years, ethnic and   differences in performance among the students had all but disappeared. The ethnic minorities in question made up about   of the students. They are   and   immigrants from   backgrounds  —   Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While the history and legacy of racial oppression are different from that in the United States, the Netherlands still struggles with large differences in wealth and educational attainment among majority and minority groups. ’Zeroes Are Deadly’ At the Rotterdam school, minorities generally underperformed the majority by more than a third, earning on average eight fewer credits their first year and four fewer credits their second year. But for minority students who had done this set of writing exercises, that gap dropped to five credits the first year and to just   of one credit in the second year. How could a bunch of essays possibly have this effect on academic performance? Is this replicable? Melinda Karp is the assistant director for staff and institutional development at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. She leads studies on interventions that can improve college completion. She calls Peterson’s paper ”intriguing.” But, she adds, ”I don’t believe there are silver bullets for any of this in higher ed.” Peterson believes that formal   can especially help minority students overcome what’s often called ”stereotype threat,” or, in other words, to reject the damaging belief that generalizations about   academic performance will apply to them personally. Karp agrees. ”When you enter a new social role, such as entering college as a student, the expectations aren’t always clear.” There’s a greater risk for students who may be academically underprepared or who lack role models. ”Students need help not just setting vague goals but figuring out a plan to reach them.” The key for this intervention came at crunch time, says Peterson. ”We increased the probability that students would actually take their exams and hand in their assignments.” The act of   helped them overcome obstacles when the stakes were highest. ”You don’t have to be a genius to get through school you don’t even have to be that interested. But zeroes are deadly.” Karp has a theory for how this might be working. She says you often see   students engage in   behavior ”to save face.” ”If you aren’t sure you belong in college, and you don’t hand in that paper,” she explains, ”you can say to yourself, ’That’s because I didn’t do the work, not because I don’t belong here.’ ” Writing down their internal motivations and connecting daily efforts to   goals may have helped these young people solidify their identities as students. Brophy is testing versions of the   curriculum at two high schools in Rotterdam, and monitoring their psychological   school attendance and tendency to procrastinate. Early results are promising, she says: ”It helps students understand what they really want to do.”"
168,"Classical composers have long had their patrons: Beethoven had Archduke Rudolph, John Cage had Betty Freeman. For contemporary opera composers, there’s Beth Morrison. She and her production company have commissioned new works from some of the most innovative emerging composers today. Morrison is not your typical moneyed patron, though. ”I didn’t come from money and I didn’t have money and I wanted to live in New York!” she says. She runs her empire from a     apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn. One bedroom in the apartment is for sleeping. The other is a workspace for her eight employees. ”I’ve always run the business from my home, maybe much to the chagrin of my board,” she says. ”For me, the decision is always really clear: I could spend $30 to $40, 000 on an office space every year, or I could put that into a commission.” Morrison has commissioned works from David T. Little, Mohammed Fairouz and Missy Mazzoli. Mazzoli, whose first opera, Song from the Uproar, was produced by Morrison, calls her a true individual. ”Beth has this famous boot collection that is just amazing  —   it blows my mind,” Mazzoli says. ”It’s sort of a symbol of this commitment of being an individual and to being an iconoclast and to doing things her own way.” Morrison says she follows her guts and her ears in her work. ”I won’t do anything unless I’m mad crazy about the music and the composer and really feeling like they’re contributing something to the field that is different,” she says. David T. Little says Morrison expressed this kind of excitement for his work Soldier Songs after she watched a video he sent her. ”[She] called me almost immediately and says, ’We have to do this piece. I don’t know where we’re gonna get the money, I don’t know how we’re gonna do it . .. but we have to do it! ’” he says. Little says this moment was a perfect illustration of how Morrison works: When she’s excited about something, she makes it happen. Their work together has continued: Last year, Morrison featured Little’s   opera, Dog Days, at Prototype, the annual festival she   (with Kristin Marting and Kim Whitener of the arts organization HERE) to showcase new work. The 2017 festival begins tonight in New York. Morrison doesn’t have her own theater. Instead, she partners with venues in New York and around the country to give works more than one hearing. ”[Composers] need their works to be seen by as many people as possible,” she says. ”I feel like I’ve succeeded  —   particularly with an opera project, ’cause they’re large and expensive  —   if we’ve been able to give two to five presentations of the piece in different cities.” One project that achieved success by this metric was Mazzoli’s latest opera, Breaking the Waves. Last fall, Morrison partnered with Opera Philadelphia to present the piece, and it’s now being done at this year’s Prototype festival. Kamala Sankaram, whose opera Thumbprint premiered at the first Prototype, will see it restaged at LA Opera this June, thanks to Morrison’s efforts. Morrison’s commitment to extending the life of her composers’ works has made them just as passionately devoted to her as she is to them. Sankaram says Morrison’s work is not easy. ”To make contemporary opera your business takes a lot of guts,” Sankaram says. ”I don’t want to go there too much, but there’s still a lot of sexism in our field, and so for her to do this on her own is really kind of astonishing.” Morrison’s current season includes five world premieres, nine tours and her annual festival  —   all funded and produced out of her   nonprofit. Her schedule is certainly packed, but she says championing new composers has been intensely rewarding work. ”It’s been thrilling to be a part of the launch of these incredible composers,” she says. ”It really has been this symbiotic relationship that I feel very grateful for.”"
169,"Even before Barack Obama moved into the White House, he and his team made a choice that made actually selling his policies to the public more difficult. In December 2008, Obama’s economic team gathered in Chicago to map out what would become the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. ”A dispute, discussion, something breaks out at that meeting. We haven’t even come in yet,” said Austan Goolsbee, a professor at the University of Chicago, who was a top economic adviser in the early years of the Obama presidency. Goolsbee said there were two schools of thought about how to proceed. ”Doing something on the order of magnitude of the problem, which everyone understood is going to be a collection of a whole bunch of things and you’re going to have a hard time explaining it” was one option, Goolsbee said. Or, he said, others argued, ” ’Couldn’t we just pick one thing and just do that one thing?’ And that would be really easy to explain.” The economy was hemorrhaging jobs, and Obama’s economic team was afraid the country was on the brink of another Great Depression. The president chose to go big. Obama came into the White House eight years ago, hailed as the ”Great Communicator” because of his lofty speeches, but as he leaves office  —   and delivers a farewell address Tuesday night in Chicago  —   by his own admission, Obama hasn’t always been so adept at communicating his policies and achievements. He struggled to make the sell on the Recovery Act (known as the stimulus) the auto bailout and the Affordable Care Act. The man who will succeed him has chosen a decidedly different path.   Donald Trump has on multiple occasions hyped up announcements by companies that they will add a few thousand or even fewer jobs, declaring victory and getting lots of attention for relatively small wins, as compared with the size of the U. S. economy. Obama has overseen 75 straight months of job growth. Employers added millions of jobs during the course of his presidency, but Obama hasn’t been able to capitalize on that politically as well as his allies would have hoped. Obama signed the Recovery Act in February 2009. And in the speech he made that day, the challenges of explaining the behemoth $780 billion package were clear. ”Today does mark the beginning of the end,” Obama said, ”the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs.” He talked about the millions of jobs it would ”save or create,” a metric so squishy it proved hard for Obama to claim credit for it later and made it easy for opponents to criticize the stimulus as a failure. He spent most of the speech talking about ”investments.” ”Rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing our faulty dams and levees, bringing critical broadband connections to businesses and homes in nearly every community in America,” Obama said in what was a long list of projects. ”Upgrading mass transit.” But Frank Luntz, who has advised Republicans on messaging, said in an interview with NPR that the word ”investment” can sound, for some, like code for   spending. ”There was real hostility early on,” Luntz said, ”a feeling that it’s just an expansion of Washington and nobody was going to benefit and everyone was going to get stuck with the tab.” Obama’s team overestimated Americans’ appetite for stimulus spending, Luntz argued. Republicans in Congress, who never supported the Recovery Act, repeatedly derided it as a ”failed   stimulus.” In reality, a big chunk of it went to tax cuts  —   and it helped pull the country out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. In Obama’s   speech, the mention of those tax cuts came near the end. ”About a third of this package comes in the forms of tax cuts  —   by the way, the most progressive in our history,” said Obama to applause, arguing it would not only spur job creatio, but put ”money in the pockets of 95 percent of   families in America.” The way the tax cuts were distributed also limited any public relations benefit. The money just appeared in people’s paychecks as a smaller payroll tax deduction. ”Nobody realized, nobody understood and, so, nobody celebrated it,” Luntz said. ”There’s a simple rule in politics: If you don’t talk about it, no one knows you did it, and you get no credit for it. And that was the problem with the   component of Obama’s stimulus package.” The tax cut was carefully designed by the Obama administration to target   and   Americans. But it ultimately had little traction with the public  —   or with Republicans whom it was intended to help sway. ”At one point in the first year,” Goolsbee said, remembering a moment of great frustration, ”there’s a poll that comes out in which something like 60 percent of the country said that they were sick of the tax increases that had come from the stimulus, when, in fact, 95 percent had gone down.” Goolsbee said that is when he began to realize that reality was relative  —   something that has truly taken hold in American politics now. ”And at that point, you know the president was basically asking the economic team, ’What is wrong with you people?’ and I just felt like punching myself,” said Goolsbee with a laugh. Economists widely view the stimulus as having helped the economy avoid disaster. But politically, Obama got none of the credit for the tax cuts and a whole lot of grief for the spending. This was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout his presidency. As Trump prepares to enter the White House, his communications strategy is one of mass saturation, including   tweets on multiple topics. Will that work out better than Obama’s cool focus on facts and figures when trying to convince the public? Or as he works to repeal some of Obama’s policy achievements, will he have to adopt a different tactic to sell his proposals?"
170,"The end of 2016 marked a grim milestone in Chicago. More than 4, 000 people were shot over the course of the year, and 762 people were homicide victims, according to the Chicago Tribune. Those numbers are higher than the totals of New York and Los Angeles combined. To be clear, other cities, like New Orleans and Detroit, had higher rates of gun violence and murder on a per capita basis. But nowhere were the sheer, raw numbers as staggering as they were in Chicago. NPR’s Michel Martin spoke with a variety of voices in Chicago  —   those who have been personally affected by the violence people who have been involved in it themselves, and officials at the federal and local level who are trying to fix it. The story that emerged was one of frustration, and fear, with no clear silver bullet toward fixing the problem. But there’s also a sense of hope, even from those who have suffered the deepest. Illinois Congressman Danny Davis remembers exactly where he was when he got the phone call just a few weeks ago, in November. ”One of the police commanders was on the phone and he said, ’I have some bad news to tell you,’ Davis recalls. ”And I said, ’Bad news? Well, I’m pretty accustomed to bad news.” The longtime Chicago Democrat has performed eulogies for some two dozen young Chicagoans who have been killed. But this phone call was different. ”He says, ’I want you to just brace yourself. I understand that your grandson may have been shot. ’” Javon Wilson, 15, was killed in a dispute over shoes and clothes, according to police. Davis says it arose from a ”swapping group,” where kids borrowed each other’s clothes in a trading system. The    congressman choked back tears, as he recounted hearing the news. ”I couldn’t, for the moment, think. And by then, my son called, and I said, ’Oh yeah, I heard that Javon. ..’ (And my son) says, ’Daddy, he’s gone. ..’” Davis says he has no choice but to find some sort of silver lining out of this. He’s doubling down on his efforts to strengthen gun laws, and prevent similar tragedies from occurring again. That’s despite a   legislature, which has shown little appetite for stricter gun laws. ”There are millions and millions of people who think about guns the same way that I do,” Davis says. ”You know, one of my favorite songs, something by a guy named Sam Cooke used to sing   oh, it is so profound. ’It may be a long time coming, but I know some change is going to come.’ That’s the way I feel about this issue.” No consensus as to why Chicago has been hit hard by violence, Although there’s no consensus as to why Chicago has been hit so hard by violence, there are a few factors that officials point to again and again: Guns and poverty. ”You put those two volatile things together and you end up with folks with guns and no purpose in life and killing people for no reasonable purpose at all,” says Davis’ Senate colleague, minority whip Dick Durbin (D  —   IL). Durbin, among others, points out that geography might also play an important role in Chicago’s misfortunes. The city is seen as a centrally located hub for gun and drug trafficking. ”Our city of Chicago is awash in guns. They come in from every direction, from the suburbs, from Northern Indiana gun shows, from Mississippi for goodness sakes. They make it into the city. They’re confiscated in these gun crimes at a rate of about one an hour every day, every week, every month.” ”My wife said, ’Somebody has to do something.’ And I realized, I am somebody. I’m the senator from the state of Illinois. You know, I’m doing my best to understand what I can do from the federal level. But yes, I care, and a lot of people care. And this killing has to stop.”   Donald Trump is another voice suggesting federal intervention. Earlier this month he tweeted about Chicago’s violence, as he sees it. ”Chicago murder rate is record setting   4, 331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016. If Mayor can’t do it he must ask for Federal help!” Durbin, for one, says he’d be open to that sort of help. ”The mayor suggested an increase in the police department, and we need some federal funds to help us do that. We need resources and training and equipment. And [Trump] could help us do it. I hope he will.” Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office declined a formal interview request. But the city did make available Chicago’s recently hired police chief, Eddie Johnson, who spoke to Martin from member station WBEZ in Chicago: ”Chicago has a gun problem. That’s where our violence stems from. To be honest, Chicago isn’t out of control, but we have five police districts that are actually responsible for the majority of the increase in our gun violence this year. But I think one of the main factors that contribute to it is the fact that we do a terrible job of holding repeat gun offenders accountable for their crimes. ”The violence in Chicago is not just about what police are or are not doing. We have   issues. The economic support that we have to give these impoverished areas, the mental health treatment, better education, better housing   all of that stuff matters. ”But I tell you when it comes to morale, you look at what happened the other day when those beat officers found a young man wandering down the street. If they didn’t care and if morale wasn’t good, they didn’t have to stop and investigate that to the extent that they did to find out what happened.” Johnson was referring to yet another black eye for Chicago. Four teenagers have been charged with hate crimes, for allegedly kidnapping and torturing an acquaintance with special needs. Police say the victim was approached by police, after he escaped, looking disoriented and disheveled. Hate crimes not common, but social media use is, NPR’s Cheryl Corley, who is based in Chicago, says the story is grabbing headlines locally, as well as nationally, ”People are just really shocked by this. You know, what we know about the case is that it started off with the victim and a suspect he considered to be a friend hanging out.” The victim was white, and the black suspects allegedly used racial slurs against him. But Corley says the crime doesn’t really fit the pattern associated with much of the violence in the city, which has been fueled by gangs and guns. ”I think that the only thing that may be common with what’s happening with gun violence here is that the Facebook suspects used social media to broadcast what was happening,” she told Martin. ”And we often have cases where gang members here will post something on social media, often some sort of taunt, that sparks some of the gun violence that occurs here.” One way the incident may be similar to others, however, is that the victim knew his attackers. Some researchers, notably Yale professor Andrew Papachristos and Dr. Gary Slutkin of the University of Illinois at Chicago, say that nugget could hold the key to predicting, and eventually preventing violent crime in places like Chicago. ”So if I get shot, for instance, there’s a high likelihood that the people around me in my networks will also be victims and that, then, their friends will be victims. And their friends’ friends will be victims,” Papachristos tells Corley. ”It is contagious and that, when it’s managed as a health issue, you can rapidly drop it and sustain drops for long periods of time,” Slutkin adds. Slutkin heads a group called CureViolence. The group uses data to predict who might be involved in disputes, that might turn violent, and then sends ”interrupters” to try to stop things from escalating. But Corley reports the program has been mainly dropped in Chicago, due to funding shortages. The state’s ongoing budget woes have widely been blamed as another obstacle to stopping violence in the streets. In places like Austin on Chicago’s West Side, or Englewood and Chatham, on the South Side, there’s nothing abstract or academic about gang life. Gang life can be a death sentence, Edwin Day, Mario Hardiman and Andre Evans are all former gang members. All of them say their family structures were crumbling, and they were drawn to gangs for both structure, and safety. ”Most of the other people in the neighborhood were the pimps, drug dealers, dice shooters, ticket scalpers, some type of hustler, some type of, you know, shyster,” Hardiman told Martin. ”So I looked up to those characters and eventually became somewhat of a few of those characters myself   gambling and selling drugs, using marijuana.” Evans tells a similar story. ”I felt isolated, you know   the whole emotional thing. You’re just dealing with my emotions and not having my biological father in my life. ”That was the number one source of why I wanted to   why I got involved in (Gangster Disciple Nation). And I think the second reason was really to protect my brothers as well. You know, there would be a lot of times when, you know, people would be having hits out on my brothers or things happening to my brothers and just in a lot of ways, it was a way for me to protect them. Day recalls to Martin an incident where he was shot nine times in a gang dispute. DAY: Well, I was involved in gang life. I felt that there was others that was trying to do to me and my people bodily harm, and so we felt at the time that we would protect ourselves at all costs. And so there were times that I would pick up a gun and try to shoot people. I didn’t   I’ve never done it or I never shot anybody, but I have shot a gun and tried to shoot people. And the ironic thing about that, I guess, things come full circle. I was shot. And so. .. MARTIN: That’s part of the story, isn’t it? DAY: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. MARTIN: That people are as likely to be victims as they are to be perpetrators. Right? So why   what happened with that? Why did you get shot? DAY: And so what happened was   like I say   we were involved in gangs and drugs, and so you’re talking about monies being exchanged. And so that’s what changes. That’s where the violence heightens when you talk about drugs and monies and things of a sort. And so at this particular time, we were in what was called a gang war. And so guys would come in and try to shoot us and kill us, and we would kind of go back and forth try to shoot them and kill them. And so one particular night, I was in a home where we were kind engaging in all of this negative activity. I was leaving out and actually prepared to go and put my gear on to go and cause somebody else harm. And so unknowing to myself as I walked down the stairs, there was a guy that was waiting for me on the side of the building in the bushes or what have you. And he could have killed me. I will say that he could have killed me because he could have waited ’til I got to the bottom step and just kind of walk right up on me and shot me in the back of the head, but he didn’t. And I thank God for that. He waited until I kind of got to the edge of the curb, and he rose up out of the gangway and he started to shoot me. And so as I ran, I’m running across the street trying to get to my house, and I kind of catch one in the back of my leg. And I felt that and from then I continued to catch numerous shots   my back, my leg, my arms   all over. It was a total of nine shots that I ended up receiving. I can remember it kind of like it was yesterday. I was telling myself if I can just make it to the other side of the street, I’ll be fine. And so he continued to shoot, unload on me. And I did make it. I did make it to the other side of the street. And by the time I made it to the other side of street, I had caught so many shots that I just kind of collapsed right there. He was gone. I was down. And that’s what happened. Unintended consequences another problem, Another problem, according to experts and former gang members, is one of unintended consequences. When authorities cracked down on gang leadership  —   rank and file members no longer had gang hierarchy to ensure order. Large groups devolved into   factions. And that in turn led to chaos on the streets. ”When you have different factions, you don’t have leadership, and people can kind of run amok and do what they want to do,” Evans says. ”And they be like oh,    come from this block, so we going to mess with him like that, you know, just do random  ’  as they say, just because    comes from that side of the street per se. You know, and I had one of my best friends in high school who, you know, tried to join a gang, and they beat his jaw in with the gun.” Day, Hardiman, and Evans now all talk to   youth about avoiding the gang life. And despite their harrowing stories, they say they haven’t given up hope that things can get better, even if some young people in the city have. Hardiman says the government has to step up and help the black community. Evans advises young kids to find a legitimate ”hustle” to focus on, instead of turning to the streets. Day says the answer lies within every person in Chicago, who can either ignore the problem, hide from it, or try to stop it. ”I think that it starts by really having a love and a concern for someone other than yourself, to be able to go out and say, ’You know what? Let me go in and let me grab one. I’ll just grab it. It doesn’t have to be a whole group of young people, but let me grab one and talk to him.’ I think that it starts with love. It starts with compassion. It starts with caring for someone other than yourself. ’”"
171,"The morning of Oct. 18, 2016, the employees at La Divina, a taqueria and Mexican grocery in Buffalo, N. Y. were prepping for the lunch crowd  —   making salsa, grilling chicken and stocking the shelves with Mexican Cokes and Corona beer. Suddenly, agents from Homeland Security Investigations rushed in. ”I heard someone shouting, ’Don’t move! Don’t move!’ It was ICE,” says Jose Antonio Ramos, a    Mexican cook working illegally, in Spanish. ICE stands for U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ”I was in shock. I was complying with their orders, but they were mistreating us,” he says. ”They pointed guns at our heads. They pushed us on the floor and handcuffed us. They brought in dogs.” Beefy federal agents hauled out computers and cash registers while local news crews filmed. The raid of La Divina and three other restaurants under the same owner became one of the nation’s biggest immigration worksite actions in recent years. In all, 14 workers have been charged with civil and criminal immigration violations. Twelve more workers were found to be in the country illegally, but they were released because they didn’t meet the government’s enforcement priorities. The owner and his two managers are charged with harboring unauthorized immigrants. The federal criminal complaint alleges the trio provided workers with housing and transportation, paid them in cash off the books and avoided income taxes. Sergio Mucino, a    lawful permanent resident from Mexico City, owns the four restaurants ICE raided. During a recent lunch rush, Mucino is spotted making tacos behind the counter at La Divina with some newly hired workers. He declines to discuss the raid because his case is ongoing, but he is happy to talk about his menu. ”We try to offer authentic street tacos, make it more like a Mexican atmosphere,” he says as patrons line up to order ribeye and chorizo tacos. While Mucino is out on bail and reopening his restaurants one by one, most of his illegal workforce is out of a job and facing deportation. This was the aftermath of the raid despite an ICE statement that they were targeting the abusive employer, not his employees. Over at a lunch counter, Jeff Dugan, who works at a local marketing company, digs into a plate of chicken quesadillas. Dugan says he supports the ICE raid. ”I want the workers to be in good standing and . .. working under our laws and [well] taken care of,” he says, ”because when they’re not, they get put in subpar housing and they’re getting underpaid and overworked.” Thirteen hours a day, six days a week are what Ramos and his coworkers put in. They earned the equivalent of $6. 50 an hour  —   below the federal minimum wage. ”I guess my only complaint would be the long hours,” Ramos says. ”But you need to make money to eat and take care of your family. You have no choice.” The father of three children from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, wears an electronic ankle monitor and faces a civil violation for overstaying a work visa at a different restaurant that paid him even less. The city has rallied around the Buffalo restaurant workers who are facing removal. Churches are supporting them with food and rent assistance while they await their immigration hearings. Local sympathizers have demonstrated outside the ICE office in this Northern border city and circulated a petition asking federal authorities to let the workers go. An ICE spokesman defends the raid. He says they focused on Mucino, but during the course of the investigation they learned some of his workers had   the country after being deported, which is a felony. But some locals are asking if these relatively minor violations are a reason for federal agents to storm restaurant kitchens with handguns drawn and police dogs. ”It’s really small potatoes and so it really did shock this community,” says Nicole Hallett, an immigration law professor at the University of Buffalo. She represents four of the workers. ”I think it did shock the national immigration rights community.” Most immigration offenses are civil, not criminal, but there are exceptions. ”Criminal  ” is the charge when someone is previously deported or removed from the U. S. and comes back. Unauthorized immigrants who are deported often turn right around and make multiple attempts to   U. S. territory. ”But most of the time when someone gets charged with criminal   it’s because they have other criminal history,” says Hallett, puzzled. ”So [federal prosecutors] very rarely will indict someone with criminal   if that is the only thing that they have.” That’s what happened in Buffalo. Big,   worksite sweeps were common under President George W. Bush. President Obama has mostly taken a more   approach, such as auditing employer records to make sure all the workers have valid Social Security numbers. ”You need it all. You need audits, but you need an enforcement action now and again,” says a top ICE official in Washington, who asked not to be named. ”We’re trying to send that chilling effect to employers [to say] you need to think twice” about exploiting illegal workers. Yet Hallett says these raids can easily backfire. ”If one of your goals is to protect workers from exploitation, obviously arresting those workers as part of an enforcement action makes workers very afraid to come forward and report if there is exploitation happening,” she says. Obama’s Homeland Security team will be gone soon and there will be a new sheriff in town.   Trump and his advisers have talked about cracking down on unauthorized immigrants and the job magnets that attract them. It’s reasonable to ask if, under Trump, the Buffalo restaurant raid will become the norm rather than the exception."
172,"Nat Hentoff, the author of dozens of books and decades of columns, has died at 91. His son Nick Hentoff confirmed his father’s death on Twitter Saturday night. Hentoff was a writer for the Village Voice for 50 years. He also wrote for many publications over his lengthy career, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, United Media syndicate and Down Beat magazine. He frequently wrote about issues surrounding civil liberties  —   the Voice describes him as a ”civil libertarian.” His 1982 novel The Day They Came to Arrest the Book tells the story of a high school that seeks to remove the book Huckleberry Finn from the school curriculum and library over racism and other issues. A student from the school newspaper fights the effort  —   an allegory on censorship. He also was a lover and frequent writer on jazz music. From age 11, he was hooked on the genre after hearing the song ”Nightmare” by Artie Shaw coming through an open door at a record store. ”It just reached inside me,” Hentoff told NPR’s Guy Raz in 2010. ”I rushed into the store, ’What was that?’ ” Over the six decades he spent covering jazz, he attended plenty of performances and met many musicians. He ”got to be very good friends” with jazz great Dizzy Gillespie. At one point, he sat in on a recording session featuring Abbey Lincoln, Coleman Hawkins and Max Roach. ”The music just became part of you as you heard it,” Hentoff said of the experience. His most memorable show he attended was Duke Ellington ”with his full orchestra” at Symphony Hall in Boston, playing the jazz work ”Black, Brown and Beige.” ”It was the history of black people in the United States from slavery to the present,” Hentoff told NPR in 2010. ”And it was so extraordinary. At the end . .. people were so moved they could barely applaud until they gave a standing ovation.” Hentoff started writing for the Village Voice in 1958 until he was ”excessed” in 2008 by new managers. A few days after his firing, he told NPR that condolences he received from readers afterward were ”like reading one’s obituary while you’re still alive.” But he vowed to keep writing. In his final column for the Voice in 2009, he recalled advice he received from one of his mentors in journalism, the muckraker I. F. Stone: ”If you’re in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told.”"
173,"Availability is the best ability for Keith ”Bang Bang” McCurdy. ”I’m waiting all the time for that call, because I know Justin Bieber may call me at three in the morning and I have to tattoo him at six. That has happened,” McCurdy says. Bang Bang is considered one of the most successful tattoo artists in the industry. The New   artist is credited for creating some of the most iconic tattoos on celebrities. Like fashion model Cara Delevingne’s simple yet   lion tattoo that sits on her index finger. And pop star Rihanna’s henna design that wraps across her wrist and drips down her fingertips. In fact, it was Bang Bang’s work of art for Rihanna in 2007, when he was just 19 years old, that helped to catapult his career. Now 29, Bang Bang reflects on his journey from Pottstown, P. A.  —   a city about 40 miles northwest of Philadelphia  —   to how he got his big break. Keith McCurdy was born to teenage parents. His mother was a    high school dropout who worked at Domino’s Pizza, while his dad, who finished high school and went on to college, was scarcely around to father him, McCurdy recalls. This resulted in McCurdy being raised primarily by his mom. When he was 3 years old, McCurdy moved with his mom from Pennsylvania to a public housing unit in Delaware. There, his mom became an exotic dancer and he says this sometimes exposed him to a somewhat unsavory lifestyle. But the most challenging part, he says, was watching his mom struggle to put food on the table. That early hardship, however, forced McCurdy to grow up fast. In school, he struggled to keep up and was easily distracted by friends and the occasional recreational drug use. And while his dad was often absent from his life, whenever he did come around, he always stressed to McCurdy the importance of education. Thus, at age 13, tired of failing grades and getting into trouble, McCurdy heeded his dad’s advice to be a better student and convinced his parents to send him to boarding school in Connecticut. Leaving home for the first time, Two years later, McCurdy was thriving in boarding school. By now, he’d gotten his first exposure to tattoos and wanted one. His parents weren’t enthusiastic about the idea, but McCurdy struck a deal with them that if he made the honor roll, they’d let him get a tattoo. ”So I made the honor roll and I got a tattoo, and it was a great experience for me because it really fueled my interest more,” McCurdy says. He was 15 years old. By this time, McCurdy notes, he’d gained more   and discipline. It appeared that his life was on track. But then he did what he describes as ”something stupid.” He was gearing up for college, filling out applications and getting his portfolio together McCurdy was interested in graphic design. And despite finally getting his act together and excelling in school, McCurdy cheated on a Spanish test. This got him kicked out of boarding school. He found himself back in Delaware living with his mother and working   at Red Lobster, while trying to complete his high school diploma at a public school. Getting kicked out of boarding school was devastating for McCurdy. He’d liked it there, it inspired him and he felt like he was doing something positive with his life. It was also there  —   after he got his first tattoo  —   that he realized he wanted more. But with no money to pay for them, McCurdy thought of the next best thing  —   creating them from scratch. He felt that he could express himself through designing tattoos. McCurdy ordered a tattoo kit online and when it came in the mail, he walked into his mother’s kitchen, sat down and started to tattoo. ”And every day since, it’s with that enthusiasm and love, that I continued to tattoo,” he says. After three months of tattooing at home on himself and on everyone he knew, McCurdy landed a job at his dad’s friend’s tattoo shop outside a nearby trailer park. He quit his job at Red Lobster, dropped out of school and focused solely on tattooing. ”In hindsight it was a terrible decision, I mean it worked out, but man, I dropped out of high school to tattoo outside of a trailer park. And I tattooed guns on [my] neck and I had no choice other than to succeed at it,” McCurdy says. It was from tattooing the guns that McCurdy earned the nickname, ”Bang Bang.” He says the guns also symbolized that this was what he was going to do for the rest of his life. New York City has more skin, Still, McCurdy thought he could take his skills further than the trailer park tattoo shop. He wanted more. So he scoped the industry and studied his craft. He knew who the big players were, and he knew that if he wanted to grow he would have to leave his neighborhood. So McCurdy packed up and moved to New York City. ”New York City just has more people,” he says. ”So it was simply my thought that, well, there’s more skin, I’m going to go where the skin is  —   so if that’s my canvas I’m going to go there.” Upon moving to New York City, McCurdy had a hard time finding work. This    tattoo artist from Delaware found himself in the Big Apple going from tattoo shop to tattoo shop passing around his portfolio. He says many tattoo shop owners had a hard time believing that it was his work in the book because of how impressive it was to the eye. He had to find another way to stand out. ”When I moved to NYC I lost that funny little nickname,” he says. ”I didn’t tell people my name was Bang Bang, I told people my name was Keith. And the problem is Keith McCurdy isn’t really easy to remember, but nobody forgets Bang Bang. So I started telling people my name was Bang Bang and it was really great for me.” From then on out there was no more Keith McCurdy there was only Bang Bang. This is what she came for, After several months, Bang Bang finally landed a job at a grungy, dark basement tattoo shop on the Lower East Side. It was here where he’d meet the girl that would launch his career and forever change his life. A couple of months after he landed his first gig in New York, Bang Bang was tattooing in the basement when he recalls a group of five or six, tall, beautiful women walking into the shop. They asked the man at the front who was the best tattoo artist, the man said Bang Bang. Bang Bang’s coworker then told him that a singer wanted to get a tattoo. That singer was Barbadian   pop star, Rihanna. Rihanna, then 18, wanted a Sanskrit prayer etched along her thigh. The next day, Rihanna came into the shop with a reporter. They all sat down in the window of the tattoo shop storefront. Slowly, people began to gather around the window to watch. Bang Bang turned on his machine and started to ink Rihanna’s skin as the reporter interviewed her. ”For me, it was very difficult to make that tattoo. Because she’s talking and she moves a lot when she talks, and she’s speaking with her hands. And I’m like, ’There’s this girl who will not sit still, and everyone’s watching me, and I’m stressing out,’ ” Bang Bang says. In the end, the tattoo turned out great. Rihanna was happy, so all was good in the world. Word of mouth quickly spread Bang Bang’s success on the pop singer’s tattoo. This opened the door for more career opportunities, and Bang Bang made sure he was ready. He’s created a brand, a tattoo empire. ”Bang Bang” is no longer just his nickname, it’s the name of the store he opened where he now manages 16 artists. He’s Rihanna’s   tattoo artist, and has also inked celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Lebron James and Miley Cyrus, just to name a few. Through it all, Bang Bang falls back on one principle: being available. So much so, that for his first 10 years in New York, he didn’t take a vacation  —   and he’s made sure to not repeat the mistakes of his younger years in abusing alcohol or using drugs. ”I may need to fly across the planet because Lebron calls at 9 p. m. and I have to fly on this first flight the next morning,” Bang Bang says. ”I have to sort out my whole world to get it done, but saying yes and making sure I am able to do it is what really laid the foundation for the opportunities that came.”"
174,"The world of global health and development loves its buzzwords  —   a word or short phrase that sums up a problem or a solution, like ”food insecurity” or ”gender equity.” The problem is that buzzwords aren’t always clear to the average global citizen. And some folks in the development world don’t like them either. Here’s The International Development Jargon Detector to prove it. Still, the latest jargon can reveal a lot about trends and goals. We asked our sources and our audience on Twitter to share buzzwords from 2016 that are likely to be part of the global conversation in the year ahead. And we checked to see what words are trending. Here’s a sampling. A haze of air pollution  —   think pea soup fog but toxic. The word’s been around but resurfaced in the past few months after particularly bad airpocalypses in India and China. In December, Beijing issued its first red alert of 2016 after five days of smog was forecast. Schools were shut down, people wore surgical masks to filter out the fumes and flights were canceled because of poor visibility. There was even a trending hashtag, #themostserioussmog, which prompted citizens across Chinese social media site Weibo to share photos of their experience. Use it in a sentence: During airpocalypse, the wealthiest schoolchildren in Beijing can expect to play soccer under an inflatable   dome.  They’re not doctors or nurses. But they’ve received some basic training in medical skills and play a vital role in places where there’s a lack of health workers  —   often in remote parts of   countries but in the U. S. as well, where there are 48, 000 CHWs according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In December, CHWs had their moment in the sun when Dr. Raj Panjabi won a $1 million TED Prize for founding Last Mile Health, an organization that uses CHWs to provide health care in isolated parts of Liberia. Use it in a sentence: By day, she runs a beauty salon, but by night, she’s a CHW, educating women about contraception. The act of collecting data and using it to predict or shape behavior  —   like keeping track of your steps with a FitBit so you can decide if you need to amp up your exercise program. The word’s been around for years but got new life in the global community last year as technologists started thinking of ways to use data, like disease outbreaks, DNA and financial transactions, to improve people’s lives. Some companies in China, for example, are feeding weather data into a computer with artificial intelligence software to predict   events  —   like an airpocalypse  —   in advance. Use it in a sentence: Activists are hoping that the datafication of air quality data can help bring more funding for   programs. Around the world, there are 1 billion people who live without power. They can’t automate agricultural processes like milling grain to produce more food to sell. They use carbon   cookstoves. They pay someone to let them charge their mobile phones. The term’s been floating around the global development space since 2011, when U. N.   Ban   made electricity access a global priority. It made headlines in February 2016 when U. S. lawmakers passed the historic Electrify Africa Act, promising to put 50 million Africans on the grid by 2020. Use it in a sentence: Some startups in Silicon Valley are fighting energy poverty by designing more affordable   lamps for people in the developing world.  A portmanteau of ”financial” and ”technology” used to describe emerging financial services like virtual currency, mobile banking and online payment systems. Last year, economists and developers started exploring how fintech might benefit the developing world. With just a mobile phone and an Internet connection, fintech makes it possible for people without bank accounts to save and send money  —   or get the loans they need to start a small business. Use it in a sentence: Thanks to fintech, a Nigerian worker in China can send money back to his family using his mobile phone.  Proof that you are a citizen in a country. Some 1. 5 billion people, mostly in Africa and Asia, are undocumented  —   limiting their ability to vote, get a job or inherit property. The need for NID has always been an important issue in global development, but over the past couple of years, there’s been growing momentum in Africa to ensure that all citizens have these important documents from birth. This April, countries will meet in Namibia for the third Government Forum on Electronic Identity in Africa, in the hopes of finding better ways to register citizens. Use it in a sentence: Sorry, madame, we cannot admit your    child to school unless she has NID. How ecosystems affect human health. In the face of climate change and rapid urbanization, it’s a topic that will continue to grow in the years ahead. Climate   droughts, for example, can cause crop shortages that lead to malnutrition. And cutting down forests to make way for housing can expose humans to harmful viruses that are carried by   animals. In December, The Lancet, a medical journal, created a new publication to help share research on the subject across the the global health community. Use it in a sentence: The dwindling bee population is a big planetary health issue  —   we need them to pollinate   crops that help humans stay healthy. A fancy acronym for drones and similar airborne robots. UAVs have been around awhile, but in the field of global health, the term got quite a lift in 2016. Aid groups are testing out UAVs to deliver everything from contraceptives to vaccines to the remotest parts. They’re even being used to help communities map flood risk by capturing aerial images of slums in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Use it in a sentence: Dust is a big problem for the UAVs that deliver health care goods over desert terrain in Ghana  —   it makes it hard for the remote pilots to see where the drone is flying.  Any other buzzwords you think we may have missed? Tweet at @NPRGoatsandSoda and share your words with us! "
175,"A week after a gunman killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub, the suspected assailant remains at large and secular Turks are feeling under attack. ISIS claimed the shooting, calling it an assault on what it called ”a pagan holiday.” The government’s pledge to defend all lifestyles hasn’t kept an atmosphere of fear from descending on some of Istanbul’s secular neighborhoods. By way of contrast, some Turks point to what happened in November 2015, when gunmen stormed Paris cafes and entertainment venues, killing more than 100 people. Parisians quickly rallied, saying the only response was to keep right on going out at night, which many did. In Istanbul, there was a similar call right after the New Year’s nightclub attack, but the response so far has been different. A well known Turkish writer and actor, Gulse Birsel, wrote a newspaper column urging people not to get lost in despair. ”Go out every night,” she wrote, ”to a movie, a play, hang out at a music concert.” The column has drawn praise. But in Istanbul’s more secular neighborhoods the response feels more like fear than defiance. Empty Tables, Fearful Customers, ”Beer Time” is a bar that occupies a corner just off the city’s major commercial thoroughfare, Istiklal Street. Songs from the pop charts of yesteryear are playing as bartender Selami, who like many Turks these days is cautious around reporters and gives only his first name, sits down to chat. He only has a couple tables to watch. He says in the past several years business has gone from bad to worse. ”There were the Gezi Park protests in 2013,” he says, referring to   demonstrations in nearby Taksim Square that were violently crushed by riot police. Then there was a bomb that hit tourists on Istiklal Street  —   after that, he says the place was almost empty. ”This New Year’s Eve we were actually packed,” he says. ”But then people started getting alerts on their phones about the nightclub attack, and in no time pretty much the whole street was deserted.” Selami jumps up as a quartet of students gets ready to leave. These days, he says, it’s mainly students who come here. His old regulars are nowhere to be seen, and the customers that do show up are jittery. ”I think it was yesterday, a woman came in and ordered a beer,” he says. ”She saw two foreign guys at another table and called me over. She pointed at one and said, ’Doesn’t he look like the nightclub attacker?’ People are starting to feel  .” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to pull a divided country together, and says he won’t allow terrorists to harm anyone’s lifestyle, religious or secular. He told an audience of local leaders that he rose to power arguing for tolerance for pious Muslims in officially secular Turkey, and that same tolerance should extend to those with secular values. ”Just as it is wrong for people who cannot tolerate the call to prayer to trample on a preacher, it is wrong to use force against those who do not pray,” he said to warm applause. ”In Turkey, nobody’s life style is under systematic threat.” Secular Turks aren’t so sure about that. They’ve been feeling increasing pressure for years under Erdogan’s government, led by a party with roots in political Islam. Turkey’s head of religious affairs was one of the first to condemn the nightclub attack. Critics say that may be in part because the day before New Year’s Eve, he issued a sermon to be read in all mosques. It criticized   celebrations as not consistent with Muslim values. In the largely secular Cihangir neighborhood, home to Turks, foreign journalists and diplomats, a young man who gives his name as Aram take a break outside a   called Mellow. It looks like a cheerful shoebox of a place, but these days Aram says the mood is somber. Many of his Turkish customers are staying away, and too many of the expats who round out the cosmopolitan atmosphere here are dropping in to say goodbye. ”I remember one Italian guy who used to come here a lot,” he says. ”He’s lived here for 10 years, but he said he has to go home because he doesn’t feel safe here.” Another trend he’s noticed is people moving out of the neighborhood altogether.   Turks say secular values may be fiercely defended in Paris, but in today’s Turkey they’re merely tolerated, and then only sometimes. They’re hoping the president’s call for tolerance is more than just reassuring rhetoric."
176,"Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer ”radical empathy” and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety. Today the Sugars hear from a woman going through radical physical  —   and emotional  —   changes. She was ”extremely overweight,” but lost 100 pounds. Now she wants to have a ”grand adventure” and feels that her husband is holding her back. If you lose weight, do other parts of your life inevitably change as well? To help answer this and other questions, they’re joined again by Lindy West, a writer, editor and performer whose work focuses on pop culture, social justice and body image. She’s the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. Dear Sugars, My husband and I got married four years ago. I was 28 and he was 31. It was the happiest day of our lives. We were excited for the future, happy in our relationship and ready to give marriage a go. We were also both extremely overweight. After marrying my husband, let’s call him Dylan, I began feeling motivated to make positive changes in my life. I changed my eating habits, started moving more, found a love for yoga and decided to become a yoga teacher. I lost 100 pounds. Dylan was supportive and encouraging the whole way through. He would cook me healthy dinners, celebrate my weekly weight losses (whether 1 pound or 5) and was my cheerleader throughout my year of yoga teacher training. He never left my side. He is the epitome of unconditional love. What they don’t tell you about weight loss is that after you lose a large amount of weight, an entire new world opens up for you. For the first time in 10 years, I am able to ride roller coasters. I can zip line, rock climb, kayak and paddle board without having to check weight restrictions first. I discovered hiking and found that nature makes me feel alive. I feel like a teenager again, Sugars. The world is mine for the taking, and I want to see it all. Dylan is ready to settle down. He wants to start a family. He wants to buy a house. He wants a garden and a yard for our dog. We will work at   jobs, come home to dinner every night and raise our children.  Those things sound lovely to me, but while they are what I wanted before, they are not even close to what I want now. I want to travel. I want to try new things. He’s willing to compromise with vacations and weekends of travel here and there, but I want more. I want a grand adventure. The ”next chapter” for us couldn’t look more different. I’ve changed so much while he’s stayed the same. I’m not even sure I want children anymore. So what now? I love this man, but I worry that if I’d been this person four years ago, I wouldn’t have gotten married. I feel like he is holding me back. I feel like I have a ball and chain. I feel selfish. I feel inspired. I feel like a jerk. I feel strong and confident and capable. I feel like I am ruining my marriage, like a terrible wife, but I feel amazing. I can’t imagine my life without Dylan, but at the same time, I don’t want to live with regrets. Signed, Lost in Love, Steve Almond: I’m not sure how much this has to do with weight. She seems like somebody who has gone through a radical shift in what she wants out of life. I’m not saying weight isn’t a relevant issue, but it seems much more fundamental that she wants to follow a different map. Cheryl Strayed: It’s really a fascinating dichotomy she’s set up. She sounds like somebody who allowed her body weight to make her world smaller than it should have been, and now she’s like, ”I want to have this gigantic life.” She’s so clear about this feeling of being held back. Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio:RSSiTunesStitcher, Steve: Lost in Love, if you want to consider the possibility of remaining married to Dylan, then you have to talk with him. It sounds like the issues and differences in your priorities, and even what you inwardly feel toward him, are conflicting enough that you should be in counseling or individual therapy. I don’t think you’ve said to him, ”Sometimes I feel like you’re my ball and chain, and I just want to get away and have a big life, but you’re an anchor.” You’re not going to be successful in the marriage, or even moving out of the marriage, until you settle up and are honest with him. Cheryl: The final paragraph of this letter is fascinating. She says, ”I love this man, but I worry that if I’d been this person four years ago, I wouldn’t have gotten married.” This is interesting  —   the idea that you lose weight and then you’re a different person. Many years ago, I was a waitress and I worked with a woman who, over the course of the year that we were employed together, lost about 100 pounds. And it seemed like she was a different person. She went from being this kind of shy, reserved woman to suddenly showing up in these incredibly tight dresses and dancing on the tables. I remember watching this  —   not just a physical transformation, but the way she presented herself to the world. I ran into her years later, and she hadn’t gained back all of the weight, but she’d gained back enough of it. She was back to being that first person I met. Lost in Love, maybe this is a strange era where you feel like you’re out of the box that was both of your own making and that our culture defines for fat women. I think that you should be very careful as you make decisions based on this moment in your life. Lindy West: The way that our culture’s   narrative works is that weight loss is this magic ticket to a perfect life and all of your problems go away. If you read literature about people who’ve undergone really drastic weight loss, what you hear over and over is people saying, ”I discovered when I became thin that I had all the same emotional problems I had when I was fat. I had all the same   problems, all the same confidence problems.” It’s not magic. You still have to do all this work on yourself, emotionally and psychologically. It seems like she’s in this really electric moment, and it might be a good idea to take it slow and assess where she is and if she has realistic expectations about what being smaller is going to do for her life and for her problems more broadly. You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear about a man who wants to talk about his girlfriend’s weight. Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail. com and it may be answered on a future episode. You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app."
177,"Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer ”radical empathy” and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety. Today the Sugars have advice for people in different situations. In the first, a woman writes that she thinks her boyfriend loves her, but he hasn’t said it outright. She says she doesn’t want to say it first and make him feel forced. Is it possible to express your love for someone without explicitly saying it? Then they hear from a man wondering about the importance of physical attraction in a relationship, and thinking about how societal standards of beauty may be affecting his perception of his girlfriend. Dear Sugars, I’ve been dating a wonderful man for just over a year. We’ve been officially a couple for just about six months. We have so much fun when we’re together, and he shows me that he cares in so many ways  —   sneaking quietly into bed so he doesn’t wake me, inviting me to his family holidays, lots of kisses and snuggles when we’re together, and saying ”I miss you” lots when we’re apart. We spend all of our free time together, and we’ve decided to move in together in a few months. We talk about everything. He shares his ambitions, his insecurities, and whenever we have a disagreement, we talk it out. He is more open about his feelings than anyone I have ever dated. He’s told me that I’m the person he feels closest to. But there is one thing he hasn’t shared  —   his love. While I feel it from him, he hasn’t uttered those three little words to me  —   ”I love you.” Each time our relationship has moved to the next level, I have been the proactive one. But on this front, I have held back. I am waiting for him to tell me he loves me before I say it. I’d like to know he loves me before we take the next step of sharing a home together, but I don’t feel comfortable asking, ”Do you love me?” If he said yes, I would feel like I had forced it  —   like he said it because he knew it’s what I wanted to hear. So Sugars, what do I do? Can I get him to express his love in words without disbelieving it? How long is too long to wait to hear ”I love you”? Signed, I Love Him, Cheryl Strayed: I Love Him, welcome to a   relationship. There’s the way that you want the other person to be or behave, and then there’s the way that they are. You need to negotiate these things. To me, it sounds like your boyfriend loves you, and you love him. He just assigns a very different value to those three words. Maybe, for whatever reason, ”I love you” is just not a thing that he has said to people in his life. Steve Almond: That’s such an important point. I come from a family that did not say ”I love you,” and I had to train myself to say it to people. When others say it, I feel uncomfortable. It’s as if there’s been a sudden intrusion of intense direct emotion that makes me feel frozen. Now, I can say it because I know that it’s shorthand, I Love Him, for all the things your boyfriend does for you. I imagine that if you explain to him that it’s personally meaningful, even if it makes him feel a little uncomfortable, you’ll find out what his relationship to that phrase is and whether it’s something you should be unsettled by. Cheryl: The two options I see are either, go ahead and say ”I love you,” and you’ll just have to let go of this archaic, sexist notion that he should be the person who says it first. Or, you say, ”I need to talk to you about something. I love you, and I am perplexed that you haven’t said you love me. I’ve been waiting for you to say it, and I don’t know why it’s important to me that you say it first, but it is.” Maybe your view on this is rooted in the feeling that you are the proactive one and the one who compels emotional growth in your relationship at each juncture. That’s something really important for you two to unpack, and I think this ”I love you” conversation could be a great portal into that deeper relationship. Dear Sugars, I’ve been with my girlfriend for about a year now, and I’ve never felt such a strong connection to someone. She and I have more in common than I’ve ever shared with a partner, and our relationship has progressed very quickly.  Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio:RSSiTunesStitcher, The only problem is, when we first met, I didn’t feel as much of a physical attraction to her as I thought I should, but I decided that my attraction to her on all other levels was deep enough to overcome that. I thought that our physical chemistry would grow in time, but unfortunately, it hasn’t.  I feel terrible and shallow for even writing this down, and I can’t imagine how I could ever explain this to her without hurting her deeply. I’ve even felt some of my male friends imply (or say outright) that they thought I could ”do better.”  My question for you is: Am I doing the right thing in pursuing a relationship with this wonderful person and ignoring what I perceive to be totally invented standards of beauty? Or is physical chemistry the first and most important part of a real relationship? Sincerely, Struggling with Standards, Cheryl: Struggling with Standards, I think that you are up against two things that you have conflated into one. There is your physical attraction to your girlfriend and the physical and sexual chemistry you have with her, and then there’s the invented standards of beauty. Those are two different things. The person that you are attracted to and have chemistry with is not necessarily someone who fits into standards and conventions of beauty. So the first thing to think about is, do you have a powerful physical bond with this woman, or are you hung up? Is the thing that’s inhibiting you from having this bond the idea of what women ”should” look like? And if that’s the case, the great news about that is that it can be revised. You can say, screw the standards. I love sleeping with her, I love this relationship. Now if, on the other hand, it is a chemistry issue rather than a beauty standards issue, I think that you’re right to ask this question. If you don’t have a basic, real attraction to your romantic partner, I think that you need to rethink the relationship and maybe break up or become friends. I will say, if you decide to end this relationship, I really don’t think that you should say to your girlfriend that it’s because she’s not physically attractive enough for you. That’s a subjective opinion, and it’s one that will hurt her for a long time and probably affect her for many relationships. Steve: The pattern in my life has been, when I get involved with somebody, as I find out more about who they are and all the hidden beautiful things within them, they become more attractive to me. What’s unsettling here is that, for whatever reason, after a year, she hasn’t become more attractive to you. Being steeped in this youth and   culture mixes up our internal lives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could separate out how much is chemistry and how much is an external standard? The problem is, we’ve internalized these things, and they become false sacred texts inside us. That is something you should question yourself about. At the bottom of it, you cannot fake chemistry. A year isn’t a short amount of time to figure out whether the underlying chemistry is there. But if it’s not, it’s not. Don’t waste her time or yours trying to fake it, because that’s its own kind of humiliation. You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more from people doubting love in relationships. Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail. com and it may be answered on a future episode. You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app."
178,"When I told my coworker that I was participating in a study that involved fasting, she laughed until she nearly cried. My boyfriend, ever supportive, asked hesitantly, ”Are you sure you want to try this?” Note the use of ”try” instead of ”do.” When I told my father over the phone, the line went silent for a moment. Then he let out a long, ”Welllllll,” wished me luck, and chuckled. Turns out, luck might not be enough. I like to eat. Often and a lot. Now, however, my eating habits have become more than a source of amusement for friends and coworkers. Now they are data in a study focusing on people with multiple sclerosis, like me. The pilot study, led by Dr. Ellen Mowry at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is looking at the impact of intermittent fasting on our microbiomes  —   the universe of trillions of microbes, mainly bacteria, that live in our guts. Intermittent fasting is pretty much what it sounds like. For six months, participants are allowed to eat during an   period each day. The remaining 16 hours we are limited to water, tea and coffee. No added sugar, cream, honey or sweetener. Several studies have suggested that the predominant bacteria in the guts of people with MS tend to be different than those in the guts of those without the chronic autoimmune inflammatory disease, according to Samantha Roman, the study’s research coordinator. Depending on their makeup, bacteria have the ability to soothe or trigger inflammation, potentially affecting the symptoms of MS and other diseases. Exactly how gut bacteria and inflammation are related, though, is not well understood. What researchers do know, Roman says, is that intermittent fasting is one of many ways to change the makeup of the microbiome, and it can quell the inflammatory symptoms of MS  —   at least in mice. To help shed light on the relationships between fasting and the microbiome and inflammation and multiple sclerosis in humans, researchers at Hopkins will inspect gut bacteria in study participants, before, during and after the   period of fasting. Two random mornings a week, Roman sends text messages, asking participants to photograph all of our food intake for the day. As a part of this study, I like to think that every bite I take may bring doctors one data point closer to easing the abdominal spasms that ebb and flow like a wave of knives, occasionally sending me to the emergency room. Every embarrassingly audible gurgle of hunger could be a signal that my microbial cohabitants are calming my immune system, muting the burning sensation that at times covers my skin from eyelids to  . Each   snack that I decline may help reduce the inflammation that has left my brain and spinal cord dotted with lesions that lead to those and other symptoms. It is a noble endeavor, I told myself as I prepared that first stool sample, and I have continued to remind myself of this lofty motivation every morning at 10 a. m. when inevitably, my stomach begins to growl. I’ll likely repeat the mantra at the end of the study, when I’ll need to prepare a second stool sample for comparison. Like so many such endeavors, this one isn’t easy. I took Roman up on her suggestion, and scheduled my periods of eating between noon and 8 p. m. I get home at about 7 p. m. several evenings a week after strength training, and there is no way I could go 16 hours without eating after the ordeal my trainer puts me through. I only started eating breakfast in the past few years. I figured I would slip back into that routine fairly easily. My first few days of fasting coincided with the presidential election and my car breaking down. These were   events. As it turned out, a little   helped out quite a bit. Thanks to the knot in my stomach, I had to force myself to eat. ”This is going to be a breeze,” I thought. Then came Saturday. After running several   errands  —   the butcher, the coffee shop, the grocery store  —   I was famished. So I did the sensible thing and bought a grilled cheese sandwich that was stuffed with crab dip. When I got home at about 2:30 p. m. I devoured it, then promptly fell asleep. I woke up two hours later in a panic  —   I only had a few hours left to eat! I wasn’t hungry, but just to play it safe, I ate a taco and some ice cream. In the first month and a half of the study, my symptoms have not changed much. I’m still fatigued, my hands and feet often feel as though they are on fire, and I have occasional muscle spasms in my feet. Still, things had been going well. I lost about 8 pounds (my regular diet includes more vegetables, less    grilled cheese) set a new PR at the gym, and slipped into a comfortable eating routine. Until my trip to Chicago. It was a wedding! What was I supposed to do? The answer, apparently, is drink. I did keep my food intake between noon and 8 p. m. But there was the snowy Christkindlmarket with its fragrant, sweet, hot mulled wine. And champagne toasts! And whiskey! Over three nights, I drank alcohol beyond my   limit three times. And then, in the most unexceptional place, for the most basic of foodstuffs, I hit rock bottom. After two hours of sleep, in Terminal E of O’Hare Airport at 7 a. m. I ate a bagel. I needed that bagel. I regret nothing. During that weekend, for the first time, Roman sent text messages two days in a row. Hesitantly, shamefully, I confessed to everything. The point of the texts is, after all, to determine how well participants stick to the program, as well as to have data to help determine if what we eat has any effect over and above when we eat. I have become the very reason I tend to   studies that rely on   data! I want to do better, for the opportunity to improve my health and for the integrity of the study. I’ll have to continue to remind myself of the nobility of this scientific endeavor, particularly in January, when I spend a week at the beach in Mexico. Brandie Michelle Jefferson is a communications manager and freelance reporter who loves a good science story. She’s on Twitter, too: @b_m_jefferson."
179,"By many standards, Mireille Kamariza is at the top of the world. She’s a graduate student at one of the world’s top universities, working on her Ph. D. with one of the world’s top chemists. And she’s tackling a tough problem  —   tuberculosis  —   that sickens nearly 10 million people a year. Earlier this year,    Kamariza and her adviser unveiled a potential breakthrough in fighting TB: a way to detect the culprit bacteria faster and more accurately. But for Kamariza, the fight against TB is not just about scientific progress and prestige. It’s personal. Kamariza grew up in the small African country of Burundi, where many around her were stricken with TB. A close relative lived with the disease for years  —   and eventually died from it. It was common for people in her town to get sick with TB and ”wait to see if you’d die  —   and if you survived, you’d just kind of live with it.” A World Health Organization report released in October states that an estimated 10. 4 million people were infected with TB in 2015, up from previous years  —   and 1. 8 million died from the disease. TB is still a stigmatized disease in Burundi, so Kamariza doesn’t want to be specific about her relative’s identity. But, she says, he most likely didn’t get treated ”because he didn’t know you could be treated, and even if he did know, [treatment] was far from where he was  —   and expensive.” Kamariza’s journey hasn’t been easy. In Burundi, it’s rare for girls to attend college  —   not to mention work with   scientists. ”Science was something that Europeans and Americans did,” she says. ”It was for other people  —   not for me.” When she was in high school, she didn’t have a clue about science careers. Neither did her parents. ”I never dreamed [Kamariza] would become a scientist because it is a career path that is unknown in Burundi,” says Denise Sinankwa, Kamariza’s mother. Sinankwa had her hands full when Kamariza was young. She and her husband were raising four kids during a bloody civil war. Nearly 300, 000 civilians were killed. The family moved a lot, and Sinankwa often worked multiple jobs to feed the family. But Sinankwa still pushed Kamariza to do well in school. She wanted her daughter to land a   job and be able to support herself. Kamariza considers herself lucky. She attended a   Catholic school, where ”things were more rigorous” than other public schools. The ”nuns’ school” instilled a mindset most of her peers lacked because generally girls ”were raised to be a wife,” she says. Kamariza wanted to pursue studies in the U. S. where her   brother had already landed. So, when she was 17, Kamariza packed up her belongings and traveled with her third brother half way around the world. She went to San Diego in the fall of 2006 and moved into a tiny studio apartment with her brothers. The four worked various jobs at grocery stores, restaurants, retail shops  —   ”whatever we could get to pay the bills,” Kamariza says. Their earnings also paid for classes at a junior college. Then Kamariza’s hard work started to pay off. At San Diego Mesa College, she found a   mentor. Her chemistry teacher, Saloua Saidane, was a fellow   African. Born to illiterate parents in Tunisia, Saidane was one of 12 children and knew what it was like to be a poor immigrant kid pouring herself into school as the only way to a better future. ”Kamariza was serene yet determined,” Saidane says. ”She worked hard. She saw the opportunity to have a good life, a life different from what she left behind.” Saidane started Kamariza’s journey into science. ”She really pushed me and kept motivating me and telling me I should aim high. Whatever she told me, I did,” Kamariza says. After quitting her job at Safeway to focus on school, Kamariza got into the University of California, San Diego, and began undergraduate studies. Through a National Institutes of Health diversity scholarship, Kamariza spent summers doing biology research. In 2012, she joined Carolyn Bertozzi’s lab  —   then at the University of California, Berkeley, now at Stanford University  —   as a graduate student. Kamariza wanted to focus on infectious disease. So she started brainstorming with another graduate student to figure out a quicker, better way to diagnose TB. They eventually came up with a new test that recognizes a sugar, called trehalose, that is uniquely found in TB bacteria. In the presence of a special substance, TB bacteria cells glow green, making the microbes easy to spot on microscope slides of an infected person’s mucus or saliva. Current TB tests are laborious and not very sensitive  —   some infections are missed. TB cultures are more reliable but take six weeks to produce a result. Kamariza  —   and other researchers elsewhere  —   are creating methods that could make TB diagnoses simpler and more accurate. Kamariza’s method looked promising this year when she and her colleagues tested it on a small batch of samples from patients in South Africa. But the tools are still in the developmental phase. Larger, more rigorous studies are needed for the method to be considered for use in clinics. Though unfinished, the research drew heavy crowds when Kamariza presented her data on a poster at a TB conference in September in Paris. Considering her improbable journey  —   from a child witnessing the tragedy of this disease to a young researcher contributing toward its eradication  —   ”the whole experience is surreal,” Kamariza says. ”A lot of hard work, a bit of luck, perseverance and relentless support from friends and family are what got me here,” says Kamariza, She hopes her experience can ”encourage others like me to pursue their passions, no matter the obstacles.”"
180,"Donald Trump has named his    to a top White House job. Jared Kushner will serve as a senior adviser to the president, and the transition team says he will work with incoming Chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Stephen Bannon ”to execute   Trump’s agenda.” The announcement also says Kushner will not receive a salary while serving in the Trump administration, which could help alleviate legal problems stemming from federal   law. Kushner, a    real estate developer and publisher of the New York Observer, has been married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka since 2009. When it was reported last week that they would be moving to Washington, D. C. it fed into speculation that one or both would serve as advisers in the Trump administration. ”Jared has been a tremendous asset and trusted advisor throughout the campaign and transition and I am proud to have him in a key leadership role in my administration,” Trump said in a statement, nothing Kushner’s success in business and politics, with his role in the inner circle of the  ’s 2016 campaign. In the statement, Kushner said, ”It is an honor to serve our country. I am energized by the shared passion of the   and the American people and I am humbled by the opportunity to join this very talented team.” Bringing family members into the White House may prove difficult, though. That’s because of a 1967   law, inspired by another famous family, as NPR’s Jim Zarroli recently reported: ”The   law was passed by Congress in response to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to appoint his brother Robert as attorney general, says Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. ” ’It was very controversial at the time. Lyndon Johnson in particular did not like that, and when he became president he helped shepherd this   law through the U. S. Congress,’ West says.” But it’s not entirely clear what that law means. Here is what the statute lays out, as NPR’s Ailsa Chang reported in November: ”A public official may not appoint, employ, promote, advance, or advocate for appointment, employment, promotion, or advancement, in or to a civilian position in the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control any individual who is a relative of the public official.” The question now is what exactly ”agency” means, Chang reported. This question has come up before  —   in a 1993 case pertaining to President Bill Clinton, who appointed wife Hillary to head up a health care reform task force. In that case (which was not in fact about nepotism at all) the judge mentioned in his decision that the statute didn’t seem to apply to White House staff. But that still isn’t settled law, Chang also reported. ”There’s plenty of disagreement in the legal community about whether that bit from Judge Silberman’s opinion is legally binding because it wasn’t part of the reasoning for the central holding in the case.” But the fact that Kushner will not draw a salary could be key. Government ethics lawyer Ken Gross pointed out to NPR last November that the statute requires violators give up compensation, which he described as an ineffective way to enforce the law. ”So it sounds like you could have someone in an unpaid position, and then they’ve already suffered the penalty for violating the provision, and presumably, they would go on their merry way as an unpaid member,” said Gross at the time. Even leaving aside the appointment’s legality, it could also raise plenty of ethical questions. In a recent piece, the New York Times laid out the many possibilities for conflicts of interest to arise with Kushner in the White House. For example, the Times reports that Kushner ”played a pivotal role in persuading” Trump to appoint Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn  —   whose bank lent money to the Kushner Cos.  —   as director of the National Economic Council. Kushner’s legal counsel, Jamie Gorelick  —   who served as deputy attorney general during Bill Clinton’s administration  —   told NPR’s Jackie Northam on Monday that Kushner plans to divest from his real estate holdings in anticipation of serving in public office. ”He is going to restructure his business, so that he will no longer have any active involvement in Kushner Co. entities, which are real estate entities mostly in New York. He will divest a substantial number of his assets, and for any of those that remain he will abide by all the appropriate recusal requirements of the ethical guidelines,” Gorelick said."
181,"On behalf of the U. S. State Department, John Kerry has issued a formal apology for the department’s pattern of discrimination against LGBT employees during a period beginning in the 1940s and stretching for decades. Sen. Ben Cardin,  . had asked the secretary of state for such an apology in late November, calling the historical discrimination ”  and unacceptable.” The Washington Blade reported on Cardin’s request in early December, noting at the time that the State Department said it was preparing a response. The mass purge of gay staffers during the   century was known as the ”Lavender Scare,” which coincided with the ”Red Scare.” Author Eric Berkowitz, speaking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2015, said the systematic discrimination against gay people in that era has ”gotten short shrift in the popular imagination.” At the same time as the persecution of alleged communists, ”there was no less energetic a hunt to root out what were called ’perverts’ . .. from the federal government,” he said. And it started in the State Department, explains David Johnson, the author of The Lavender Scare. He says that in the ’40s, the State Department was already systematically firing gay employees. Then, in 1950, Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists in the State Department. In an attempt to defend itself against the charges, the department pointed out that it was working hard to expel ”subversives”  —   by firing gay people. That disclosure kicked off the wider ”Lavender Scare.” ”The purges begin in the State Department,” Johnson says. ”And then in the politicized atmosphere of McCarthyism, they doubled down.” In 1953, years after the State Department began firing gay employees, Dwight Eisenhower instituted a nationwide ban on gay men and lesbians working for the federal government. Purges lasted for decades. Careers were destroyed, and some employees committed suicide, Johnson says. Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, wrote to Kerry on Nov. 29 to ask that in his last months as secretary of state, he address that history. Cardin said that more than 1, 000 people were dismissed from the Department of State for their alleged sexual orientation, and ”many more” prevented from joining the department through discriminatory hiring practices. As recently as the 1990s, he said, the State Department drove out personnel thought to be gay, calling them ”security risks.” Cardin urged Kerry to acknowledge the discrimination, apologize for it  —   and perhaps install an exhibit about it at the State Department’s museum. ”Of course, the measures we take today cannot bring back years of anguish or erase decades of institutionalized homophobia, but we can ensure that such injustices levied against the LGBT community are never repeated again,” Cardin said in a statement in early December. Kerry responded with a statement released Monday. He began by highlighting the State Department’s recent support for LGBT and intersex employees. Then he wrote: ”In the past  —   as far back as the 1940s, but continuing for decades  —   the Department of State was among many public and private employers that discriminated against employees and job applicants on the basis of perceived sexual orientation, forcing some employees to resign or refusing to hire certain applicants in the first place. These actions were wrong then, just as they would be wrong today. ”On behalf of the Department, I apologize to those who were impacted by the practices of the past and reaffirm the Department’s steadfast commitment to diversity and inclusion for all our employees, including members of the LGBTI community.” Human Rights Campaign Government Affairs Director David Stacy said in a statement that ”although it is not possible to undo the damage that was done decades ago, Secretary Kerry’s apology sets the right tone for the State Department as it enters a new and uncertain time in our country under a new administration.” But David Johnson, a history professor at the University of South Florida and the author of The Lavender Scare, says that while the apology is welcome and overdue, Kerry’s statement misrepresents the State Department’s role in the purge. ”The apology made it sound like the State Department was just one of many institutions that was discriminating against gay men and lesbians . .. that it was just sort of     1950s   discrimination,” he says. ”In fact, the State Department was unique in its level of homophobia,” he says."
182,"Seven years ago, the Navajo tribal council in southeastern Utah started mapping the secret sites where medicine men and women forage for healing plants and Native people source wild foods. They wanted to make a case for protecting the landscape known as Bears Ears, a place sacred not only to their tribe but to many other tribes in the region, going back thousands of years. In one of his final acts in office, President Obama late last month created the 1. 35   Bears Ears National Monument, a move that proponents say will safeguard the area’s ecology and guarantee food sovereignty for the region’s Native Americans. ”Up to 20, 000 Natives of various tribes live within 45 minutes of Bears Ears, including 10, 000 Navajos that live just across the border in Arizona,” says Gavin Noyes, director of the Utah Diné Bikéyah, the Navajo nonprofit that developed the initial draft of the monument proposal in 2013. ”It’s one of the wildest, most intact landscapes in Utah.”  About 16, 000 people live in San Juan County, where Bears Ears is located. Roughly half are Navajo, and many in the tribe lack running water and electricity, says Noyes. But the land still provides. Women hike into the hills to gather wild onions and sumac berries for soup. They bundle juniper branches to burn, so they can stir the ashes into their family’s blue corn mush. And they forage for piñon nuts, which saved tribes from starvation during times of drought. Native hunters seek deer and rabbits, while elders collect sage leaves to throw over the fire in the sweat lodge, purifying the air and the thoughts of those inside. And when doctors fail to cure ailments, healers look to the sky for bird medicine in the prayerful flight of a   hawk or a golden eagle rising over   mesas. Under the Bears Ears Monument designation, an intertribal coalition will partner with the U. S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to manage the area  —   which is slightly bigger than the state of Delaware  —   ensuring that tribes have access to food supplies and firewood. Such a partnership has never been attempted before in the 48 contiguous states. For whites, conservation is a matter of not using the land, Noyes says. For Natives, it means actively tending it as they have for generations. ”Our goal is to change how Americans view landscapes so that they include cultures” as well as plants and animals, he says. But not everyone sees Bears Ears as a sacred source of food and healing  —   instead viewing the area for its   and mineral potential, or for ranching. The Democratic president’s most prominent critics  —   many of them Republican lawmakers at the state and federal levels  —   are already calling on fellow Republican Donald Trump to reverse the order after he takes office. That’s something no president has done in the   history of the Antiquities Act, the law that allows presidents to designate monuments. Especially in Utah, many of Obama’s opponents would like to see the area stay open to potential energy extraction. Bruce Adams is a cattle rancher and San Juan County commissioner. Last year, Adams said that while it’s important to look out for the rights of Natives, the white ”people who came to the area in the late 1800s” need to survive, too. And for them, that means raising livestock, but also extracting oil, gas, copper and uranium. ”Why should one group of people be given consideration over the rest of us?” he said. The state’s top politicians are just as disturbed at the news. Utah Rep. Rob Bishop says in a video, ”Utahns will use every tool at our disposal . .. whether it is judicial action, legislative action or even executive action” to repeal the Bears Ears decision. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes says his office is readying a lawsuit against the federal government. And Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent subpoenas to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, demanding all documents related to the Bears Ears designation dating to 2013. But even some tribal members worry that greater federal presence under the new monument designation will make it harder for them to access wild resources. They’ve been failed by the U. S. government before and aren’t inclined to trust it this time around. ”As Native American[s] we understand what broken treaties and broken promises mean. We’ve lived it for the last 200 years,” said Rebecca Benally, a Native American and the first woman elected to the San Juan County Commission, at a news conference. Benally has opposed the monument proposal from the start, saying the federal government should focus instead on paving the county’s 700 miles of dirt roads and lowering unemployment. The anger in Utah is part of the larger discord over public lands in the West, where almost half of all land is federally owned. But in the case of Bears Ears, the battle lines feel especially deep because of the fissures between Native peoples and the descendants of Mormon settlers. In 2015, members of the Utah Diné Bikéyah formed the Bears Ears intertribal coalition with five other tribes to draw up a plan to safeguard 1. 9 million acres from energy extraction. The coalition sent its plan to the San Juan County Commission, but nothing happened. The tribes claim discrimination, citing the fact that a majority of the commissioners are white. But county leaders say race had nothing to with it. ”San Juan County is the   county in the country. To say we don’t want to even look for oil is stupid,” former San Juan County commissioner Phil Lyman said. Lyman served 10 days in jail last year and was put on probation from the commission after he led an ATV ride over a Native American archaeological site to protest the closure of Recapture Canyon by federal authorities who sought to protect the artifacts. Ultimately, the county commissioners rejected the tribal proposal. Instead they sent their own plan, which maintained land for energy extraction, to Bishop and Chaffetz, who at the time were drafting a master proposal for managing Utah’s controversial public lands. Both Bishop and Chaffetz are part of the chorus of voices in the West calling for the federal government to cede control of public land to the states. Bishop is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and his biggest campaign donors are from the oil and gas industry, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Beginning in 2013, Bishop and Chaffetz conducted more than 1, 200 stakeholder meetings with energy companies, ranchers and environmentalists. The intertribal council says it was intentionally excluded. Last year, when the two politicians revealed their Public Lands Initiative, the tribes argued that large swaths of land in the Bears Ears had been left out, leaving it vulnerable to energy companies. Environmentalists raged that the bill favored fossil fuels. By the time the Public Lands Initiative was released, the intertribal coalition, convinced that it had no other choice, had reached out to Obama on its own. The bill failed to get to a floor vote before Congress adjourned for the year. The White House, though, kept talking with the tribes, and they got what they wanted. So too did the 71 percent of people in Utah who said they supported protecting Bears Ears, according to one poll. The Bears Ears Monument will cover 1. 35 million acres, less than the 1. 9 million acres that the tribal coalition had requested. And the final plan didn’t entirely ignore the Public Lands Initiative. For instance, the monument boundaries exclude the Daneros uranium mine, which mine operators say they hope to expand soon. Mining within the monument will be prohibited, but ranchers can still graze there, according to a statement by the Department of the Interior. Adams told reporters that San Juan County will join the state in suing the federal government over Bears Ears. Meanwhile, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch says he is scheduling a meeting with Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, Trump’s pick for secretary of the interior, to discuss what can be done about Bears Ears. And while no president has ever undone a predecessor’s monument designation, it’s possible Trump could try to be the first, even though some experts doubt he could win the legal case. Even if he doesn’t try, Congress could cancel the monument. It has done so in the past, but only 11 times  —   and only once in the last 50 years. This story comes to us from the Food  Environment Reporting Network, an independent, nonprofit investigative news organization where Kristina Johnson is associate editor. A version of the story first appeared in FERN’s Ag Insider."
183,"The week before Donald Trump takes the oath of office will set the stage for his entry into the Oval Office. Not only will at least nine of his Cabinet nominees begin their Senate confirmation hearings, but the   himself will face reporters at a   press conference, where he may address how he plans to separate his business interests from his presidency. On top of that, President Obama steps into the spotlight one last time, on Tuesday evening in Chicago, for a farewell address in which he’s likely to frame his legacy. In addition to the busy schedule, Trump has demonstrated in recent days his ability to upend what’s happening in Washington or move the financial markets with a tweet  —   whether he’s going off on intelligence agencies, deflecting claims against Russia, or taking aim at companies that could move the financial markets. Here’s a guide to what to watch for before Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States. All times are Eastern. Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions is first up in the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet picks, beginning at 9:30 a. m. Typically, there’s a lot of deference shown toward sitting senators, and the Alabama senator is   on Capitol Hill. But there will still be questions at his Judiciary Committee hearing about allegations that he once used racist language when he was a U. S. Attorney. Those allegations sank his hopes of a federal judgeship 30 years ago when he failed to win a Senate confirmation vote. Sessions has denied those allegations. He’ll also likely be asked about how he would handle civil rights cases, which have renewed scrutiny given the increased tensions between the police and many   communities in recent years. And he could also be pressed on whether he would prosecute Trump’s former opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, over her time at the State Department and her use of a private email server. ”Lock her up!” became a frequent chant on the campaign trail, but Trump has since abandoned that line and even admitted it was simply a campaign tactic. Retired Gen. John Kelly will also begin his confirmation hearing to lead the Department of Homeland Security at 3:30 p. m. Kelly is one of Trump’s less controversial nominees, but he’ll still face questions about Trump’s vaunted border wall proposal and other plans to curtail illegal immigration. On top of those confirmation hearings, the Senate Intelligence Committee has called a hearing for 1 p. m. on Tuesday where the heads of the CIA, FBI, NSA and the director of national intelligence will testify on Russian cyberattacks. That evening at 9, Obama will give his farewell address from McCormick Place in Chicago, where he held his 2012   victory party. With a Trump administration threatening to repeal or roll back some of the president’s signature accomplishments, such as Obamacare and climate change regulations, it’s a chance for him to defend his two terms. And while Obama has shown deference to Trump, whom he criticized as unequivocally unqualified and dangerous during the campaign, during the transition, he could still leave some words of rebuke or warning for his successor. Four more confirmation hearings are slated for midweek, but it’s secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson who is the most controversial of the slate. Beginning at 9:15 a. m. the former Exxon Mobil CEO will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he’ll be peppered with questions about his relationship with Russia and President Vladimir Putin. Plenty of tough questions are likely to come from the GOP side. Former Trump antagonists such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the 2016 primary candidate, along with fellow Republicans like Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, have raised plenty of questions about Tillerson’s qualifications. His business involvement in Russia has only been magnified in the wake of U. S. intelligence findings that Russia conspired to influence the election with hacks into emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Trump has been reluctant to accept those findings. Russia’s role into those cyberattacks will also come up at the confirmation hearing of Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s choice to lead the CIA. He’ll also face questions about Trump’s pointed criticisms of the intelligence community and reports that the   wants to scale back some agencies. Education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos won’t sail through a hearing either. Democrats don’t like her push for voucher programs and charter schools, and there’s plenty of questions about her financial disclosures and potential conflicts of interest, too. The least controversial nominee of the day  —   and perhaps of Trump’s entire proposed Cabinet  —   is likely to be Elaine Chao, Trump’s pick for transportation secretary. Not only has she been confirmed before, serving as labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration, but she’s also married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Sessions hearing before the Judiciary Committee will also continue on Wednesday with outside witnesses, including the head of the NAACP and a former attorney general, scheduled to testify. All of those consequential confirmation hearings could be overshadowed by Trump’s press conference at 11 a. m. in New York City. The   eschewed traditional rules throughout his unlikely campaign, and that continued into the transition by not holding the typical   press conferences. Trump had finally slated a press conference on Dec. 15 to detail how he would deal with his business interests, but canceled just days before. If the press conference on Wednesday stands, it will have been 167 days since his last press conference in late July  —   during which he encouraged Russia to try and find Clinton’s missing State Department emails. Trump had often mocked Clinton for going months without holding a press conference, and now he has done the same thing. Instead, Trump has taken to Twitter to try to influence the news agenda for the day and get his message directly out to the public, all while blasting the media. On Wednesday, he’s sure to face questions about his businesses and conflicts of interests, his recent comments about Russia, his criticism of U. S intelligence, his Cabinet picks and more. Trump’s pick for defense secretary, James ”Mad Dog” Mattis, will be the main event near the end of the week at his confirmation hearing at 9:30 a. m. before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The retired Marine Corps general still has to get a waiver to even let him lead the department  —   current law bars former officers from serving as secretary until they’ve been retired seven years, and Mattis only left the military in 2013. Many Democrats like the waiver, saying it protects the ideal of a military under civilian control. It’s only been approved once before, for Gen. George Marshall. Mattis, however, is   by both parties, and his opposition to torture is seen as a mainstream influence on Trump. Ultimately, he’s likely to get the waiver and to be confirmed. Ben Carson, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will also have his confirmation hearing at 10 a. m. before the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. While the famed retired neurosurgeon is likable, the big complaint over Carson is that he has essentially no experience in issues with the department he’s being tapped to lead. A top aide to Carson, who also ran for the GOP presidential nomination before withdrawing and endorsing Trump, had even said Carson wasn’t interested in a Cabinet position because he didn’t think he was qualified to lead a federal department. Billionaire investor and turnaround specialist Wilbur Ross will have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation at 10 a. m. as well. Like Trump, he has taken positions against free trade and wants to renegotiate current deals."
184,"Darlene Hawes lost her health insurance about a year after her husband died in 2012. Hawes, 55, is from Charlotte, N. C. She ended up going without insurance for a few years, but in 2015 she bought coverage on HealthCare. gov, the Affordable Care Act marketplace, with the help of a big subsidy. ”I was born with heart trouble and I also had, in 2003,   surgery,” she says. ”I had   surgery. I have a lot of medical conditions, so I needed insurance badly.” After the results of the 2016 election came in, she was scared she’d lose her insurance immediately. For years, Republicans have vowed to scrap the health care law. The new Congress is already working on a plan to undo the Affordable Care Act. But they have not settled on how to replace the health care structure that Obamacare set up. Hawes is one of about 550, 000 North Carolinians who relies on the Obamacare marketplace for health insurance. She was relieved after she talked with an enrollment specialist last month who told her she can renew her policy for 2017. ”And I’m like, ’Oh my Lord, did she just say that?’ ” Hawes asks with a laugh. ”It’s just like a whole load of burdens just fell off of my back because all the years I haven’t been covered since my husband passed away  —   I don’t want to be sad again. I was very sad.” Most health care researchers and policy analysts agree not much is likely to change in 2017. ”Even the Republican Congress in one of their most recent bills to repeal it, they put in a   transition period, so that the premium subsidies and the other provisions of the law that are fundamental wouldn’t be repealed for a couple of years,” says Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s. Some Republican leaders say repeal should happen immediately with a transition period to come up with a replacement. Still, the CEO of HealthCare. gov, Kevin Counihan, says he can’t guarantee coverage will remain. ”It’s not my place to promise anything about a new administration,” he says. ”But what I can tell you is not only are we moving forward, but our enrollment is higher than expected.” At the end of 2016, enrollment for 2017 plans spiked and as of the end of December, North Carolina has the   enrollment for 2017 plans among states using HealthCare. gov. Julieanne Taylor with Legal Services of Southern Piedmont is helping people sign up. She says about a third of them have asked about the election. ”But generally when we’re calling, people are really excited to have their appointment and come in and look at the plans for 2017,” she says. ”I think they’re mostly interested in how much they’re going to be paying.” In some ways, North Carolina is in tough shape. Premiums are going up and insurance companies have dropped out, leaving Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina as the only insurer in 95 percent of the state. Blue Cross actuary Brian Tajlili says it’s simply an expensive market that has older, sicker people who cost more to cover. ”There is continuing demand for services and continuing high utilization within this block of business,” he says. What he calls ”this block of business” means the customers who buy insurance on the exchange. It’s a small slice of the overall health insurance market, because most people are covered through work or Medicare. The overwhelming majority of consumers who buy coverage on the exchange get federal subsidies that greatly reduce what they pay. Still, it’s been a turbulent market for consumers and insurers. Over the past two years, Blue Cross has lost $400 million in North Carolina on that part of its business. Amid the   uncertainty, Tajlili says Blue Cross is committed to offering plans in 2017. ”2017 will be another pivotal year for us as we look at the individual market,” he says. One of Blue Cross’ new customers will be Sara Kelly Jones, 46, who works at Letty’s restaurant in Charlotte, N. C. She recognizes Obamacare isn’t perfect. But before the law, health insurance was a financial vise that kept tightening on her. ”I could not afford it at all,” she says. ”Every year it was going up $100 to $120, $150 a month. It got to the point where it was going to be at least $200 more a month than my mortgage.” But under Obamacare, Jones qualifies for a subsidy. Her premium will go up with Blue Cross, but she says she can afford it with that help. Jones says the political debate over the law ignores people like her. ”I’m terrified,” she says. She’s worried about the Republican Congress’ pledge to scrap and replace Obamacare without presenting a detailed proposal. ”If there had been any plan outlined that wasn’t just some vague, ’We’re going to replace it with something awesome,’ ” she says she’d rest easier. ”They have no plan! What on Earth are you going to do with all these people, myself included, that are counting on this?” This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, WFAE and Kaiser Health News. You can follow Michael Tomsic on Twitter: @michaeltomsic."
185,"Two law enforcement officers have been killed during a massive manhunt for a murder suspect in Orlando, Fla. Master Sgt. Debra Clayton radioed from a   shortly after 7 a. m. Monday, saying she was ”attempting to contact a murder suspect,” according to a statement from the City of Orlando. Other officers radioed two minutes later, reporting that an officer had been shot. The   veteran of the department died after she was transported to a hospital. Police are seeking Markeith Loyd in the murder of a pregnant woman named Sade Dixon last month. Loyd fled from the   and pulled into a nearby apartment building, where police say he fired shots at a sheriff’s deputy but did not harm him. Loyd then allegedly stole a car and escaped. This put a manhunt into motion for the suspect, described as ”armed and extremely dangerous.” During the search, authorities say, a sheriff’s deputy riding a motorcycle was hit by a car and later died. The deputy has been identified as Deputy First Class Norman Lewis, an    of the force. ”This is probably one of the toughest days for me in my career,” Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings told reporters. ”Because not only did we lose an Orlando police officer today, we lost an Orange County deputy sheriff as well who was traveling on his motorcycle as a result of these broad efforts that we have underway.” Law enforcement is ”highly motivated to bring this suspect to justice,” the sheriff said. There is a reward of up to $60, 000 for information about the    Loyd. The Orlando Police Department says Clayton was married with a son. ”She was extremely committed to our youth and really, the community,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina told reporters. ”And she did so many different projects in the community. She organized several marches against violence by herself  —   that’s how committed she is.” The Orange County Sheriff’s Office tweeted that Lewis was a ”gentle giant” with a ”million dollar smile.” In a statement, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, ”These tragic deaths make clear the great risks that our brave men and women in uniform face each and every day, and the deep and abiding gratitude that our nation owes them for their service.”"
186,"The details of the story are unambiguously disturbing. Last week, a white    man from suburban Chicago was found walking in the cold, disoriented and bloodied. Four people, all black, had held him against his will for four hours, tied him up, and assaulted him while livestreaming part of it on Facebook. The young woman who recorded the video laughed and egged her friends on. One of the men took the knife that he waved in the victim’s face and cut off the man’s sleeves. One of his tormentors is seen on the video slapping him, and at one point, someone sliced at his hair and scalp with a knife, cutting him. His captors yelled ”F*** Donald Trump, nigga! F**** white people, boy!” According to the police, his attackers demanded a petty ransom ($300) from his mother. He finally escaped when several of his captors left to argue with a neighbor, and he was found by the police walking with one of the people in the video. Chicago’s superintendent of police described the victim as having ”mental health challenges.” His four tormentors, including one who was reportedly a school friend, now face kidnapping charges as well as condemnation from all corners. (President Obama told reporters that the incident in his adopted hometown was ”despicable. ”) But there was already a debate over how to characterize the kidnapping. Was it a hate crime? That’s not simply a legal question. In an earlier press conference, a police official demurred when asked whether this was a hate crime. He said the police had to determine whether the pronouncements in the video were ”sincere or just stupid ranting and raving.” That prompted angry backlash in some white circles, from those who felt that the case was being treated differently because the victim was white. ”If this had been done to an   by four whites, every liberal in the country would be outraged, and there’d be no question that it’s a hate crime,” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said on Fox News. The police did later file hate crime charges against the four suspects. ”There was never a question whether or not this incident qualified as being investigated as a hate crime,” police superintendent Eddie Johnson said. Under state law, both the victim’s race and his mental health  —   the police said he suffers from schizophrenia  —   were protected classes that made hate crime charges possible. ”It’s half a dozen of one, six of the other,” police Commander Kevin Duffin said. Whatever the reasons for the kidnapping, his captors cursed his whiteness. The legal specifics of the charges probably matter less than the message they send: Weren’t these kidnappers clearly racist? Didn’t they deserve the vilification that came with that description? In conversations about this case with friends and colleagues of color, I noticed that folks were straining mightily to avoid using the word racism, as if saying it might be an admission of something. I was squirming right along with them, and it took me awhile to figure out why. In some ways, this case being called a ”hate crime,” while a legal designation, might give people a rhetorical reprieve, as it allows us to talk about bias and violence without having to fight over the definition of racism. It reminded me of something Phillip Atiba Goff, who runs the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College, told me a few weeks ago. ”One of the most important achievements of the Civil Rights Movement was to take the authority over moral character away from white men,” Goff told me. ”There’s no credential that [restores it]  —   having a black friend or relative is not sufficient.” Before then, white people were the only ones who could define what was righteous and correct  —   often at the expense of the rights and safety of black Americans. Goff said that the casting of racism as an evil worthy of condemnation made all the ways white people expressed their bigotry taboo. Those taboos are, in part, what people are referring to when they rail against political correctness. And while those new constraints certainly didn’t end racism, they suppressed behaviors that created space for people of color to live more fully in America. And that, to me, seems a big part of what we’re really discussing in stories like the one in Chicago, and what makes these conversations (and writing this) so discomfiting. In calling the kidnapping and assault racism, we’re staking claim to moral language  —   and uniquely powerful moral language  —   to which white people can’t easily lay claim, even in cases like the one in Chicago, which seems to qualify for the most vehement reproach available. And it’s why, I suspect, the folks of color I talked to seemed so visibly uncomfortable. Calling what happened in Chicago racism seems to cede at least some of that moral authority to the many people who we suspect are engaging in conversations about race and racism in bad faith people who want to push the conversation in the direction of a false, ahistorical equanimity. Is racism as expressed by centuries of white torture and discrimination the same as the racism of the four black people in Chicago? It’s a distasteful comparison. It’s as if you’re downplaying the misery of the young man in the video by reducing this conversation to semantics. But consider what’s already happening with folks from the   Internet, where people are holding up the Chicago case as the handiwork of black activist groups like Black Lives Matter (despite the complete lack of evidence that anyone involved in the kidnapping has ties to the organization). It seems that the people who have embraced this ridiculous claim  —   the hashtag #BLMkidnapping was used hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter  —   want to prove some kind of symmetry in American racism. One way to argue that the evil of racism is not uniquely wedded to whiteness is to argue that it is a moral failing that lives equally in blackness. It’s a notion that seems to be gaining traction even outside the fever swamps. Last year, two professors wrote in the Washington Post about their research showing that white Americans think   bias has been on the rise in recent decades, and that it now constitutes a bigger problem in the country than   bias. ”This perception is fascinating, as it stands in stark contrast to data on almost any outcome that has been assessed,” professors Samuel Sommers and Michael Norton wrote. ”From life expectancy to school discipline to mortgage rejection to police use of force, outcomes for white Americans tend to be  —   in the aggregate  —   better than outcomes for black Americans, often substantially so. (While a disturbing uptick in the mortality rate among   whites has received a great deal of recent media attention, it is worth noting that even after this increase, the rate remains considerably lower than that of blacks. )” It’s against the further legitimizing of this idea  —   that there are no distinctions to be made when we talk about racism  —   that I suspect folks are uncomfortably holding the rhetorical line, especially in this current political moment, rife with calls to validate white grievance. And it’s that sense of grievance that this video corroborates, regardless of whether it should regardless of how poorly it’s contextualized. Not that epistemology matters terribly much to the victim or his family. The video is chilling. It’s easy to go to an even darker place by imagining what might have happened to the victim had he not been able to escape. The captors wonder aloud about killing him. They are performing. They are talking back to their audience. One of the young women complains that there aren’t enough people watching. They livestream their torment of this man the way people might Snapchat themselves turning up at a club. It’s the kind of story that’s so random and unsettling that the desire for clear, moral parameters feels even more pressing. That’s why it’s worth wrestling over the language of racism, even if no words can make the event any more comprehensible, or, for the victim and his family, any less calamitous."
187,"In Venezuela, food has become so scarce it’s now being sold on the black market. One person tells the Associated Press, ”it’s a better business than drugs.” And the food traffickers are the very people sworn to protect Venezuela: the nation’s military. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro gave the military complete control of the food supply last summer, after people began protesting in the streets over food rationing. Shortages had become so bad that people were even ransacking grocers  —   though many were largely empty. These days, hunger remains widespread. But if you venture into the black markets, you’ll find foods that aren’t available in the   supermarkets, ”where people would prefer to shop because it’s a lot cheaper,” says Joshua Goodman, the AP’s news director for the Andes. He was part of the AP team that investigated the food trafficking situation. ”These goods are only getting into the country because the military is importing them,” Goodman tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. ”And when you see the food sold at these makeshift markets, there’s usually military people standing by with weapons, watching over it all, if not actually selling the food directly.” And the military isn’t just running these black markets  —   it’s getting rich off them, Goodman says. Goodman spoke with Cornish about the findings of the AP investigation. An edited transcript of their conversation follows. How does this affect the price of food? Right now there are some things that are incredibly cheap in Venezuela but in incredibly scarce supply. If you’re one of the lucky people to get the food at the   price, you are doing quite well. But a lot of people can’t afford to spend an entire day in line at a state supermarket, only to find the shelves have already been emptied by the time they get through the door. So a lot of people do have to go to the black market to find food. It’s a very unfortunate situation. Something like 80 percent of the country right now says they have lost weight because of what they sort of joke is the President Maduro diet  —   the forced austerity upon the country. You found lots of examples of how, essentially, the military is getting rich off controlling the food supply  —   even when people are trying to bring food into the country.  We documented a case of a South American businessman. He admitted to us that he had paid millions of dollars in bribes over the years to bring food into the country. And he really didn’t care who he was paying, because the prices [at which] he was able to sell to the government were so sky high  —   something like more than double the international price for a shipment of corn, for example. And that made it very easy for him to pay kickbacks to government officials. And of course, that worked its way all down the food chain. This businessman specifically pointed to the food minister right now, who’s a military general, or people close to him having received the money that he was paying. Now what’s happened to people trying to bring evidence of this corruption to the president? Venezuela right now is a very opaque place. We don’t have a lot of info about the internal deliberations of the government. There are some people in the military who clearly are upset with this situation. However, there are some serious entrenched interests within the military who are politically important to President Maduro. He is a man who is a hanging by a thread. . .. He does not have the popularity of his predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez. And the military for him has become an invaluable crutch in the face of mass street protests and sinking popularity and hyperinflation, almost. So this is a way to keep [the military] paid, frankly. Is that what’s going on? It’s a way to keep them fed, you could even argue. Because a lot of this food, I’m sure, is going to the families of the military, to feed their own families and friends. And yeah, it puts money in their pocket at a time when there really isn’t much money in the country. What has shocked you most about this situation? I think what has shocked me the most is the degree to which the military has really sullied its own reputation. They were seen by many as a disciplined force that could actually provide answers to the serious problems Venezuela is facing. Instead they seem to be much more   much more corrupt than I had imagined when we started this project. You’ve talked to a lot of officials in your story. For average Venezuelans  —   what are people saying about this?  They’re outraged. They know fully well that while they’re not eating, people are getting rich. This is an issue that touches the stomachs, literally, of every Venezuelan. A lot of Venezuelans who would be sympathetic to the government are very upset over this issue. And when they find out people are actually profiting from it  —   it’s a potentially explosive situation for the government."
188,"A powerful winter storm in California has brought down an ancient tree, carved into a living tunnel more than a century ago. The ”Pioneer Cabin Tree,” a sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, saw horses and cars pass through it over the years. More recently, only hikers were allowed to walk through the massive tree. Over the weekend, a powerful winter storm slammed into California and Nevada, prompting flooding and mudslides in some regions. The Associated Press reports it might be the biggest storm to hit the region in more than a decade. On Sunday, a volunteer at the state park reported that Pioneer Cabin had not survived. ”The storm was just too much for it,” the Calaveras Big Tree Association wrote on Facebook. It’s unclear exactly how old the tree was, but The Los Angeles Times reports that the trees in the state park are estimated to be more than 1, 000 years old. Sequoias can live for more than 3, 000 years. The iconic tree was one of just a few   sequoias in California. The most famous was the Wawona Tree, in Yosemite National Park it fell during a winter storm in 1969 at an estimated age of 2, 100 years. The other remaining sequoia tunnels are dead or consist of logs on their side, the Forest Service says. However, there are still three coastal redwoods (taller and more slender than sequoias) with tunnels cut through them. They’re all operated by private companies, the Forest Service says, and still allow cars to drive through  —   one appeared in a recent Geico ad. SFGate. com spoke to Jim Allday, the volunteer who reported Pioneer Cabin’s demise. He told the website that the tree ”shattered” when it hit the ground on Sunday afternoon, and that people had walked through it as recently as that morning. Local flooding might have been the reason the tree fell, SFGate reports: ” ’When I went out there [Sunday afternoon] the trail was literally a river, the trail is washed out,’ Allday said. ’I could see the tree on the ground, it looked like it was laying in a pond or lake with a river running through it.’ ” ”The tree had been among the most popular features of the state park since the late 1800s. The tunnel had graffiti dating to the 1800s, when visitors were encouraged to etch their names into the bark. ”Joan Allday, wife of Jim Allday and also a volunteer at the park, said the tree had been weakening and leaning severely to one side for several years. ” ’It was barely alive, there was one branch alive at the top,’ she said. ’But it was very brittle and starting to lift.’ ” Tunnel trees were created in the 19th century to promote parks and inspire tourism. But cutting a tunnel through a living sequoia, of course, damages the tree. ”Tunnel trees had their time and place in the early history of our national parks,” the National Park Service has written. ”But today sequoias which are standing healthy and whole are worth far more.”"
189,"From head to toe, a first lady’s look is heavily scrutinized, and Melania Trump will be no exception. But Trump is no stranger to the spotlight: In 2005, she was on the cover of Vogue in her Dior wedding dress, and she’s modeled for Harper’s Bazaar and posed nude for GQ. She also once sold her own line of costume jewelry and watches on QVC. With the whole world watching, the first lady can make a fashion statement like no one else. She can also make a difference during the campaign. In October 2008, just days before the election, Michelle Obama appeared on The Tonight Show wearing a mustard yellow sweater and printed silk shirt. When Jay Leno asked her what she was wearing, she told him her outfit was from J. Crew. The audience roared with excitement: ”We ladies, we know J. Crew,” Obama said knowingly. ”You can get some good stuff online.” Chicago boutique owner Ikram Goldman worked as Obama’s fashion consultant at the time. She says, ”The idea of her being inclusive was very important, and I think it was important to other people who were looking at her to feel like they can have access to that as well.” Obama also championed young American designers like Jason Wu, whose career took off after she wore his   white chiffon gown to President Obama’s 2009 inaugural balls. Goldman helped select the gown but kept it a secret until that night. She says when Wu saw it on TV, he called her. ”He was crying. He was shocked. He was happy. He couldn’t believe it,” Goldman remembers. Obama was embraced by the fashion industry, but Melania Trump comes from it. A former model, Trump seems to have a preference for European designers. She’s often seen wearing such luxury brands such as Gucci and Dolce  Gabbana, most of which she reportedly bought off the rack. ”Expensive” and ”body conscious” are among the first words Robin Givhan uses when asked to describe Trump’s style. Givhan, a Pulitzer   fashion critic for The Washington Post, says, ”It speaks to a bank account it speaks to a particular kind of social life and it speaks to a particular tribe of women who exist in New York, in particular. . .. They lead very comfortable lives. . .. They have both the time and the energy to attend to themselves.” Givhan says Trump’s look has ”a polish to it, a glamour to it, but not in a particularly personal or individual way.” Like Michelle Obama before her, Melania Trump’s choices are already making an impact. For her speech at the Republican National Convention this summer, Trump wore an ivory, cotton and silk dress with sleeves that billowed at the elbows. The $2, 195 dress (by   designer Roksanda Ilincic) reportedly sold out in the days following Trump’s speech. Meanwhile, retailers in Washington, D. C. are getting ready for a very different style of first lady. The ladies consignment shop Inga’s Once Is Not Enough is something of an institution in the nation’s capital, especially for women who need to dress for   formal events on a federal government salary. Sorting through the racks, owner Inga Guen says she would love to dress Melania Trump. She pulls out an olive green Oscar de la Renta dress,   with ivory beading, and a black cashmere jacket with a fur collar by Valentino. ”She would look très chic  —   très, très, très chic  —   in this,” Guen says. Guen describes Trump’s style as daring and slightly eccentric with a European sensibility. She says she’s already had three new clients come into her shop who’ve been hired by the new administration. ”I have no idea how they heard about me, but I dressed them and they were so, so very happy to have met Melania Trump,” she says. Asked whether their style was anything like Trump’s, Guen replies, ”Au contraire, it was not similar to her at all. But I said, ’We have to put a little bit of oomph in your wardrobe right now, we have to be a little bit glamourous.’ ” Guen hopes to do business with Trump, but the fashion industry is splitting at the seams over whether to work with her. Some designers have said absolutely not others say it would be an honor to dress any first lady."
190,"A police officer in Fort Worth, Texas, has been suspended for 10 days after an inquiry into his forceful arrest of a woman and her two daughters in December. The arrest was recorded and streamed live on Facebook, as The   reported at the time: ”The events unfolded in southwest Fort Worth, where Jacqueline Craig called police to say a man had grabbed and choked her    son after accusing him of littering. But after an officer responded to the call, the two engaged in a heated argument as bystanders, including Craig’s relatives, looked on. ”In the nearly   video that’s now been viewed some 2. 5 million times on Facebook, the responding officer is seen questioning Craig, as she says the man should have spoken to her about her son. The video was posted by Porsha Craver, Craig’s niece who used a smartphone to film a screen showing the original footage  —   and who offers her own comments about the police encounter.” Immediately after the incident, the officer in the video was ”placed on restricted duty status by the Chief of Police” pending the outcome of an Internal Affairs investigation, the Fort Worth Police Department said. The Fort Worth   reported that the officer, William Martin was ”contrite” and ”sorry” about the incident, according to police Chief Joel Fitzgerald, who called the suspension ”significant punishment” during a news conference Monday. The newspaper continued: ”Both Mayor Betsy Price and Fitzgerald said the situation was an isolated incident. He said various videos were reviewed during the investigation. ’We left no stone unturned,’ Fitzgerald said. ”The chief said the decision to suspended Martin for 10 days was his, and some members of the department’s command staff disagreed, [saying] he should have been more lenient. ” ’But the buck stops here,’ Fitzgerald said. He said Martin showed neglect of duty and discourtesy. He said the officer will undergo training before he returns to duty.” Craig told the Dallas Morning News she wanted the charges against her dropped. The newspaper reported that the charges include interference with public duty, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and failing to provide identification. The   says the charges have been forwarded to the district attorney, who will decide whether to prosecute."
191,"  projects like the musical film La La Land and FX’s TV comedy Atlanta won big at Sunday’s Golden Globe awards. But the most powerful moment of the night belonged to Meryl Streep, who used her acceptance speech for the honorary Cecil B. deMille Award of the 2017 Golden Globes, to deliver a harsh rebuke of   Donald Trump and to advocate for press freedom. Recalling the moment Trump mocked a disabled reporter from The New York Times during a campaign rally, Streep labeled it one performance in the past year that ”stunned” her. There was nothing good about it, but it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it of out my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. In what The New York Times described as a brief telephone interview early Monday morning, Trump said he had not watched Streep’s remarks. But Trump said he was not surprised he had been criticized by ”liberal movie people,” and dismissed Streep as a Hillary Clinton supporter. Trump also denied, as he frequently has, that he intended to mock Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for his disability, the incident to which Streep was apparently referring. Just a few hours later, Trump reiterated his remarks to the Times in a trio of tweets. Streep also urged the audience to support the Committee to Protect Journalists to preserve an independent press, and specifically outlined the wide and varied birthplaces of many Golden Globe nominees and winners. ”Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” she said. ”And if we kick ’em all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” Streep wasn’t the only one to take on the   less than two weeks before his inauguration. Host Jimmy Fallon joked at the show’s start that the Golden Globes were ”one of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote.” While accepting the award for best supporting actor in a limited TV series, The Night Manager   Hugh Laurie joked it would be the last Golden Globes ceremony, because the awards are chosen by an association with the words ”Hollywood,” ”foreign” and ”press” in the title  —   groups Trump has criticized in the past. These barbs capped an evening in which the Hollywood Foreign Press Association championed the musical film La La Land, handing it a record seven awards, including best director for Damien Chazelle, best actor in a musical or comedy for Ryan Gosling and best actress in a musical or comedy for Emma Stone."
192,"Sunday night’s Golden Globes were, in the great tradition of the Golden Globes, full of unexpected winners and a certain fondness for Hollywood itself. In this case, that fondness manifested itself in part through a sweep of the   film awards for La La Land, which  —   in case you haven’t yet heard  —   is about dreamers. Elsewhere, Meryl Streep talked Trump, Donald Glover cleaned up, Tracee Ellis Ross had her moment, and awards shows continued to be the gift that may not keep on giving, but certainly keeps on going. It’s just the beginning of awards season, but we’ll be with you till the end. Meanwhile, we’ll have a full episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour this Friday, covering Hidden Figures and the new One Day At A Time."
193,"Tom Hiddleston is trending on Twitter, and not for a good reason. Last night at the Golden Globes, he won a best actor award for the AMC series The Night Manager. But his acceptance speech didn’t go over as well as his performance. Hiddleston recounted a visit he made to see medics from Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan. He was serving as a humanitarian spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, and some of the medics ”wanted to say hello” because ”during the shelling the previous month they had   The Night Manager.” Hiddleston continued: ”The idea that I could . .. provide some relief and entertainment for people who work for UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières and the World Food Programme who are fixing the world in the places where it was broken made me immensely proud.” The internet showed no mercy. Sample tweets: Hiddleston is part of a long list of stars who’ve served as the celebrity face of a global goodwill organization. Today, the U. N. roster of celebrity advocates ranges from singer Selena Gomez to Indian cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar. This generation’s most famous U. N. goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie, has dedicated a significant portion of her time to the UNHCR’s work with refugees. Other nonprofits have celebrity advocates as well. So let’s step back from the Hiddleston flap and take a look at this phenomenon. What makes an ideal celebrity spokesperson? Are there some who are better than others? And how do NGOs  —   nongovernmental organizations  —   go about picking them? The U. N. has a long history of integrating celebrities in its campaigns, dating back to stage and screen star Danny Kaye, who linked up with the   UNICEF agency in 1954. Many who work in the international aid community point to the 1980s as the ”tipping point” when celebrities and NGOs really forged bonds. That’s the view of Sam Worthington, chief executive officer of InterAction, an alliance of   NGOs (InterAction has worked with the U. N. in the past). Consider the 1985 Live Aid concert, which produced the song ”We Are the World” to aid victims of the Ethiopian famine. A who’s who of the music industry sang a song that sold 20 million copies, with proceeds going to famine victims. Picking a celebrity to front a cause isn’t just a matter of approaching a hot star. First and foremost, a celebrity must be ”likable” with a stellar character, says Nanette Braun, chief of communications at U. N. Women. And of course there can be a payoff for the celebrity. In a media environment where a celebrity’s every move is photographed and analyzed, charitable work can help shape someone’s image.   Worthington emphasizes that passion is central to a successful partnership between NGO and celebrity. A track record helps to indicate this. Anne Hathaway, he says, named as a U. N. goodwill ambassador last year, is a good example of a person who has been outspoken for girls and women’s rights: Hathaway has held previous posts advocating against child marriage with the Nike Foundation and was the narrator of Girl Rising, a 2013 CNN documentary that followed seven girls around the world as they sought an education and better lives for themselves. But a previously held public stance can only go so far in indicating a celebrity’s commitment, Worthington stressed. ”The issue is finding a celebrity for whom the cause actually means something and an individual who is able to advance the cause,” he says. Rajesh Mirchandani, the vice president of communications at the Center for Global Development, agrees. But there is a down side, he notes: Celebrities can be distracting because of their celebrity. ”If they [celebrities] are too famous, or infamous, the media is going to be more interested in their personal doings than the project they are supposed to be fronting,” he said. An ”unlikely but powerful” example of a celebrity who has been able to walk the tightrope between offering an organization   publicity and awareness while also acting as a strong role model is actress Angelina Jolie, says Mirchandani. Jolie began her work with the UNHCR as a goodwill ambassador in 2001 after adopting eldest son Maddox while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia and becoming interested in the local history of refugees. Jolie developed a focus on the needs of refugee women and emergency medical relief. In 2012, the U. N. offered her the rare distinction of ”special envoy,” recognizing her role in attracting attention to the refugee cause. But   matches don’t always work out. PETA, the animal rights group, once arranged for model Naomi Campbell to pose nude to promote its stance: ”We’d rather go naked than wear fur.” A few years later, Campbell was promoting fur for Dennis Basso. Then there’s the clueless celebrity. In 2013 a Telegraph reporter accompanying Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern on a goodwill trip to Sierra Leone with the group World Vision wrote this: ”I ask about her new role as charity ambassador. She says that she has never been to Africa, and does not know what to expect. As if to prove this point, when we refuel in Dakar, Senegal, she gets mixed up and says we have stopped in Darfur, a region in western Sudan, some 4, 000 miles away.” Other celebrities are praised for their involvement. U2 singer Bono is cited by industry analysts as a model celebrity in his efforts to bring attention to poverty and disease in Africa. The ONE Campaign has been lauded by groups like the U. S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for helping pass the Electrify Africa Act of 2016, which would help bring electricity to 50 million Africans by 2020, and GAVI for helping to secure funding for vaccines. ”He really changed the way we think of celebrities and charities,” Worthington of InterAction remarks. Emma Watson, who sparkled in Hollywood with her turn as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise, has since marked herself as a vocal feminist with her #heforshe gender equality campaign after she was appointed a goodwill ambassador for U. N. Women in 2014. A video of her speech promoting the cause went viral and boosted not only Watson’s profile as an actress with a conscience but also the profile of U. N. Women. Indeed, celebrities have been the backbone of many fundraising and publicity efforts. The U. N. even has an office dedicated to brokering partnerships. But once the celebrity is chosen to represent their cause, it’s really up to him or her what to do with it. Commitments can vary, and there is no ruling authority that watches what a celebrity does. And there is always the danger of the Hiddleston backlash. ”In the best cases, the most enlightened celebrities understand that their fame and wealth is not the objective, but the platform from which to make a real difference in the world,” says Mirchandani, ruefully adding, ”If only they all did.” After Hiddleston’s remarks last night, it seemed that no one was talking about the work of Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan. They were just talking about . .. Tom Hiddleston."
194,"Beijing is launching a new police force aimed at tackling its persistent smog problem. This comes after a month of particularly severe air quality that left the capital and dozens of other Chinese cities blanketed in thick, brown smog. The city’s acting mayor, Cai Qi, announced over the weekend that the new environmental police force will crack down on polluters such as ”  barbeques, garbage incineration, biomass burning, [and] dust from roads,” according to the   Xinhua news agency. He didn’t offer any more specifics about the squad. Cai also announced other measures to tackle the persistent problem, including closing the city’s only   plant. In 2017, ”coal consumption will be cut by 30 percent to less than 7 million tonnes” and ”another 300, 000   old vehicles will be phased out,” the news agency reports. Cai said the city also plans to shutter 500 factories and upgrade 2, 560 others, according to the news agency. ”I totally understand the public’s concerns and complaints over air pollution,” Cai said, admitting that he checks the air quality index ”first thing in the morning.” China’s environmental problems are exacerbated by difficulties enforcing regulations. ”China’s ministry of the environment said during last week’s hazardous smog, inspection teams found factories resuming production, despite being given   orders,” NPR’s Rob Schmitz reports from Beijing. Rob explains the main drivers of China’s air pollution: ”China’s air pollution is mainly caused by   power plants and inefficient vehicles. While the government tries to answer public calls to address the issue, it’s also addressing the challenge of an economic slowdown and maintaining growth.” The environment minister, Chen Jining, said in a statement that he personally ”felt guilty” and ”wanted to reproach himself” about the smog. He added that it made people feel anxious. Last week, China issued its   red alert for fog in some northern and eastern regions, according to a ministry statement. As The   reported, some 72 cities were under pollution alerts. The pollution has deadly consequences  —   as we reported, the World Health Organization said 1, 032, 833 deaths in China in 2012 were attributable to air quality. That’s the highest in the world."
195,"In Georgia, lawmakers are set to pass a more than $20 billion budget this year and grapple with a failing hospital system. But Georgia, like many other states, faces a serious human resource problem in its Legislature: Salaries are often low and many   politicians can’t afford to be lawmakers. Former Georgia state Rep. LaDawn Jones loved serving in the General Assembly even as she juggled raising two kids and running a law practice. But she left after one term because the job didn’t pay enough. ”I absolutely believe that we need to increase the wage for legislators to keep up with the times,” said Jones. Lawmakers in Georgia make $17, 342 a year, plus a per diem for lodging and meals when the Legislature is in session and reimbursement for mileage. Serving in the Georgia Legislature is considered a   job, but it took much more of Jones’ time than that and she had to hire extra help for her law firm. ”If I really sat down and did the math I’m certain that the amount that I paid out was equal or more than what I received,” she said. Most state lawmakers don’t make much, While a few big states have   legislatures with higher pay (California pays lawmakers $100, 113 a year and Pennsylvania pays $85, 339) but in most states, legislators are paid like it’s a   job. According to data compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, 30 states pay $30, 000 a year or less to legislators. New Mexico doesn’t pay lawmakers at all, while those in New Hampshire make just $200 per   term. Median household income in the United States was $55, 775 in 2015, according to the Census Bureau. ”Not paying legislators is like a very   pound foolish thing,” given the size of state budgets and complexity of issues that legislatures tackle every year, said Stanford University political scientist Neil Malhotra. That low level of pay also keeps many people from entering politics, said Malhotra. ”There’s very, very few working class people in legislatures. This might have something to do with why a lot of legislation does not seem very friendly towards working class people.” Even those with   jobs can find it hard to take several months off a year to work in a state capitol. Mike Dudgeon, chief technical officer at the video game company   Studios, is retiring from the Georgia General Assembly after six years as a state representative because he struggled to balance his professional and political commitments. ”Some people suggested that I sort of do the     and keep my seat in the Legislature and just do the bare minimum, just go down and vote and kind of do that,” said Dudgeon. ”But I just can’t do that, it’s not my personality. If I’m going to do anything I’m going to do it well.” No raise in sight, In Georgia, there’s no sign lawmakers will get a raise anytime soon. ”I’m not in favor of increasing legislative pay,” said David Shafer, a leader in the Georgia Senate. ”I don’t know that anyone serves in the General Assembly because of the pay, and I don’t know that we would attract a better legislator if the pay were higher.” That’s a perspective shared by lawmakers around the country, said Malhotra, because it doesn’t look good for politicians to vote to give themselves raises. ”People don’t want to pay politicians more money because they don’t like politicians very much,” he said. Both retiring lawmakers Dudgeon and Jones worry a big raise could spawn more career politicians. They like the idea of ”citizen legislators” who take time off from their jobs to meet at the state capitol for a few months out of the year, if they can afford it. While compensation for state lawmakers is relatively low, some draw salaries in fields closely related to their work in the Legislature, such as public relations and law. Others make up for years of low pay once they retire by quickly jumping to consulting and lobbying firms where compensation is much higher. As the new legislative session opens in Georgia, Jones wishes she could be in the mix. But Jones felt she ”could not dare ask my family to continue to make such a big sacrifice.” Instead, Jones plans to focus her political passions closer to home on local issues that she can afford to work on."
196,"Mothers should feel comfortable   infants in public, Pope Francis said on Sunday, even if they are in one of the most sacred spaces in Catholicism. Speaking at an annual ceremony to commemorate the baptism of Jesus, the pope addressed the families of 28 infants who were to be baptized in the Sistine Chapel. Some of the babies began to wail as the ceremony wore on, according to Vatican Radio: ”As the sounds of crying grew louder, the Pope joked that the concert had begun. The babies are crying, he said, because they are in an unfamiliar place, or because they had to get up early, or sometimes simply because they hear another child crying. Jesus did just the same, Pope Francis said, adding that he liked to think of Our Lord’s first sermon as his crying in the stable. ”And if your children are crying because they are hungry, the Pope told the mothers present, then go ahead and feed them, just as Mary breastfed Jesus.” This is not the first time the leader of the Catholic Church has expressed support for women who are  . As The Washington Post reported: ”During the same baptismal ceremony two years ago  —   in which he baptized 33 infants in the Sistine Chapel  —   he urged mothers to feel free to   their children if they cried or were hungry. The written text of his homily during that ceremony included the phrase ’give them milk,’ but he changed it to use the Italian term ’allattateli, which means ’  them.’ ” ”You mothers give your children milk and even now, if they cry because they are hungry,   them, don’t worry,” the pope said. Although the pope has repeatedly justified his position in the most traditional terms possible  —   harking back to the infancy of Christ himself, the stance on   does challenge norms in some churches. In 2014, the National Catholic Reporter published an article describing a mother who said she was told   during church was ”inappropriate.” In a 2012 Christianity Today article titled ”  in the Back Pew,” writer Rachel Marie Stone recalled, ”On a family trip to St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, as I started to   my son in the sanctuary, I was whisked away by a security guard to the bathroom. ”Countless other Christian women, trying to feed their children without having to miss a sermon, have faced the disapproval of others who think breasts have no place in the sanctuary,” she continued."
197,"In South Korea, preparing for the worst has become a routine part of life. Twice a year, the country runs air raid drills in case of an attack by North Korea. Citywide sirens go off at 3 p. m. in the capital, Seoul. They’re supposed to bring the bustling city to a temporary halt. ”It’s a simulation of what will happen at a time of war,” says Jeong   a spokesman for Seoul’s Yongsan district. South Korea is still stuck in a technical state of war with North Korea, and has been since the North invaded in 1950. With Pyongyang’s ever more frequent missile launches and nuclear tests, Seoul  —   with a population of 10 million near the border  —   says it’s got to be ready. ”These drills are something every South Korean knows,” Jeong says. Drivers are expected to slow down and pull over  —   and most of them do. Pedestrians are expected to take cover. But it’s not clear that everyone outside knows they’re supposed to pretend an air attack is coming. On the day we witnessed a drill in late August 2016, there was a look of confusion among some folks on the streets when the sirens went off. Inside, government workers do know the drill. They have to, since they are the only ones required to take part in these each time. At the Yongsan district office, the lights go out at the   where people pay their taxes. Bureaucrats file downstairs to the lowest level of the underground parking garage. ”I think it will be over soon. Like about 10 minutes, 15 minutes,” says Will Park, who is interning at the district office. He grew up in the U. S. so this is his first air raid drill ever. We’re huddled with his   in the dark. ”I’m just following the directions . .. just moving with the flow,” Park says. And just as quickly as it started, the drill is over. The 300 or so employees of this district office take the stairs or the elevators and get back to work. So is this kind of drill really necessary? ”If we keep doing these drills, if war does happen, people will be able to deal with it without being too shocked,” says Jeong, the district office spokesman. The North Korean border is just a   drive from Seoul. Kim Jong Un ordered more than 20 missile tests last year alone. And since he has been in power, he has presided over three nuclear tests  —   two of them in 2016. ”In the event war breaks out, we can minimize the damage to human lives through repetitive practice,” says Jeong. That’s what preparedness is about: repetitive practice for a situation no one wants to see. Haeryun Kang contributed to this story."
198,"David Bowie had long wanted to make a record with a jazz band, and on Jan. 8 of last year, he realized his dream with the release of Blackstar. Two days later, he was gone. Donny McCaslin’s band helped him make that record, and now, a year later, we pay tribute to Bowie and Blackstar  by bringing McCaslin’s band to the Tiny Desk. It’s been exciting to see jazz find its way into the broader music world in recent years think Kendrick Lamar and   in general. Musicians such as McCaslin often play in their own small circuit, but have much to offer popular music. As a bandleader and sax player, he’s put out a dozen albums, the most recent of which is Beyond Now, with musicians Tim Lefebvre on bass, drummer Mark Guiliana and keyboardist Jason Lindner. Beyond Now was recorded after Blackstar, features a few Bowie covers and stretches the band’s own usual boundaries. For this Tiny Desk concert, you can hear an extraordinary group playing extraordinary music  —   including an instrumental version of ”Lazarus,” from Blackstar. Just as Bowie brought these musicians into his   world, I hope this set takes you down McCaslin’s jazz path. Beyond Now is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) Donny McCaslin (saxophone) Jason Lindner (keys) Tim Lefebvre (bass) Mark Guiliana (drums). Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Nicole Boliaux Production Assistant: Anna Marketti Photo: Raquel  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
199,"Chances are your doctor has stopped taking notes with pen and paper and moved to computer records. That is supposed to help coordinate your care. Increasingly, researchers are also exploring these computerized records for medical studies and gleaning facts that help individual patients get better care. Computerized medical records are hardly new. Pioneers at one of the nation’s first HMOs, Kaiser Permanente, were using electronic medical records as far back as the 1970s and saw them as a big part of the future of medicine. ”The part of it that they didn’t envision that we’re envisioning now, is how proactive a role patients would be taking,” says Dr. Tracy Lieu, who heads Kaiser’s research division in Oakland, Calif. Medical records don’t simply store facts about an individual’s health. There’s a big potential for a database of medical records to be mined to help shape an individual’s treatment. ”Patients are always saying, don’t just give me the averages, tell me what happened to others who look like me and made the same treatment decisions I did,” Lieu says. ”And tell me not only did they live or die, but tell me what their quality of life was about.” Kaiser hasn’t put this concept into action, but it’s working toward it. Lieu has a prototype of how it could work. She scoots up to a keyboard in her office and types in ”pancreatic cancer.” That search function pulls up data from Kaiser’s long history of treating this disease. She can narrow that search by cancer type, stage, patient’s age and treatment options, to look at trends and outcomes. The records also include information about patients’ feelings and emotional states based on a   survey that patients routinely fill out. (Individuals are not identified in the database.) That provides a hint about how a person felt before, during and after cancer treatment. But it’s not as complete a picture as patients might want as they weigh their options about treatment choices. Unfortunately, getting that level of detail could be a challenge, because it requires much more data than doctors currently collect. ”If you’re a patient and someone says, ’Gee, we’d like you to fill out this   survey on a routine basis,’ you’re going to say ’Why?’ ” she says. ”’What will this get me? How will this help my care?’ ” Yet that information could be incredibly useful to other patients contemplating treatment decisions. Another piece missing from the Kaiser records is genetic information about patients. Here, the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania is making strides. It has sunk a lot of money and effort into adding gene scans to electronic medical records. It already has scans for 50, 000 patients in its system. Dr. David Ledbetter, the chief scientific officer, says that number is growing fast, toward a goal of more than 125, 000 patients  ” and beyond. ”Even though this is primarily a research project, we’re identifying genomic variants that are actually important to people’s health and health care today,” Ledbetter says. Geisinger patient Jody Christ volunteered to get the genetic screen during one of her routine medical visits. Her doctor had been concerned about her high cholesterol and told her to work on getting in shape. ”So I started to ride a bike and 10 minutes in, I would start to get a sensation down my left arm,” she says. That made the    from Elysburg, Pa. uneasy, so she stopped exercising. But last February she got a call from the program that had run the genetic testing. They told her she had inherited a genetic trait called familial hypercholesterolemia, and that was why she had persistently high cholesterol levels. The disorder makes the body unable to remove cholesterol from the blood, making patients more vulnerable to narrowing of the arteries at an early age. That genetic diagnosis led to a series of clinical tests through the spring. Toward the end of April, Christ took a stress test, which suggested serious heart trouble. A few days later, her heart vessels were scanned in the cardiac catheterization lab, ”and by May 5th I was having triple bypass surgery.” She feels much better today and is grateful that she had volunteered for the genetic test that revealed this serious problem. ”I feel they saved my life,” Christ says. Genetic testing like this (known as exome sequencing) is not routine because the tests typically cost a few thousand dollars. But Ledbetter says the prices are falling fast, and this year could even be in the $300 range. ”So we think as the cost comes down it will be possible to sequence all the genes of individual patients, store that information in the electronic medical record, and it will guide and individualize and optimize patient care,” he says. Doctors don’t know how to interpret most of the genetic results. But there are a few genetic variations, like Christ’s cholesterol marker, that are clear indications of serious health problems. Ledbetter said    variants like that have shown up in 3. 5 percent of the patients they studied recently. That means the test doesn’t provide actionable information for the vast majority of the people who get it. But ”that 3. 5 percent is going to grow,” Ledbetter says, as scientists learn to identify more genes that are associated with disease, and scientists identify more of those genes in their population. ”I don’t know what the final number will be, but it will be in the 5 to 10 percent range.” The hope, he says, is that it will help reveal the biology of more common forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease, and possibly more complex diseases like obesity and diabetes. Geisinger’s experiment, done in partnership with a company called Regeneron, which funds and performs the gene scans, is an important foray into the new world where genetic data merge with electronic medical records. ”The scientific community has been waiting to see what would happen here,” says Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University who researches cardiology and health care. He’s excited at the prospect of being able to look at physical symptoms in medical records and then look for genetic variations that could be responsible, but he says that the system is so far not at all robust. ”The quality of data [collected in medical records] is not necessarily research quality,” Krumholz says. Think of something as basic as the language in these medical records. The word ”shock” in a medical record could mean different things to different people. ”So I think it would be unfortunate if people felt that all of a sudden we had this remarkable treasure trove. There’s a long way to go to move from where we are now to where we need to be,” he says. The federal government is planning to recruit a million volunteers to expand this approach to research in its Precision Medicine Initiative, which has been rebranded as the ”All of Us” research program. The Department of Veterans Affairs started a similar effort in 2012. Scientists there have gathered a huge amount of data, which they are now starting to explore. But medicine is not yet at home in the world of big data, Krumholz says. ”Medicine’s got to catch up, and medicine’s got to understand how best to take advantage of all the information that’s been generated every day,” he says. The early experiences, at Kaiser, Geisinger and elsewhere, are helping find the path forward."
200,"French police have reportedly arrested more than a dozen people during raids linked to the   robbery of reality TV star Kim Kardashian West in Paris last October. During the robbery, a group of thieves burst into the private residence where Kardashian West was staying, held her at gunpoint, then escaped on bicycles with jewelry worth about $10 million. There’s some confusion about exactly how many people police have arrested  —   some French media outlets say 16, while others say 17. DNA left at the scene proved crucial to the investigation, one police official told Agence  . ”One of the DNA samples matched an individual known to police for robbery and criminal offences, who is considered a major thug,” the official told the news agency. He added that they were able to then ”build up a picture of the criminal network behind the robbery . .. adding that it stretched to Belgium.” Police arrested people during raids in Paris and in southern France, Agnes   a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, told The New York Times. She added that ”the oldest of those arrested was 72 and that several of the others were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, which suggested that they were part of an ’experienced” group,’” according to the newspaper. The police targeted those suspected of carrying out the robbery, along with intermediaries and those thought to be responsible for selling the stolen items, Le Figaro reports. Immediately after the robbery, a spokeswoman for Kardashian West said she was ”badly shaken but physically unharmed,” as The   noted at the time. Since then, she has kept a relatively low profile, but she tearfully recalled the ordeal in a promo video released Friday for her family’s reality TV show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. ”They’re going to shoot me in the back,” she recalled thinking as she was surrounded by her family members. ”There’s no way out. . .. It makes me so upset to think about it.”"
201,"When South Korea’s mountain town of PyeongChang hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games next year, a white tiger and a black bear, respectively, will serve as mascots. They’ve been introduced as cuddly icons of Korean history and folklore. ”They are so cute and adorable, so I’m sure that you’re gonna fall in love with them,” Korea’s figure skating champ and former Olympian Yuna Kim said, in announcing the PyeongChang 2018 mascots in a promotional video. The ”adorable” Asiatic black bear is better known regionally as a moon bear, for the distinctive white crescent on its chest. It’s native to Korea and a symbol of the province where the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will be held. ”It’s a very unique and symbolic creature in Korea,” says Anna Jihyun You, a spokeswoman for the Olympics here. ”I can’t say . .. how far [these bears] go back [in folklore] but it’s really since a long time ago,” she says. But that place in history and lore hasn’t spared the actual bear breed itself from cruelty. An hour’s drive south of Seoul, you can find a   farm, one of 39 sprinkled across the country. Here, farmer Kim   keeps 230 moon bears in rusty cages. He breeds them and cages them for the legal minimum of 10 years. Then they’re slaughtered for their gall bladders. In East Asia, bear bile is believed to solve a host of health problems  —   from hangovers to heart disease. The bears are never let out. ”It’s true we don’t have play facilities for the bears,” Kim says. ”But in South Korea right now, almost all these bears are kept in cages.” A century ago that wasn’t true. Moon bears roamed freely in the mountains of Korea. But bear bile became such a   traditional medicine that today, the bears have been captured and farmed to near extinction. ”The way that these bears are farmed is particularly cruel,” says Jill Robinson, a veterinarian and founder and CEO of Animals Asia foundation. Her organization has been working, along with other nonprofits, to try to end the practice of   farming in China, Vietnam and South Korea. ”This is an issue that I sort of discovered way back in 1993 when I walked onto a   farm for the first time in my life and was just absolutely horrified by what I saw,” she says. ”Cages and cages all around me, with bears with the most miserable faces, with   catheters protruding from their abdomens. Their teeth cut back, their paw tips cut back so that they couldn’t hurt the farmers as they were extracting the bile.” Since then, South Korea has banned the practice of milking bears for bile while they are alive. But the animals are still living in captivity until they’re killed. The bear farmer  —   Kim  —   says he has come to enjoy the bears he keeps. But he has no other livelihood. ”Only by selling the bile can I maintain the business,” Kim says. ”So it hurts, it hurts me. I don’t even look at them when they’re being slaughtered. I feel really sad. I mean, you’re not a human being if you’re not sad about it.” That underlines the gulf between what’s happening to the actual Asiatic black bears and the   character of next year’s Paralympic mascot. While moon bear mascot ”Bandabi” glides his way down animated mountains in promo videos, the inspirations for Bandabi spend their days banging their heads against their cages. ”I just hope the Korean government does make that connection and finally gives its incredible species of bear the freedom they deserve,” Robinson says. Demand for bear bile has collapsed, which has led to the closure of many farms already. But nearly 800 moon bears still live in caged limbo in their native country. Haeryun Kang contributed to this story."
202,"Outgoing Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro’s office overlooks a stretch of the Washington, D. C. waterfront where several   apartment buildings are being built, in a city where affordable housing is in short supply and homelessness is a big problem. These are some of the same issues his successor will have to deal with as head of an agency that provides housing aid to 10 million   families. Castro has been in his post for 2   years. Before that, he was mayor of San Antonio, where he got some experience with housing and community development. He’s expected to be succeeded by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who says his main experience for the job was growing up poor. Castro says he and Carson spoke by phone about a week ago, but didn’t talk specifics. ”I just pledged that we wanted to make sure there’s a smooth transition, and to make sure that he has everything that he needs as he heads toward his confirmation hearing,” Castro says. At the confirmation hearing, which is scheduled for Thursday, Carson will likely face questions about whether he’s up for a job that he himself expressed reservations about taking, when it was offered by   Donald Trump. Castro thinks, like other secretaries before him, that Carson will grow to appreciate HUD’s role once he learns more about it. Still, he’s clearly worried that the new administration could roll back some key initiatives. Carson has strongly criticized a new HUD rule to get local communities to comply with the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which is intended to reduce neighborhood segregation. ”I’d be lying if I said that I’m not concerned about the possibility of going backward, over the next four years,” Castro says. Carson has called the new rule excessive government regulation. He’s also complained that government aid can make some people too dependent. Congressional Republicans have proposed time limits and work requirements for those getting housing assistance, to make them more  . Castro thinks that’s the wrong approach. ”The first things we need to do is to clarify misperceptions about the families who get HUD assistance,” Castro says. He says most are elderly, disabled or already working. ”I believe that the folks who live in public housing are ambitious, that they have tremendous potential and that we should invest in them. I don’t believe that we should go back to the   and scapegoating them and talking about doing away with HUD and so forth,” he says. Not that Carson has said as much. In fact, he’s said very little. His confirmation hearing will be the first real chance the public has to see where he stands on programs, including one of the Obama administration’s biggest achievements  —   moving tens of thousands of homeless individuals, mostly veterans, into permanent housing. That effort has had bipartisan support, but future funding is in doubt because Trump says he wants steep cuts in domestic spending. ”On the other hand, the   has talked about investment in infrastructure, investment in other things. And so, it’s possible that we’re in for a surprise,” Castro says. He won’t be around to find out. Castro is getting on a plane first thing on Inauguration Day, going back to San Antonio to work on his memoir."
203,"Though the great outdoors becomes more inhospitable when winter winds rise and temperatures drop, there’s nothing like wandering through an evergreen forest as snow squeaks underfoot. And once people have trudged stiffly back inside, they can keep those forests with them by imbibing one of the world’s many pine liqueurs. These liqueurs have been a longtime fixture in European hotels and ski lodges. Under the umbrella of ”schnapps” (essentially any strong, clear alcoholic drink with little resemblance to the sweetened stuff marketed as schnapps in the United States) Austrians have been brewing their own   varieties for generations. Yet it wasn’t until the early 2000s that these evergreen spirits finally made their way to America  —   2005, in particular, seems to be the magic year. Call it good market research or just good timing, but at least three major pine spirits made their U. S. debut that year. Any earlier and it’s likely that pine liqueurs might have swiftly been forgotten. Pushing against the sweet excesses and   flair of 1980s and ’90s bar culture (and drinks with names like the ”slippery nipple”) bartenders began reviving Prohibition Era classics like the Manhattan, martini and Negroni  —   all   drinks light on mixers and sugar. As this renaissance started to take off, bartenders became open to even more daring spirits and flavors that would help their menus stand out  —   and there are few flavors more distinctive to Americans than pine. Zirbenz, a   Alpine liqueur made from the fresh fruit of the Arolla Stone Pine, has been distilled by Austria’s Josef Hofer family in Styria since the late 1700s. Reaching this evergreen is no easy task. It grows at altitudes of roughly 4, 000 to 8, 000 feet, right up to the Alpine tree line, after which conditions become too harsh. Though Zirbenz is often enjoyed in the winter, the mountaineers who pick the fruit harvest it when it ripens in early July. Oregon’s Clear Creek Distillery also harvests the buds for its Douglas Fir Eau de Vie when they’re at peak freshness  —   early spring in the Pacific Northwest. In the 1990s, founder Steve McCarthy recalled the various pine spirits he’d tried in Europe and how he wanted to bring one to the United States. ”It was by far the most difficult of all our products to make because it’s not just ’crush, ferment, distill,’” says Jeanine Racht, Clear Creek’s national sales manager. Douglas fir buds didn’t have enough sugar in them for fermentation, so McCarthy turned to distillation. He soon got the flavor right but he wanted the liqueur to be green  —   with no added dye. ”Solving the puzzle was like a hobby for Steve,” Racht explains. By the time McCarthy was ready to send the Eau de Vie to market, 12 years had elapsed. In purely economic terms, the product shouldn’t exist. ”A lot of money went into it,” Racht says. Unlike many   animals  —   birds, butterflies, and Caribbean monkeys  —   humans are the MacGyvers of alcohol. The first evidence of a   ”drink” is a honey, rice and grape mixture that dates back to 7000 —  6600 B. C. Since then, humans have been experimenting to try to turn plants and crops  —   from bananas to wormwood  —   into some type of intoxicant. In the Mediterranean, mastiha, the resin from the mastic tree, has been used for cooking, chewing and drinking for centuries. Mastic is an evergreen, though it has leaves instead of needles and bears little resemblance to northern pine trees. When crushed, the resin releases a flavor reminiscent of pine or cedar. For more than 3, 000 years, people on the Greek island of Chios have been gathering the resin, which is also called the ”tears of Chios.” The tree is scored and the dried crystals are collected and cleaned. It’s a painstaking process that happens once a year at the end of summer. Today, one company, Skinos, makes the liqueur commercially. Though the product is sold in more than 20 countries, the United States is the biggest buyer. Because alcohol isn’t exactly a health food, pine’s beneficial effects are downplayed in the marketing of spirits. But Dram Apothecary, based in Colorado, makes an evergreen syrup from local trees that can be used for both alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages. It’s high in vitamin C and is often used as an herbal remedy for colds or coughs. Yet, Dram founder Shae Whitney says, not all evergreen trees are alike. People who want to make their own pine syrup often turn toward Colorado’s local pine tree, the Ponderosa. ”It’s toxic,” says Whitney, adding that on social media she’s had to talk a few people out of making Ponderosa pine syrup. ”Trees are difficult to identify at different altitudes,” she explains. She purchased a Colorado tree guide on early outings to make sure her team was harvesting from the right kind of tree. Spiky pine needles may not have been humanity’s first choice for a spirit, but it’s no surprise that at some point in history, someone walked into the snowy woods with a hankering for a stiff drink and noticed that there was exactly one plant still alive. Tove K. Danovich is a journalist based in Portland, Ore."
204,"Updated at 6:55 p. m. ET, A jury has sentenced to death the man who murdered nine people in a Charleston church basement in 2015. The twelve jurors deliberated for about three hours before sentencing Dylann Roof, 22, to die. To impose the death penalty, they had to reach a unanimous decision. It is the same jury that found Roof guilty of federal hate crimes charges for entering Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015 and sitting among those at a Bible study in the basement before opening fire on the worshippers. The sentencing portion of the trial began Jan. 3 and ended on Tuesday. Survivors, family members of those killed and law enforcement officials testified for the prosecution about Roof’s crime, the lives he cut short and his apparent motives. Family members of Cynthia Graham Hurd, one of the victims, talked about Hurd’s love of books, which led to her work as a librarian, reported Charleston’s Post and Courier newspaper. After the sentence was announced, Hurd’s brother Melvin Graham told reporters outside the courthouse ”It’s a hard to say that this person deserves to live when [the] other nine don’t,” tweeted Post and Courier reporter Abigail Darlington. ”He was radicalized,” Graham continued. Another victim, Ethel Lance, was remembered as the matriarch of her family. The Post and Courier reported: ”The oldest of Lance’s children, the Rev. Sharon Risher, held up her hands in the witness stand and pretended to rip apart a piece of fabric representing her family. ” ’Nobody is there to keep us together, to keep the pieces together. Now we have tattered pieces,’ Risher said tearfully. ’And I know that would devastate her.’ ” FBI Special Agent Joseph Hamski, who led the federal investigation, told the jury that Roof had an account on the white supremacist website Stormfront. org under the username ”LilAryan” and posted messages in the months before the massacre, looking for other local people who shared his views, the paper reported. In his closing argument, which lasted about two hours according to South Carolina Public Radio’s Alexandra Olgin, prosecutor Jay Richardson argued that Roof deserved to die for his crime because he planned a deadly   attack in an attempt to incite further violence and had shown no remorse. Roof, who acted as his own attorney during the sentencing portion of the trial, called no witnesses and did not testify. He gave a brief opening statement, as we reported: ”He said it’s ’absolutely true’ that he chose to represent himself so that his lawyers would not present evidence of mental illness. ” ’The point is I’m not going to lie to you,’ Roof said. ’There’s nothing wrong with me psychologically.’ ” In a rambling,   closing statement on Tuesday  —   his last chance to address jurors before they decided whether to sentence him to die  —   Roof spoke about hatred. As the Post and Courier reported from inside the courtroom: ” ’Anyone, including the prosecution, who thinks I am filled with hate has no idea what real hate is,’ Roof said, speaking to jurors from a podium about eight feet from the jury box during his closing argument. ’They don’t know anything about hate.’ . .. ” ’They don’t know what real real hatred looks like,’ [Roof said]. ’They think they do, but they don’t really.’ . .. ” ’I think it’s safe to say that someone in their right mind wouldn’t go into a church and kill people,’ he said. ’You might remember in my confession to the FBI I told them I had to do it. Obviously, that isn’t true because I didn’t have to do it. I didn’t have to do anything. But what I meant when I said that was I felt like I had to do that.’ . .. ” ’Wouldn’t it be fair to say that the prosecution hates me since they are the ones trying to give me the death penalty?’ he said. ’You could say, ”Of course they hate you. Everyone hates you. They have good reason to hate you.” I’m not denying that. My point is that anyone who hates anything, in their mind, has a good reason.’ ” He ended by reminding jurors that they had each agreed to stand up for their opinions during deliberations, as Olgin reported, and that a death sentence would require a unanimous decision. Roof is facing separate murder charges brought by the state of South Carolina, which is also seeking the death penalty. A previous version of this article stated that trial was scheduled to begin Jan. 17, but it has been postponed due to uncertainty that the federal trial would not be completed in time. After the death sentence was announced Tuesday, Roof’s defense team released a statement suggesting Roof intends to appeal the sentence, saying ”Today’s sentencing decision means that this case will not be over for a very long time. We are sorry that, despite our best efforts, the legal proceedings have shed so little light on the reasons for this tragedy.”"
205,"Dylann Roof murdered nine people in a church basement in Charleston in 2015. He confessed to the massacre shortly after he was arrested. He didn’t testify at trial and no witnesses were called on his behalf before he was convicted of federal hate crimes. The most emphatic statements on Roof’s behalf came from defense attorney David Bruck. For weeks, the prosecution had presented evidence that Roof is a white supremacist whose violent racism drove him to kill black people. Bruck asked the jury to consider how the    came to believe the things he did. As NPR reported: ” ’There is hatred all right, and certainly racism, but it goes a lot further than that,’ [Bruck] said. ” ’Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet. That’s it. . .. ’He is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans and facts  —   bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.’ ” Bruck was referring to Roof’s assertion in his confession and in a manifesto that a Google search shaped his beliefs. So when Roof asked Google for information about race, what did the search engine show him? ”The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case,” Roof wrote in the racist manifesto he published online, a cached version of which was saved to Internet archive sites. Roof was 17 years old at the time, the same age Trayvon Martin was when neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot and killed the unarmed black teenager in 2012. ”I kept hearing and seeing [Martin’s] name,” Roof wrote, ”and eventually I decided to look him up.” Roof wrote that he ”read the Wikipedia article” about the shooting and came to the conclusion that Zimmerman was not at fault. ”But,” he continued, ”more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ’black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.” In a videotaped interview with FBI agents after he was arrested in June 2015, Roof told a similar story. He said that after hearing about Martin’s death he had ”decided to look his name up. Type him into Google, you know what I’m saying?” Roof told investigators he had read the Wikipedia article for Martin, and then, ”for some reason after I read that, I,” he paused before continuing, ”I typed in  —   for some reason it made me type in the words black on white crime.” ”And that was it,” Roof said. ”Ever since then . ..” he trailed off and didn’t finish the sentence. It is impossible to know what Roof saw when he typed those words into Google. The search engine does not make the details of its search algorithm public, and even if the exact date and location of Roof’s initial search were known (court documents suggest only that it was around 2013) there is no public archive of past search results. ”Even the Wayback Machine, which is maintained by the Internet Archive, does not preserve search rankings,” explains Robert Epstein, a psychologist who studies how people interact with search engines and who has published multiple studies about Google’s algorithm. ”You can find old versions of Web pages,” he says, but ”all this past stuff  —   search suggestions, search results  —   you cannot get to.” Epstein says the closest approximation of what Roof saw on Google begins with the search engine’s ”autocomplete” feature. Taking Roof’s statements at face value, he went to Google. com and typed the letters in his search term, one at a time. But he didn’t necessarily have to type all the letters in the search term, ”                .” NPR googled that phrase in December 2016 and January 2017, and found the letters ”      ” elicited this top autocompleted suggestion: ”black on white crime.” Users need only press enter to complete the search. Adding one letter to make it ”       w,” the top autocomplete suggestion remained the same, and the second was ”black on white violence.” The third and fourth were ”black on white crime statistics” and ”black on white racism.” The top autocomplete results for ”       w” were ”white on white crime,” ”white on white,” ”white on white acid” and ”white on white kitchen.” A spokesperson for Google told NPR in an email that ”autocomplete predictions are produced based on a number of factors including the popularity and freshness of search terms.” ”We do our best to prevent offensive terms, like porn and hate speech, from appearing, but we don’t always get it right,” the spokesperson continued and pointed to a June 2016 blog post by the search engine’s product management director, Tamar Yehoshua, saying Google had changed its algorithm to ”avoid completing a search for a person’s name with terms that are offensive or disparaging.” When Roof hit Enter for the search term ”black on white crime,” the search engine returned a list of websites. ”The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens,” Roof wrote.  The Council of Conservative Citizens is a white supremacist organization, according to the   League, which tracks hate groups. In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the ADL reported that multiple hate groups used inaccurate Internet posts about crimes against white people as a ”propaganda tool” for white supremacy. As the ADL reported: ”On May 11, 2012, the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) posted an article on its Web site that claimed that a New Jersey newspaper had ’censored’ the race of the alleged assailants in what it called ’savage mob attacks’ on five white concertgoers in New Jersey. The CofCC dismissed both the newspaper and police accounts portraying the incident as an ’isolated event.’ According to the CofCC, ’almost as alarming as the epidemic violent crime being perpetrated against white people is the blatant media censorship and   of the racial element of the incidents. ’” It’s impossible to know whether the Council of Conservative Citizens page that Roof referenced appeared at the top of the Google search results. Results for a given search term and the order in which they’re presented change over time. Google searches for ”black on white crime” conducted by NPR in December 2016 and January 2017 found the top results included multiple white supremacist websites, but didn’t include anything from the Council of Conservative Citizens. The top five results included the website New Nation News, which the   League says ”promotes the belief that ’voluntary racial segregation in all prisons is a constitutional right,’ ” and American Renaissance, a magazine put out by what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls ”a   think tank that promotes   studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.” The first page of results also included an article published on the website The Root titled, ”Open Letter to White People Who Are Obsessed With    Crime,” and a link to a forum about ”Black on White Crime” on the   site The Daily Stormer. ”The top two positions in the search results matter the most,” says Epstein, who has studied click rates for search results. ”The top two draw 50 percent of clicks, and the numbers go down from there, so what’s at the top is extremely, extremely powerful.” In NPR’s test search, New Nation News was the second option, following a post from the conservative website dailywire. com. ”People equate the position of search results with how true they are,” Epstein explains. ”What’s higher is better. What’s higher is truer.” In December, an extensive article published by The Guardian publicized another instance of potentially inflammatory rhetoric on Google’s search engine. The newspaper pointed out that the search ”      ” suggested, among others, the autocomplete phrase ”are jews evil.” (The same final word was suggested for the search ”       .” The letters ”         ” suggested the phrase ”are muslims bad. ”) Google said it ”took action within hours” and changed its autocomplete results. The search engine company ”did not comment on its decision to alter some but not all those raised in the article,” the Guardian reported. NPR did the same search a few weeks later and got the suggested phrases ”are jews white,” ”are jews a race” and ”are jews christians.” There were no suggested phrases for ”      ” and ”         ” suggested only ”are muslims a race.” Some experts who study search engines and their implications for democratic society have suggested there is a disconnect between the stated mission of a free and open Internet and the reality of search algorithms, which come with all the messy biases of anything designed by humans. Internet law expert Frank Pasquale is among those who have advocated for search result algorithms in the U. S. to be regulated by the government. ”Though [dominant search engines] advocate net neutrality, they have been much less quick to recognize the threat to openness and fair play their own practices may pose,” Pasquale wrote in a 2008 paper. U. S. courts have repeatedly dismissed challenges to search engines’ editorial control over their search results, including a case in which the court upheld Google’s right to present what the plaintiff argued were ”biased search results that favor its own paid advertisers and   companies.” Courts have repeatedly cited the First Amendment, treating search engine companies as conduits for free speech on the Internet. Asked what, if anything, Google sees as its responsibility concerning potential hate speech in search terms and results, the spokesperson told NPR: ”The views expressed by hate sites are not in any way endorsed by Google, but search is a reflection of the content and information that is available on the Internet. We do not remove content from our search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware and violations of our webmaster guidelines, including spam and deception.” The company did not comment on the potential role of its Internet search in the specific case of Dylann Roof."
206,"Donald Trump met Tuesday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. an environmental activist and known skeptic of childhood vaccinations. Kennedy has been a prominent voice in the   community, raising questions for years about a possible (disproven) link between a preservative in some vaccines and autism. Kennedy spoke to reporters after the meeting, which he said came at Trump’s request, and noted that he would be heading up a commission on vaccine safety and ”scientific integrity.” The Trump transition team, however, later said a commission is not quite baked, noting in a statement that Trump is at this point ”exploring the possibility of forming a commission on autism.” But the fact that Kennedy  —   who has lent his name and prominence to a controversial cause of whether vaccines, specifically the preservative called thimerosal, cause autism, for which there is no evidence within the scientific community  —   is part of that conversation, once again, reflects Trump embracing the fringe when it comes to the science of autism and vaccinations. During the presidential campaign, Trump argued that he knew a child of an employee who had gotten a vaccine and then ended up with autism. That’s despite the confluence of evidence to the contrary  —   from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the overwhelming scientific body of research. ”  Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies,” Kennedy said, according to a pool report after the meeting at Trump Tower in New York, ”and he has questions about it. His opinion doesn’t matter but the science does matter, and we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science. And that everybody ought to be able to be assured that the vaccines that we have  —   he’s very   as am I  —   but they’re as safe as they possibly can be.” The Trump transition team later released this statement: ”The   enjoyed his discussion with Robert Kennedy Jr. on a range of issues and appreciates his thoughts and ideas. The   is exploring the possibility of forming a commission on Autism, which affects so many families however no decisions have been made at this time. The   looks forward to continuing the discussion about all aspects of Autism with many groups and individuals.” Alarm from medical authorities, Kennedy’s announcement immediately provoked alarm among leading medical authorities. The American Academy of Pediatrics put out a statement reiterating that ”vaccines protect children’s health and save lives. They prevent   diseases, including forms of cancer. Vaccines have been part of the fabric of our society for decades and are the most significant medical innovation of our time. Vaccines are safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines save lives.” It’s a topic that has been hotly debated for two decades and has incited strong passions among some parents of children with autism. Out of these fears, some parents have decided to forgo vaccinating their children. As a result, some parts of the country saw a measles outbreak in 2015. There were ”more cases of measles in the first month of 2015 than the number that is typically diagnosed in a full year,” the New York Times noted. Of 34 California patients, 22 were of age to be vaccinated and never were six were babies too young to be vaccinated, NPR reported. It spread to more than a dozen states. Pushing conspiracies from the bully pulpit? Trump, who has peddled numerous conspiracies, picked up the   charge in a   way in a September 2015 debate. ”You take this little beautiful baby, and you pump  —   I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child,” Trump said, ”and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me. Just the other day, 2 years old, 2    old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.” But that link Trump tries to draw is simple, convenient and false. Here was Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, in that same debate: ”We have extremely   proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccinations.” As NPR’s Scott Horsley   after that debate: ”Trump said all he’s really advocating is that vaccines be spaced out over a longer period of time, though the American Academy of Pediatrics says there’s no evidence that’s necessary.” The academy noted in its statement Tuesday, ”Claims that vaccines are linked to autism, or are unsafe when administered according to the recommended schedule, have been disproven by a robust body of medical literature. Delaying vaccines only leaves a child at risk of disease.” Discredited, The    link theory first came to prominence in 1997 with a   study in a British journal, The Lancet, which was withdrawn in 2010. It was authored by a surgeon, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who has since lost his license to practice medicine. (More on that here.) That very researcher met with Trump last summer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has categorically stated, ”There is no link between vaccines and autism.” As far as thimerosal specifically, the CDC wrote: ”Research shows that thimerosal does not cause ASD [autism spectrum disorder]. In fact, a 2004 scientific review by the IOM concluded that ’the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between   vaccines and autism.’ Since 2003, there have been nine   or conducted studies that have found no link between   vaccines and ASD, as well as no link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and ASD in children.” Most childhood vaccines have had just trace amounts of thimerosal in them for more than 15 years. The only ones that still have more in them are some flu vaccines. The CDC notes that the removal of thimerosal was done as a precaution and points out that there are flu vaccines without it also available. What’s more, some research suggests that autism develops in the womb. NPR noted in 2014: ”The symptoms of autism may not be obvious until a child is a toddler, but the disorder itself appears to begin well before birth. Brain tissue taken from children who died and also happened to have autism revealed patches of disorganization in the cortex, a thin sheet of cells that’s critical for learning and memory, researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Tissue samples from children without autism didn’t have those characteristic patches.” A flawed messenger, Kennedy himself has come under fire for his facts and assertions on the potential link. Salon pulled completely from its website a story written by Kennedy in 2005 because of a series of factual errors. Salon noted that it published that piece ”that offered an explosive premise: that the   thimerosal compound present in vaccines until 2001 was dangerous, and that he was ’convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real.’ ” But the story,   with Rolling Stone, had to be pulled after ”we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy’s exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece  —   and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency  —   was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book ’The Panic Virus,’ further eroded any faith we had in the story’s value. We’ve grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.” Part of a broader pattern, Trump happened to take the meeting with Kennedy on one of the busiest days in politics, in one of the busiest weeks in politics, since the presidential election. Trump’s attorney general nominee, Jeff Sessions, is sitting for the first of two days of hearings questioning past allegations of racism and highlighting where he differs from the  . Meantime, there is another hearing happening related to Russian hacking and interference into the U. S. election at which the director of national intelligence and the director of the FBI  —   whom Hillary Clinton blames, in part, for costing her the election  —   are testifying on Capitol Hill. They said definitively that Russia was behind the interference and had the intent of undermining American democracy and trying to get Trump elected. More than half a dozen other hearings are taking place in the coming days, including for Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state  —   a hearing that is sure to be a proxy fight with Trump on the U. S. relationship with Russia. It all follows a pattern of Trump in (1) utilizing something of a chaos theory of politics in throwing as much news as possible in all directions meant to distract and make the salience of news diffuse, and (2) once again believing what conforms to a predisposed view. Consider the way he has handled Russian interference into the 2016 election: He and his team have cast doubt on U. S. intelligence findings that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and a Clinton campaign official with the intent to undermine American democracy and get Trump elected. Instead of treating that as a serious national security issue that demands a response, as most Republican elected officials have, he has focused on how there’s no evidence any hacking affected the outcome of the election. It’s a pattern likely to be repeated early and often in the Trump presidency."
207,"In giving his farewell address on Tuesday night in Chicago, President Obama will follow a tradition begun by America’s first president. George Washington offered a series of warnings, what he called a ”solemn contemplation.” His parting words have been deemed so valuable that they are read on the floor of the U. S. Senate each year, including his warning about the dangers of partisanship: ”It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with   jealousies and false alarms kindles the animosity of one part against another foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.” The presidential farewell address became a fixture in the 20th century, right along with the arrival of television in American homes. In these modern farewell speeches, almost all of them talk about the difficulty of the job, and urge the American people to be nice to the next guy. ”I want all of you to realize how big a job, how hard a job, it is  —   not for my sake, because I am stepping out of it  —   but for the sake of my successor,” President Harry Truman said. ”He needs the understanding and the help of every citizen.” All the presidents look back on their years in office, some lingering on their legacies longer than others. There is pride at accomplishment  —   as expressed by President Ronald Reagan, who thanked the men and women of the Reagan revolution and talked of proving the pundits wrong. ”Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end,” he said. ”We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.” But there is often talk of regrets, like not securing peace, says Gerhard Peters,   of the American Presidency Project. ”They are almost very respectful in the way they present their administration’s accomplishments,” Peters says. ”You know, at times they’re also very humble.” Peters says in most cases, it has been a president of one party handing the presidency off to a successor from the other party. And yet, ”They’re very graceful to their successor, and I’d expect President Obama to be, even though this has been a very political climate, this transition.” As with Washington’s address, many of these final speeches contain warnings. President Eisenhower coined a term: ”  complex.” ”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the   complex,” he said in 1961. ”The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” In modern times, presidents have used these speeches to argue for American leadership in the world, including President George H. W. Bush: ”We must engage ourselves if a new world order, one more compatible with our values and congenial to our interest, is to emerge. But even more, we must lead.” His son George W. Bush took up the same theme: ”In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism.” Many presidents, including Gerald Ford, talk with pride about the peaceful transfer of power and of the balance of power built into the American system of government. ”This often results in difficulty and delay, as I well know, but it also places supreme authority under God, beyond any one person, any one branch, any majority great or small, or any one party,” Ford said. ”The Constitution is the bedrock of all our freedoms.” Guard it and cherish it, he said. President Jimmy Carter said it could be tempting in times of tension and economic distress to abandon principles: ”We must never yield to this temptation. Our American values are not luxuries, but necessities  —   not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself.” American values come up again and again in these speeches. Listening to President Bill Clinton in early 2001, you could imagine President Obama striking a similar theme on Tuesday night: ”We must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country  —   always moving toward the more perfect Union of our Founders’ dreams.” And ultimately, as so many have before him, President Obama will have to say goodbye."
208,"President Obama will address the nation for what’s likely to be the last time Tuesday night. He says the   address from his adopted hometown of Chicago will be a chance to celebrate the successes of the past eight years and to offer some thoughts on where the nation goes from here. The celebration could be  . While Obama can rightfully boast about a vastly improved economy and other changes during his tenure, the man who’s taking his place in the Oval Office has promised to reverse much of what Obama accomplished. And while the president remains personally popular, his Democratic Party is weaker than it was eight years ago, reducing its chances of protecting Obama’s legacy. The president outlined the highlights of that legacy in an open letter to the American people last week. ”By so many measures, our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started,” he wrote. Here’s a scorecard of some of the measures the president cited, along with some he left off: ”An economy that was shrinking at more than 8 percent is now growing at more than 3 percent,” Obama wrote in his letter. ”Businesses that were bleeding jobs unleashed the longest streak of job creation on record.” President Obama took office in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He leaves with an unemployment rate less than half of what it was during the depths of the downturn. U. S. employers have added more than 11 million jobs since Obama took office (and more than 15 million since the job market bottomed out in early 2010). After nearly a decade of stagnant wages, median household income jumped sharply in 2015. And last year’s wage growth was the strongest of the recovery. ”There’s the sort of rule about how you’re supposed to go, leave the forest nicer than you found it,” White House economist Jason Furman said last week. ”President Obama is definitely handing over an economy in much, much better shape than the economy he inherited.” The Recovery Act Obama pushed through Congress less than a month after taking office was roundly and repeatedly mocked by Republicans as a failure. But a majority of economists surveyed by the University of Chicago agree that the stimulus cushioned the blow from the recession. The Federal Reserve also took dramatic action to shore up the sagging economy. And the president’s controversial auto rescue (along with a bridge loan from the Bush administration) saved an industry that rebounded to enjoy record sales. ”Income gains were actually larger for households at the bottom and the middle [in 2015] than those at the top,” Obama notes. ”We’ve actually begun the long task of reversing inequality.” That could change, however, in a Trump administration. The   has promised a tax overhaul that would give the biggest tax breaks to those at the top of the income ladder. He’s also likely to unwind an Obama administration rule designed to make millions more   workers eligible for overtime pay. ”Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, another 20 million American adults know the financial security and peace of mind that comes with health insurance,” Obama wrote in his letter. ”For the first time ever, more than 90 percent of Americans are insured  —   the highest rate ever.”  The president’s signature health care law has expanded insurance coverage and broadened protections for those who were already insured. It has also encouraged changes in the way medical payments are made  —   to reward quality rather than quantity of care. And it has coincided with slower growth in insurance premiums for the majority of Americans who get their insurance through an employer. But the law  —   which passed with no Republican support seven years ago  —   remains deeply controversial. People buying insurance on the   exchanges saw premium increases averaging 25 percent this year. And Republicans have vowed to make repeal of Obamacare their first order of business as soon as they control both Congress and the White House, which they will now. ”We’ve drawn down from nearly 180, 000 troops in harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15, 000,” Obama wrote. Obama first ran for the White House determined to end the war in Iraq while refocusing attention on Afghanistan. He ordered the successful special operations raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But an early troop surge in Afghanistan had only limited success in taming the Taliban. While the number of American troops in harm’s way has since been greatly reduced, Obama had to backtrack on plans to withdraw from Afghanistan altogether. And critics say the precipitous American troop withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum there which gave way to the rise of the Islamic State. In 2014, Obama was forced to send some troops back to Iraq to address the threat from ISIS. Obama has steadfastly resisted   intervention in Syria’s civil war. Although the U. S. is the largest contributor of humanitarian relief, a wave of refugees from Syria has had a destabilizing effect throughout Europe. It’s possible that Obama’s abrupt decision in 2013 not to enforce his own ”red line” against chemical weapons emboldened Syrian President Bashar Assad, as well his Russian sponsor Vladimir Putin, who illegally annexed Crimea the following year. ”Over the past eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland,” Obama wrote. Sustained pressure on   and ISIS, along with diligent counterterrorism efforts, have prevented another spectacular, Sept.   attack. But as Obama himself has acknowledged, it doesn’t take much planning or sophistication for violent extremists to bring about carnage. It was shortly after a deadly,   attack in San Bernardino that Donald Trump called for a ban on foreign Muslims entering the country. That proposal later morphed into ”extreme vetting.” But the country has proved vulnerable to ”lone wolves” inspired online by extremists. It has seen those attacks and has had difficulty addressing the problem. ”Through diplomacy, we shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program [and] opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba,” Obama wrote. ”Almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago.” The Iran nuclear deal, which grants Iran sanctions relief in exchange for strict limits and monitoring of its nuclear program, is one of the signature diplomatic achievements of the Obama administration  —   the result of painstaking negotiation involving half a dozen allies and adversaries. The deal remains controversial in this country and in Israel. Trump campaigned against it, but top scientists have urged him not to unravel it, saying the agreement has ”dramatically reduced the risk” of Iran quickly developing a nuclear weapon. Obama’s diplomatic thaw with Cuba also broke new ground, ending more than half a century of official isolation. Cuba has been slow to match the U. S. in liberalizing trade and travel restrictions. But the White House says its overture to Cuba has also helped improve relations with the rest of the Western hemisphere. America’s image in Europe and Asia has generally improved during Obama’s time in office, but it has suffered recently in Israel and the Middle East. Administration efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians went nowhere. And the sweeping trade deal at the heart of Obama’s push to raise America’s profile in the Pacific stalled amid political opposition here at home. ”Our dependence on foreign oil has been cut by more than half and our production of renewable energy has more than doubled. In many places across the country, clean energy from the wind is now cheaper than dirtier sources of energy and solar now employs more Americans than coal mining in jobs that pay better than average and can’t be outsourced.” Domestic oil and natural gas production have surged on Obama’s watch, largely as a result of the fracking revolution. In 2015, the U. S. relied on imported oil for less than a quarter of its total petroleum needs, the lowest level since 1970. Wind and solar power have seen rapid growth during the past eight years, though they still account for less than 6 percent of overall electricity generation. Coal and natural gas account for about 33 percent each, while nuclear power contributes about 20 percent. President Obama led an international effort to cut carbon pollution, resulting in the successful Paris Climate Agreement. But U. S. participation in that deal could be jeopardized by the incoming administration. Trump has tapped Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic with strong ties to the   industry, to head the Environmental Protection Administration. Trump and Pruitt have both criticized the   rules at the center of Obama’s climate efforts. Obama also imposed more stringent energy efficiency standards for cars and appliances, though those could be relaxed by the incoming administration. ”The high school graduation rate is now 83 percent  —   the highest on record  —   and we’ve helped more young people graduate from college than ever before.” Obama boosted Pell Grants and made it easier for many college graduates to repay student loans. But the cost of a college education continues to rise faster than inflation. Obama was unable to sell Congress on his idea of universal preschool for   and      although preschool offerings have expanded at the state level.   achievement gaps between white and minority students persist. Obama also controversially, through stimulus funds, instituted the Common Core standards. His Education Department dangled millions of dollars to states to adopt more rigorous testing and teacher standards, which put a lot of pressure  —   and introduced a lot of confusion  —   into the system. Despite Common Core being developed by Republican governors, it became a target for Tea Party conservatives and   liberals. Proponents will argue that it introduced   accountability on teachers, though teachers, especially those teaching the most difficult populations, would argue they weren’t always given the supports they needed. Obama also controversially expanded charter schools, and the book is still out on their success. Obama also changed the conversation on higher education with a focus on community colleges that hadn’t been seen before. Scott Jaschik of Insider Higher Ed told PBS NewsHour that even though Obama didn’t get free tuition for community colleges, ”Eight years ago, people were not talking about the idea of free college. Now they are.” ”We’ve also worked to make the changing face of America more fair and more just . .. repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and advancing the cause of civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights.” With help from Congress and the Pentagon, gay and lesbian members of the military can now serve openly, and their spouses receive equal benefits. The Supreme Court legalized   marriage in all 50 states in 2015. And the first bill signed into law by Obama made it easier for women to sue their employers for unequal pay. But a push last year by the Justice and Education Departments to protect the rights of transgender students was halted by a federal judge. In addition to protecting vast tracts of land and water as national monuments, Obama has also used his power to protect smaller parcels, commemorating Harriet Tubman, Cesar Chavez and the Stonewall Inn, where the modern   movement began. ”For all that we’ve achieved, there’s still so much I wish we’d been able to do, from enacting gun safety measures to protect more of our kids and our cops from mass shootings like Newtown, to passing commonsense immigration reform that encourages the best and brightest from around the world to study, stay, and create jobs in America.” Immigration reform and   legislation were two of the president’s priorities in 2013, after he won  .   legislation to expand background checks stalled in the Senate. The Senate did pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul, but it never got a vote in the House. Obama did use his executive powers to give young people brought to the country illegally as children a temporary reprieve from deportation. Obama also failed in his effort to raise the federal minimum wage (although 18 states and the District of Columbia have done so since 2013). And while the president has used his commutation power to shorten the prison sentences of more than 1, 000 nonviolent drug offenders, his push for more comprehensive   reform has stalled. Congress also blocked Obama’s bid to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, although the prison population has been substantially reduced on his watch, from 242 when Obama took office to around 50 today. President Obama’s personal popularity helped mask a sharp decline in the Democratic Party nationally over the past eight years. Republicans will soon control not only Congress and the White House, but more than   of state legislative chambers, and 32 out of 50 governor’s offices. The Democrats who follow Obama have a deep hole to dig themselves out of. But the outgoing president has remained upbeat. Shortly after the November election, he reminded reporters that, in 2004, when he delivered the speech that launched his national political career, Democrats lost the White House and were completely out of power in Washington. Two years later, they won back Congress, and four years later, he was sworn in as president. ”The running thread through my career has been the notion that when ordinary people get involved, get engaged, and come together in collective effort, things change for the better,” Obama said in his weekly radio address over the weekend. ”It’s easy to lose sight of that truth in the       of Washington and our    news cycles. But remember that America is a story told over a longer time horizon, in fits and starts, punctuated at times by hardship, but ultimately written by generations of citizens who’ve somehow worked together, without fanfare, to form a more perfect union.”"
209,"This post was updated at 1:15 pm ET. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions says he’s not a racist and that he’s been unfairly ”caricatured.” ”You have a Southern name you come from South Alabama, that sounds worse to some people,” Sessions said during the first day of his confirmation hearings to be the next attorney general of the United States. He forcefully defended his record, saying he ”did not” harbor the ”racial animosities” of which he’s been accused, saying they are ”damnably false.” Sessions, a Republican who has served in Congress for two decades, has had his nomination protested for his record on civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice. Those protests and accusations of racial animus stem from a pair of 1986 hearings that resulted in Sessions’ failed appointment to a federal judgeship. Back then, he prosecuted a   case  —   against black activists  —   that he lost unanimously. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, for one, who was a   attorney on the other side of that case, accused Sessions of a double standard for not trying to prosecute whites who attempted voter assistance, which is legal. Sessions made contradictory statements in two hearings within a month of each other before Congress, including whether he called a white   lawyer a ”disgrace to his race.” He also admitted back then that he once joked that he thought the KKK was OK until he learned they were smoking marijuana. He took a much more sober tone on Tuesday. He touted that he prosecuted a KKK leader who was executed, for example. ”I abhor the Klan and what it represents, and its hateful ideology,” Sessions said Tuesday. Of those 1986 hearings, he contended, ”I didn’t prepare myself well in 1986, and there was an organized effort to caricature me.” He noted that he is the same person today as then, but he’s perhaps ”wiser.” Recuses himself from further Clinton investigations, Sessions also said he would recuse himself from any Justice Department investigation into Hillary Clinton. He said his political statements threaten his objectivity, specifically his calling for a special prosecutor. He noted, ”Political dispute cannot turn into criminal dispute.” He added, ”This country does not punish its political enemies but no one is above the law.” Asked if he’d ever chanted, ”Lock her up,” at a Trump rally, Sessions said that he didn’t, ”I don’t think.” Waterboarding is ”illegal” Sessions also put himself at odds with   Trump, who has said he wants to bring back waterboarding or worse. But Sessions said that while there is a debate over whether waterboarding is considered ”torture” legally, he noted that Congress passed a law that make ”waterboarding or any other form of torture” is illegal.” The hearing is ongoing and will continue into Wednesday. Here are five things to watch for in this hearing, and Sessions’ prepared statement in his opening remarks are below: Opening Statement of Attorney   Jeff Sessions U. S. Senate Confirmation Hearing Tuesday, January 10, 2017 Washington, D. C. Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Feinstein, distinguished members of the Committee, I am honored to appear before you today. I thank you for the opportunity to respond to your questions as you discharge your duty in the appointment process prescribed by our Constitution. I also want to thank my dear friends, Senator Richard Shelby and Senator Susan Collins for their kind introductions. It is hard to believe, really, that the three of us have served together in this body for nearly 20 years. I want to thank   Trump for the confidence and trust that he has shown by nominating me to serve as the Attorney General of the United States. I feel the weight of an honor greater than I have aspired to. If I am confirmed, I commit to you and to the American people to be worthy of that office and the special trust that comes with it. I come before you today as a colleague who has worked with you for years, and with some of you for 20 years. You know who I am. You know what I believe in. You know that I am a man of my word and can be trusted to do what I say I will do. You know that I revere our Constitution and am committed to the rule of law. And you know that I believe in fairness, impartiality, and equal justice under the law. Over the years, you have heard me say many times that I love the Department of Justice. The Office of the Attorney General of the United States is not a political position, and anyone who holds it must have total fidelity to the laws and the Constitution of the United States. He or she must be committed to following the law. He or she must be willing to tell the President ”no” if he overreaches. He or she cannot be a mere rubberstamp to any idea the President has. He or she also must set the example for the employees in the Department to do the right thing and ensure that they know the Attorney General will back them up, no matter what politician might call, or what powerful special interest, influential contributor, or friend might try to intervene. The message must be clear: Everyone is expected to do their duty. That is the way I was expected to perform as an Assistant United States Attorney. That is the way I trained my assistants when I became United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. And if confirmed, that is the way I will run the Department of Justice. In my over 14 years in the Department of Justice, I tried cases of nearly every kind —  drug trafficking, firearms, and other violent crimes, significant public corruption cases, financial wrongdoing, civil rights violations, environmental violations, and hate crimes. Protecting the people of this country from crime, and especially from violent crime, is the high calling of the men and women of the Department of Justice. Today, I am afraid, that has become more important than ever. Since the early 1980s, good policing and prosecutions have been a strong force in reducing crime. Drug use and murders are half what they were in 1980. I am very concerned, however, that the recent jump in the violent crime and murder rates are not anomalies, but the beginning of a dangerous trend that could reverse the hard won gains that have made America a safer and more prosperous place. The latest official FBI statistics show that all crime increased nearly 4 percent from 2014 to 2015 with murders increasing nearly 11 percent —  the largest single year increase since 1971. In 2016, there were 4, 368 shooting victims in Chicago. In Baltimore, homicides reached the second highest   rate ever. The country is also in the throes of a heroin epidemic, with overdose deaths more than tripling between 2010 and 2014. Meanwhile, illegal drugs flood across our southern border and into every city and town in the country, bringing violence, addiction, and misery. We must not lose perspective when discussing these statistics. We must always remember that these crimes are being committed against real people, real victims. It is important that they are kept in the forefront of our minds in these conversations, and to ensure that their rights are always protected. These trends cannot continue. It is a fundamental civil right to be safe in your home and your community. If I am confirmed, we will systematically prosecute criminals who use guns in committing crimes. As United States Attorney, my office was a national leader in gun prosecutions every year. We will partner with state and local law enforcement to take down drug trafficking cartels and dismantle gangs. We will prosecute those who repeatedly violate our borders. It will be my priority to confront these crises vigorously, effectively, and immediately. Approximately 90 percent of all law enforcement officers are not federal, but local and state. They are the ones on the front lines. They are better educated, trained and equipped than ever before. They are the ones who we rely on to keep our neighborhoods, and playgrounds, and schools safe. But in the last several years, law enforcement as a whole has been unfairly maligned and blamed for the actions of a few bad actors and for allegations about police that were not true. They believe the political leadership of this country abandoned them. They felt they had become targets. Morale has suffered. And last year, while under intense public criticism, the number of police officers killed in the line of duty increased ten percent over 2015. This is a wake up call. This must not continue. If we are to be more effective in dealing with rising crime, we will have to rely heavily on local law enforcement to lead the way. To do that, they must know that they are supported. If I am so fortunate as to be confirmed as Attorney General, they can be assured that they will have my support. As I discussed with many of you in our meetings prior to this hearing, the federal government has an important role to play in this area. We must use the research and expertise of the Department of Justice to help them in developing the most effective and lawful enforcement methods to reduce crime. We must   and strengthen the partnership between federal and local officers to enhance a common and unified effort to reverse the current rising crime trends. I did this as United States Attorney. I worked directly and continuously with state and local law enforcement officials. If confirmed, it will be one of my primary objectives. There are also many things the Department can do to assist state and local law enforcement to strengthen and, in some cases, build the foundation for, relationships with their own communities where policies like   policing has been proven to work. I am committed to this effort and to ensuring that the Department of Justice is a unifying force for improving relations between the police in this country and the communities they serve. Make no mistake, positive relations and great communication between the people and police are essential for any good police department. In recent years, our law enforcement officers also have been called upon to protect our country from the rising threat of terrorism that has reached our shores. If I am confirmed, protecting the American people from the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism will continue to be a top priority of the Department of Justice. We will work diligently to respond to threats, using all lawful means to keep the American people safe from our nation’s enemies. Partnerships will also be vital to achieving much more effective enforcement against cyber threats, and the Department of Justice clearly has a lead role to play in that essential effort. We must honestly assess our vulnerabilities and have a clear plan for defense, as well as offense, when it comes to America’s cybersecurity. The Department of Justice must never falter in its obligation to protect the civil rights of every American, particularly those who are most vulnerable. A special priority for me in this regard will be aggressive enforcement of our laws to ensure access to the ballot for every eligible American voter, without hindrance or discrimination, and to ensure the integrity of the electoral process. Further, this government must improve its ability to protect the United States Treasury from waste, fraud, and abuse. This is a federal responsibility. We cannot afford to lose a single dollar to corruption and you can be sure that if I am confirmed, I will make it a high priority of the Department to root out and prosecute fraud in federal programs and to recover any monies lost due to fraud or false claims. The Justice Department must remain ever faithful to the Constitution’s promise that our government is one of laws, not of men. It will be my unyielding commitment, if I am confirmed, to see that the laws are enforced faithfully, effectively, and impartially. The Attorney General must hold everyone, no matter how powerful, accountable. No one is above the law, and no American will be beneath its protection. No powerful special interest will cower this Department. I want to address personally the fabulous men and women in the Department of Justice. That includes personnel in Main Justice but also the much larger number that faithfully fulfill their responsibility every day. As United States Attorney, we worked together constantly. The federal investigative agencies represent the finest collection of law officers in the world. I know their integrity and professionalism. I pledge to them a unity of effort that is unmatched. Together we can and will reach for the highest standards and the highest results. It would be the greatest honor to lead these fine public servants. To my colleagues, I appreciate the time that each of you have taken to meet with me  . As Senators, we don’t always have the opportunity to sit down and discuss matters face to face and so, for me, this was very helpful. I understand and respect the conviction that you bring to your duties. Even though we are not always in agreement, you have always been understanding and respectful of my positions. In that regard, if I am so fortunate as to be confirmed, I commit to all of you to that the Department of Justice will be responsive to the Congress and will work with you on your priorities, and provide you with guidance and views where appropriate. The Department will respect your constitutional oversight role, and particularly the critically important separation of powers between the branches. There is nothing I am more proud of than my 14 years of service in the Department of Justice. I love and venerate that great institution. I hold dear its highest ideals. If God gives me the ability, I will work every day to be worthy of this august office. You can be absolutely sure that I understand the immense responsibility I would have. I am not naïve. I know the threat that our rising crime and addiction rates pose to the health and safety of our country. I know the threat of terrorism. I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our   brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it. I understand the demands for justice and fairness made by the LGBT community. I understand the lifelong scars born by women who are victims of assault and abuse. I understand that a wise and diligent Attorney General, who not only talks but listens, can play a key role in properly focusing the efforts of our nation’s   apparatus in ways that more effectively enhance public safety and minimize officer misconduct. I know it is essential for police and the communities they serve to have mutual respect. And, if I am so fortunate as to be confirmed as your Attorney General, you can be assured that I understand the absolute necessity that all of my actions must fall within the bounds of the Constitution and the laws that Congress passes. While all humans must recognize the limits of their abilities —  and I do —  I am ready for this job. We will do it right. Your input will be valued. Local law enforcement will be our partners. My many friends in federal law enforcement will be respected. I have always loved the law. It is the very foundation of our great country. I have an abiding commitment to pursuing and achieving justice and a record of doing just that. If confirmed, I will give all my efforts to this goal. I ask only that you do your duty, as you are charged by the Constitution to do it, and by the light that God has given you to do it. Thank you."
210,"The confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, the billionaire philanthropist who is   Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of education, has been delayed for almost a week. DeVos’ hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, but late on Monday night, the Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions announced it had been delayed until Jan. 17, next Tuesday. The move comes after Democrats had raised concerns about the wealthy philanthropist’s incomplete financial disclosures and unfinished ethics review, as Politico reported last week. The top Democrat on the HELP committee asked for a rescheduled hearing, saying she was concerned about ”extensive financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest,” Politico says. DeVos submitted her financial disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics last month but has not yet finalized or signed the paperwork, Politico reported Friday. The Washington Post reports that DeVos’ ”vast wealth and considerable financial holdings have overwhelmed the bipartisan Office of Government Ethics,” which vets Cabinet nominees. The office has not finished examining DeVos’ investments for possible ethical concerns, the newspaper reported Saturday. But in announcing the delay, the HELP committee made no reference to concerns over conflicts of interest. Instead, the committee said the delay was ”at the request of Senate leadership to accommodate Senate schedule.” DeVos is a ”strong supporter of school choice” with ”limited experience with public education,” as NPR’s Eric Westervelt has reported: ”DeVos, 58, is a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and helped push a failed 2000 ballot proposal to amend the Michigan state Constitution to create a voucher system for students to attend nonpublic schools. ”DeVos is chairman of The Windquest Group, a   investment management company. She is married to billionaire Richard DeVos Jr. the son of Richard DeVos, who   the home care products company Amway. ” . .. Largely unknown outside of Michigan political and philanthropic circles, her appointment signals that Trump intends to make school choice and a voucher plan for   families a centerpiece of his education agenda. ”School choice plans are controversial because in some cases they can allow families to use public funding for private schools. Critics say choice plans undermine public education, are often underregulated and can amount to profiteering.”"
211,"The tiny village of Newtok near Alaska’s western coast has been sliding into the Ninglick River for years. As temperatures increase  —   faster there than in the rest of the U. S.  —   the frozen permafrost underneath Newtok is thawing. About 70 feet of land a year erode away, putting the village’s colorful buildings, some on stilts, ever closer to the water’s edge. Now, in an unprecedented test case, Newtok wants the federal government to declare these mounting impacts of climate change an official disaster. Villagers say it’s their last shot at unlocking the tens of millions of dollars needed to relocate the entire community. ”We just need to get out of there,” says Romy Cadiente, the village relocation coordinator. ”For the safety of the 450 people there.” Cadiente spoke while in Anchorage recently, where he met with state officials about moving the village, which includes a school built in 1958 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that drew nearby subsistence hunters and fishers to settle. Coming to terms with climate’s impact on the Alaska Native village has been   for many. But a new village has been chosen 9 miles away, and several houses are already built. Cadiente says the problem is money: The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated it will cost $80 million to $130 million to relocate key infrastructure. ”The price tag on this village move is astronomical, and what we have right now is nowhere near,” he says. Many of Alaska’s villages are dealing with erosion and thawing permafrost. But Newtok’s needs may be the most immediate. It has already lost its barge landing, sewage lagoon and landfill. As river water seeps in and land sinks, it expects to lose its source of drinking water this year, and its school and airport by 2020. After years trying to piece together state and federal funding to relocate, Cadiente says Newtok has run out of other options. Usually, the president, with input from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, declares a disaster after a specific catastrophic event. But Newtok is asking for the declaration based on mounting damage from erosion and thawing permafrost over the past decade. ”My first reaction is, it’s exciting,” says Rob Verchick, who teaches disaster law and climate adaptation at Loyola University in New Orleans. He says Newtok’s request is likely a long shot. But he thinks it needs to be done. ”And I think that it is going to lead to a very important conversation that we need to be having,” he says. Verchick says FEMA has pushed communities to plan for climate change, but the federal government doesn’t have policies to deal with issues like relocation. As more places face the problem, Verchick says they  —   like Newtok  —   may need to get creative in seeking a legal solution. A recent change gave federally recognized tribes like Newtok the right to request a disaster declaration from the White House directly. Mike Walleri, Newtok’s attorney, argues that nothing in the law prevents the president from declaring a disaster for a multiyear event. ”You know, disasters are not planned,” Walleri says. ”They don’t come in one size fits all.” If there’s no money to relocate the whole village together, Newtok residents could be forced to scatter, with some even moving 500 miles away to Anchorage. George Carl, the    village council vice president, says it’s not just houses that are at stake, but his community, culture, Yup’ik language and identity. ”Being born an Eskimo from that village, you know, that’s my life,” he says. ”Place me to another village or city, it’s not for me.” The ultimate decision on whether to declare a disaster lies with the president. Newtok’s leaders hope to get an answer before President Obama leaves office next week. This report comes from Alaska’s Energy Desk, a public media collaboration focused on energy and the environment."
212,"West Coast crab fishermen just ended an   strike over a price dispute. But a more ominous and   threat to their livelihood may be on the horizon. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found a link between warming ocean conditions and a dangerous neurotoxin that builds up in sea life: domoic acid. Seafood lovers got a glimpse of that threat in 2015, when record high ocean temperatures and lingering toxic algae blooms raised the domoic acid in shellfish to unsafe levels, shutting down the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery from Alaska to Southern California for several months. Though less dramatic, the problem emerged again this season, when harvesting was again delayed for portions of the coasts. Domoic acid is a toxin produced by   a micro algae which can accumulate in species like Dungeness crab, clams, mussels and anchovy. It can be harmful to both humans and wildlife, including sea lions and birds. Remember the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds? It was inspired by a   incident of California seabirds driven into a frenzy by the neurotoxin. Although we’re starting to hear about domoic acid more often, it’s been on the radar of public health officials since a Canadian outbreak in 1987 killed three and sickened over 100. In mild cases, it can cause vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. Severe cases can cause trouble breathing, memory loss, and even coma or death. In the case of Dungeness crabs, the food chain looks like this: The phytoplankton   produces the toxin domoic acid during an algae bloom. Zooplankton and filter feeders, like clams and mussels, then eat that phytoplankton. (Interestingly, not all shellfish react the same way. Mussels, for example, are able to rid themselves of the toxin within a few weeks, while domoic acid may linger in clams for several months, even up to a year.) Those delicious Dungeness crabs we like so much have a taste for clams, which is where domoic acid can be passed up the food chain to us humans. Officials are able to test for unsafe levels, keeping tainted seafood out of restaurants and away from seafood counters, but scientists haven’t been able to predict when natural algae blooms may take a toxic turn  —   until now. ”The record of domoic acid is now 20 years long, allowing us to look at it from a different perspective than anyone has previously,” says Morgaine McKibben, a Ph. D. candidate at Oregon State University and lead author of the new study. The researchers looked at   data collected from Oregon razor clams, copepods (zooplankton that drift with the currents and are studied to predict salmon runs) and recurring climate patterns known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and El Nino Southern Oscillation. And they were able to establish that domoic acid events, like those that have been impacting the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery, are strongly related to warm phases in the ocean. ”The most important takeaway from the study is that it’s telling us about changes in the food web based on   observations of changes in the oceans. It’s a very zoomed out view of how the food web responds to natural changes to ocean conditions. That’s very important when you talk about resource management,” says McKibben. These types of   records are somewhat rare in oceanography, she says, because ”it’s hard to find funding to keep consistent observations like this going.” And a future with more frequent domoic acid events seems likely, says says Bill Peterson, a NOAA senior scientist and   of the study. ”We’re having more and more of these warm ocean events and we’re going to have more domoic acid blooms each year. It might become a chronic problem,” he says. That paints a troubling picture for crab fishermen like Bob Eder of Newport, Ore. While domoic acid might go away for a year or two as a problem, it ”is something we’ll now be dealing with for a long time,” he says. He also worries about how future domoic acid events could impact exports  —   critically important to boosting the overall price of whole crabs. While Americans typically eat only the meat from the crab, Chinese consumers also eat what’s known as the ”butter” (or guts) of the crab, where domoic acid tends to be more concentrated. Officials from the California Department of Public Health say they test   for toxic phytoplankton at more than 100 sampling sites along the entire California coastline, and that 2015 was the first year domoic acid was found in crab meat. Oregon and Washington have similar sampling strategies, and have collaborated with California on Dungeness crab testing over the last two years. But Peterson thinks states vulnerable to domoic acid events should be doing even more testing. ”They should sample more often and over a wider . .. area,” says Peterson. ”Crab harvests are a huge money maker on the West Coast. You can’t have people think they’re going to get sick from eating crabs. Pretty soon [states] are going to have to sample more often and more places to keep better tabs on what’s going on in the ocean.” Patrick Kennelly, chief of the food safety section for the California Department of Public Health, says he’s confident the state’s monitoring program is strong and able to ramp up as needed. He notes that officials have already started testing Dungeness crab months before the season begins."
213,"Russia’s intelligence agencies compromised the networks of some   Republicans and their affiliated organizations, but not the current Republican National Committee or the campaign of   Donald Trump, top U. S. intelligence chiefs said Tuesday. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey and other spy bosses told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia ”harvested” information from Republicans but that it captured ”old stuff” and targeted RNC Web domains that were no longer in use. The testimony shed new light on a terse line in the intelligence community’s declassified report from Friday about Russia’s   campaign, in which Clapper and his compatriots said Moscow had also collected information from the GOP in addition to the reams of data it took from Democrats and then released to the public. Doesn’t that mean the Russians have the ability to release information about Republicans someday  —   even if it’s old? asked committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. ”Sure,” Clapper said. The prospect for such releases, along with other potential mischief by Russia involving U. S. or other elections, was one undercurrent in the hearing, the latest since Clapper’s office released the report. Senators warned that unless the U. S. acts strongly to deter such plots, they could intensify. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio raised a U. K. case in which Russian intelligence officers purportedly compromised the computer of a political enemy and then deposited child pornography on it. Local police were notified, they investigated, and the man was arrested and charged. What stops the Russians from doing something similar in the U. S. Rubio asked. Suppose foreign hackers got into the computer of a member of Congress, made some illegal bank transfers and then called the FBI? ”Congressman John    has been   and sure enough you’re arrested and charged and removed from the public discourse,” Rubio said. Isn’t that a danger here? he asked. ”It is certainly well within both their technical competence and their potential intent to do something like that,” Clapper said. Clapper and senators also said they expect similar Russian tricks in upcoming elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Clapper told Sen. James Lankford,  . that Moscow has interfered in the elections of ”a couple dozen” countries over time and that its meddling in the U. S. goes back to the 1960s. The   danger was part of another undercurrent in the session, in which Republicans cast the cyber breach of Democrats as a result of their own sloppiness  —   through the mishandling of passwords by Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and their neglect of what Republicans called an old threat. ”This hacking business is ubiquitous. It has been since the Internet was set up,” Idaho Sen. Jim Risch said. Committee Chairman Richard Burr observed that neither Podesta nor the Democratic National Committee provided the FBI with the compromised devices so that investigators could examine them, and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said he thought it was clear Hillary Clinton had lost because she ran a bad campaign, not because of Russian meddling. The Democrats on the panel, meanwhile, objected to what they perceived as more unfairness from Comey and the FBI. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Kamala Harris of California and Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, called on Comey to disclose publicly whether the FBI has investigated any connections between Trump’s camp and Russia. Comey said the FBI never comments publicly on open investigations. That angered the Democrats, given Comey’s disclosure to Congress that the bureau had reopened an investigation into Clinton days before the November election. Wyden pressed Comey to release what the FBI has investigated ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. Harris and King echoed that call  —   but Comey responded each time that it was against the FBI’s policy. ”The irony of your making that statement here I cannot avoid  —   but I’ll move on,” King said."
214,"Hundreds of thousands of people tuned in to an   rescue operation of a deer hopelessly stuck on ice in Simsbury, Conn. The scared deer splayed on the frozen river was streamed live by several television channels on Monday, in some cases for more than three hours, as rescue workers tried to get it to safety. You can watch the full, agonizing rescue operation in this video  —   it begins about 2   hours in. It shows a rescue worker sliding the terrified animal to the side of the river. Then it took a team’s repeated attempts to lift the struggling deer up the bank. Local animal control officer Mark Rudewicz told NBC Connecticut that coyotes chased the deer onto the thin ice. The story has a happy ending, the station reports  —   the deer scampered back off into the woods. The whole saga brings to mind this beloved scene from the Disney classic Bambi: And incidentally, this deer isn’t the only animal getting into trouble on thin ice in the past week  —   here’s the story of a cow rescue in Oregon:"
215,"Recently, NPR brought you the story of one of 2016’s most successful musicians: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Last year, the Universal Music Group released a   box set of the composer’s works. Multiply that by the   sets sold worldwide as of early December, and you had 1. 25 million CDs. And that, we said, had given Mozart a hit release. Well, David Bakula says that’s not quite right  —   and he should know. He’s a senior vice president at the Nielsen Company, which collects the data that Billboard uses to make its charts. ”I’m afraid Mozart didn’t quite make it this year,” Bakula says, explaining that physical CDs and even digital downloads only are only a part of what determines an album’s chart success these days. In fact, thanks to the rise of streaming services, some artists can make waves on the charts without ”selling” anything at all. NPR’s Audie Cornish spoke with Bakula about how streaming has changed both the music industry and the language we use to understand it. Hear the full conversation at the audio link and read an edited version bellow. Audie Cornish: OK, so we and many other people were super wrong about this. What was the real   album of 2016? David Bakula: There was a little bit of confusion there: Certainly we don’t multiply the number of discs by the sale. When you do look at the total consumption for the year in terms of albums, you had Drake’s Views record being the top record of the year. In terms of sales, it was bested by Adele’s 25 record, which actually came out at the end of 2015 but continued to sell very well throughout the year. But when we talk about total consumption  —   the album, all of the songs that were purchased individually, all of the streams that happened  —   Drake was the biggest of the year. Help us understand that. Does the word ”sales” mean anything anymore? Or do you have to explain that you mean something more specific  —   physical CDs, digital sales. It means less and less, I think, every year. We are finding that audio   streaming is becoming a very big piece of the industry. If you look at the revenue that’s coming in, the album is still the main driver of revenue on a   basis. But we had over 250 billion audio streams last year, and even if you do multiply by a very small   rate, you still get a massive amount of money, to the point where   streaming is actually making up 38 percent of the total consumption. But in the meantime, you have traditional album sales down 16 percent, and digital single sales down 25 percent. So we’re just not buying music anymore  —   buying it to hold on to, anyway. Certainly: The technologically advanced consumer is realizing the value that is in streaming and is shifting over from sales to just access. Physical has some things holding it up  —   [you might] have a consumer that maybe hasn’t switched over to digital yet, but you also have a consumer that is in love with vinyl. That consumer is getting to be a significant piece of the physical business. This year, it was about 11 percent of the total physical business, so that LP buyer is still a very loyal buyer to physical products. So your DJs, superfans, completists  —   they will still go get the vinyl. Audiophiles  —   yeah, they love vinyl. You mentioned Adele and Drake had both had a good year. Chance the Rapper’s mixtape Coloring Book did pretty well, too  —   almost exclusively on streaming. Yes, it was exclusively on streaming, and that’s one of the really interesting things. The Grammy board is recognizing Chance for what he has done this year as well. Streaming is the only component to the charts that Chance the Rapper had this year, and he stayed on the Top 200 chart for 33 straight weeks and counting  —   he’s still on the charts. He’s had so much streaming this year that it’s the same equivalency as selling over 500, 000 albums. So at the end of the day, where does that leave our friend Mozart?  He’s not gonna be anywhere near the top of the charts. Again, because we don’t count it by disc, he’s going to show up with about 250 sales [in the U. S.] this year. I think he’s done all right. Mozart’s estate is doing just fine, sure."
216,"President Obama’s adopted hometown of Chicago is often the stage for pivotal moments in his career. He claimed victory in Chicago in 2008 and again in 2012. And it’s where he will give his farewell address on Tuesday night. Many Chicagoans use the word ”pride” when talking about Barack Obama. You can hear it in their voices. In this city, where   Donald Trump got only 12 percent of the vote, admiration for President Obama is strong. Kim Chisholm stood with thousands of others in the bitter cold this weekend to get a ticket to Obama’s speech. ”I’m so excited,” she says. ”History in the making. I never made it to the White House, but I will see him here in Chicago.” Chicago officials say there are pluses and minuses to having such close ties to the Obama administration. On Monday, the city won a federal grant for nearly $1 billion to upgrade a major portion of the city’s elevated commuter rail line. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first White House chief of staff, worked to make sure the funding came through before the administration changed hands. ”This will over the next four years create 6, 000 jobs in the city of Chicago,” he says. Illinois’ senior U. S. senator, Dick Durbin, says the city has been able to make significant infrastructure improvements with the help of federal funds, including   rail and upgrades to O’Hare International Airport. ”Time and again, the Obama administration has not forgotten where he came from,” Durbin says. ”[He] has not forgotten the city of Chicago.” That’s in part because the administration included a bevy of Chicagoans as Cabinet members and advisers, such as former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, advisers Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. Tuesday night’s speech and talk about an Obama legacy in Chicago are much more personal for some. Jacky Grimshaw worked in Chicago government under Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, and was Obama’s   neighbor for years. She says the country’s first black president faced the same sort of opposition that Washington did and both men prevailed. ”And he put through the stimulus package that allowed communities across the country to deal with infrastructure projects that needed to get done,” Grimshaw says of Obama. Some community organizers take a more nuanced stance. Jitu Brown of the Institute for Educational Leadership says that while the president conducts himself with grace, he disagrees with many of his administration’s education policies. ”And I think the disappointment is in a president who started as a community organizer. I would have really hoped there would have been space to really listen to the voices of the people directly impacted,” Brown says. At Valois Restaurant, not far from the president’s Chicago home, customers can order a variety of Obama specials on the menu. Kimberly Barnes Staples was eating breakfast with her husband. ”For Chicago, specifically, he gave us a national profile,” she says. ”He showcased who we are as Chicagoans. He made us proud.” And Devi Austin, a retiree, says she personally benefited from policies Obama advanced. ”Because of the laws that he put in place for people who had just bought homes and was underwater, I got forgiven  —   forgiven, not modified  —   forgiven $60, 000,” she says. ”I will miss President Obama.” While some Chicagoans express disappointment that the president didn’t provide more help to deal with gun violence and gangs, others give him a pass, saying that’s a problem for the mayor, not the president. So as Obama says farewell, Patty McNamara, a museum consultant, says she will be watching wistfully. ”It’s kind of bittersweet,” she says. ”It’s going to be a tough transition, I’m afraid.” There will be a tangible Obama legacy for Chicagoans, though. His presidential library and foundation will be built on Chicago’s South Side. That means that even if the Obamas don’t return there to live, the president will remain engaged in the city that gave him his political start."
217,"When Barack Obama makes his farewell address Tuesday night, it will be one of the last times we’ll hear from the president, while he’s still actually the president. But before his political career, Obama was a community organizer in Chicago, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and the state director of Illinois Project Vote. And it was back then  —   in the 1990s, when Obama was in his late 20s and early 30s  —   that he first appeared on NPR. Here are highlights from some of those earliest appearances: In 1990, Obama was still a student at Harvard Law School and had just become the Harvard Law Review’s first black president when he was interviewed on Morning Edition. Obama discusses changes he hoped to initiate: At the time, Obama was 29 years old. He had worked for a few years as a community organizer in Chicago, before going to law school. Obama discusses what his plans are after serving as president of the law review: By the summer of 1992, Obama had gotten involved in politics. He was the state director of Illinois Project Vote. Bill Clinton was campaigning for president, with Hillary Clinton at his side. Meanwhile, Obama was 30 years old, and working on voter registration. Even in the 1990s, Obama was talking about something he references a lot now: getting people involved in politics and invested in institutions. Here he is on NPR’s Talk of The Nation in 1992: Another theme in these appearances: Obama talking about issues of race. It’s something he grappled with in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and in this commentary on All Things Considered in October 1994. In it, he criticizes the book The Bell Curve by political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. That book was controversial for the way it linked race, genetics and IQ  —   and Obama called it ”dubious science.” Obama argued that the country needed to invest in public schools and   jobs, and provide what he called ”real opportunity” for black children. Listen to Obama’s commentary: Exactly 14 years after that commentary aired, Obama was campaigning in Pennsylvania. He was one week away from being elected the country’s first black president."
218,"One of the most fragile pieces of President Obama’s legacy in the aftermath of the 2016 election is the Affordable Care Act. Republicans ran on their   pledge to repeal it, and we’ll know soon whether  —   as promised  —   they make it their top priority in the new Congress, even without having released details on what would replace it. The history of the Affordable Care Act also provides a window into the earliest years of the Obama presidency. Fierce opposition from the GOP was there even before work on the legislation began, and that battle featured an early form of fake news  —   a tactic that became a prominent part of the 2016 election. Remember the ”death panels”? In 2009, when the health care law was still being written, Sarah Palin coined the phrase ”death panel” in a widely shared Facebook post. The headline of her post was innocuous enough, ”Statement on the Current Health Care Debate.” But that Aug. 7, 2009, social media post from the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate included a dire warning: ”The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ’death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ’level of productivity in society.’ ” Conservative   pages were on board. Talk radio, too. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, ”She’s dead right.” The specter of ”death panels” became an instant rallying cry for the   Tea Party movement, whose supporters crowded into town hall meetings that summer and shouted down Democratic lawmakers considering support for the Affordable Care Act. Republican members of Congress tapped into that anger. U. S. Sen. Chuck Grassley told a crowd back home in Iowa, ”We should not have a government program that determines you’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma.” ”Simply dishonest” As the summer of 2009 wore on, the president stayed above the fray. Anita Dunn, who was the White House communications director at the time, told NPR in a recent interview that the team didn’t take the attacks seriously at first, ”simply because they did seem so crazy.” But the president himself would need to directly respond. He went on the road, first to a   town hall in Portsmouth, N. H. where he said that this is how politics works sometimes, ”that people who want to keep things the way they are will try to scare the heck out of folks, and they’ll create boogeymen out there that just aren’t real.” Days later, in Grand Junction, Colo. Obama kept at it. ”The notion that somehow I ran for public office or members of Congress are in this so that they can go around pulling the plug on Grandma? I mean when you start making arguments like that, that’s simply dishonest,” the president said. Ultimately, the Affordable Care Act was approved by the    Congress. The president signed it in the spring of 2010. Meanwhile, the allegations regarding ”death panels” would be ”Lie of the Year” by the   organization PolitiFact. The message that stuck, Dunn, currently a managing director at the D. C. firm SKDKnickerbocker, says that the early disinformation campaign had a lasting negative effect nonetheless. ”One of the hallmarks of the Affordable Care Act is that people don’t know what is in the bill, or realize the benefits they’ve gotten,” Dunn says, adding, ”a huge part of that is how it was defined early by the opposition.” She says the White House communications team learned from the experience. Rapid response became more of a priority. But Ruy Teixeira, a senior analyst with the Center for American Progress, says there’s another lesson from those early Obamacare battles that the administration  —   and Democrats  —   have been slow to learn: how to talk to white voters who do not have a college education. Those voters were once a key piece of the Democratic base, but Teixeira says they are now too often driven by a core belief that ”the government is up to no good.” The idea of death panels fit right into that narrative. But Teixeira says you can apply it to other issues as well. ”You’ve got to convince them you take their concerns seriously, you’re on their side,” he says, ”and the other people are not, and here’s exactly why.” That was a major weakness of Democrats in the 2016 election.    white voters rallied around Trump and his message that he  —   not the Democrats  —   is on their side. All along, Democrats considered such a claim by the billionaire businessman turned politician a kind of a fake news story of its own. But they still need to figure out how to counter it."
219,"Abra and Matt Schultz, both 32, recently built a house in a   neighborhood in Pottsville, Pa. Matt works as a carpenter foreman for a construction company. He and Abra, his wife, are right in Trump’s wheelhouse  —   Republicans in Republican Schuylkill County. The couple spent December trying to decide whether to buy health insurance or skip it for 2017. They voted for Trump because they were fed up with how much they are paying for health insurance. In   in the couple’s kitchen, Abra was sizing up their health insurance options. She showed off a thick notebook, along with a file folder with policy documents and notes piled as high as a stack of pancakes. ”Don’t touch my paperwork  —   don’t even try to touch it,” Abra joked to Matt. ”I get so stressed out about it. I’ll not pick one until the very last minute, like that deadline day.” Matt makes good money, but he usually gets laid off in the winter when construction slows down. For the past few years, he and Abra have bought coverage on HealthCare. gov, the Affordable Care Act exchange. But they’re in a tough spot. They make too much money to get a subsidy to help them pay for insurance. Subsidies are available only to those who make under 400 percent of poverty, or about $97, 000 for a family of four. But while the Schultzes don’t qualify for help, paying full price for health insurance stretches their budget to the limit. Two years ago, when they first signed up for insurance on the exchange, they were paying $530 a month for a plan they liked, Abra says. The price rose a little for 2016, but the options for 2017 went up a lot  —   about 30 percent on average in Pennsylvania. ”We have one for $881, one for $938, one for $984, like the deductibles are  —   look, these are insane,” Abra said, as she checked the exchange website for monthly premiums. ”The one that we would be stuck with would be the silver. This is $881. 50, and our deductible would be $7, 000.” It’s frustrating, she said, because she and her husband are relatively healthy and haven’t needed that much care. Add to that the cost of a separate partially subsidized insurance policy for their two children, and the family is expecting to pay at least $14, 000 in health premiums. Abra resented the mandate to buy health insurance from the beginning. And she liked what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act on campaign stops, like one in King of Prussia in November, just before the election. ”Obamacare has to be replaced, and we will do it and we will do it very, very quickly,” Trump said in his speech. ”It is a catastrophe.” Abra said she wouldn’t mind being in health insurance limbo while Trump and lawmakers debate the future of Obamacare. Larry Levitt, with the Kaiser Family Foundation, said he understands her frustration with the law. ”These are people who are playing by the rules, and doing the right thing, and they feel like they’re getting the shaft,” he said. No one likes higher and higher premiums, he says, but there’s a  . ”Before the ACA, to get insurance on your own, you had to fill out a medical questionnaire, and an insurer would only take you if you were reasonably healthy,” Levitt said. ”That kept premiums down, but it’s because sick people were excluded from the market altogether.” Levitt said the law’s goal was to to get insurance to a point where premiums only increase slightly every year while everyone can still get coverage, no matter their   condition. And, he says, any replacement plan devised by Republicans will have upsides and downsides, just like the Affordable Care Act. ”If this were easy, it already would have happened,” he said. Abra said she understands the broader picture, but she needs to focus on what’s best for her family  —   affordable health insurance. ”[Trump] just wants to fix what needs to be fixed, which I think is wonderful news,” she says. Abra did decide on a policy for her and her husband  —   she selected the plan that costs $938 a month because she wants to keep her current doctor. But if lawmakers eliminate the penalty for people who don’t get insurance, she might take a risk and drop the coverage. This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, WITF’s Transforming Health project and Kaiser Health News."
220,"Clare Hollingworth, the war correspondent who told the world of the outbreak of World War II, has died at 105. She died Tuesday evening in Hong Kong, according to   friend Cathy Hilborn Feng, who says Hollingworth ”had a smile before she left us.” Hollingworth was a rookie reporter when she landed the scoop of a century  —   she had been a journalist for the Daily Telegraph for less than week when she revealed German tanks were gathered at the Polish border, poised for an invasion. It was the start of an illustrious career in journalism that lasted some seven decades. The ”doyenne of war correspondents” lived the last few decades of her life in Hong Kong, where she was a regular at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. The club mourned her death on Tuesday, with President Tara Joseph calling her a ”tremendous inspiration.” Before her career as a journalist began, Clare Hollingworth helped thousands of political refugees fleeing Hitler’s forces to gain asylum in Britain. The BBC told the story in a piece last year: ”In 1938, a year before war was declared, thousands of refugees were flooding across borders looking for asylum. ”In response, Clare Hollingworth, a glamorous    political activist from Leicester, booked a Christmas holiday to Kitzbühel in Austria. ”She visited the     in December 1938 to carry out reconnaissance, and returned to the UK with a   visa in her passport.” With her visa in hand, Hollingworth could travel into Poland to provide aid to fleeing Jews, unionists and writers. Many of the refugees lacked documents and were in danger of being sent back into Nazi territory. Hollingworth’s   Patrick Garrett, who wrote a biography of his great aunt, wrote in the Telegraph that she used her ”noted pushiness and ability for wrangling with officials, skills that would later stand her in very good stead as a foreign correspondent,” to get the refugees papers, food, money and tickets to the U. K. She helped thousands of refugees reach Britain, Time reports, and the British press dubbed her ”The Scarlet Pimpernel” for her efforts. But the British government suspected she was letting in ”potential spies,” including communists. They put an end to her efforts in the summer of 1939. Back in London and looking for a new job, Hollingworth persuaded the Daily Telegraph to send her back to Poland as a reporter. Here’s how Time describes what happened next: ”Knowing that war may be imminent, and bolstered by the presence of a diplomatic flag, she borrowed her host’s car, and ’motored off alone into Nazi Germany’ to stock up on wine and aspirin. As she drove back along the border, a fabric partition separating the two countries flapped momentarily in the wind, exposing ’scores, if not hundreds of tanks’ in the valley below. And there was her first big scoop: the outbreak of World War II.” Her headline in the Daily Telegraph: ”1, 000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier 10 Divisions Reported Ready For Swift Stroke From Our Own Correspondent.” There were actually only nine divisions, Garrett notes  —   but ”not bad” for her first week on the job. Three days later, the invasion began. Hollingworth called both her editor and the British Embassy to alert them. The Guardian reports that the embassy staff didn’t believe her  —   so she held the telephone receiver out the window so they could hear the attack for themselves. It was a stunning start to an extraordinary career. Hollingworth continued to report for the next seven decades, from all over   Europe, then from north Africa and communist China and Palestine and Iraq and Vietnam, among other places. Colleagues particularly admired her work on the perilous, complicated Algerian War in the ’50s and ’60s, both Time and the Guardian write. She also uncovered a famous scoop related to Kim Philby, the ”third man” of Britain’s notorious ”Cambridge Five” group of Soviet spies. At a time when the British government was insisting Philby was not the spy in question, she discovered evidence suggesting he had quickly and covertly escaped to Russia. The scoop was so stunning that an editor at the Guardian refused to run it, fearing libel suits. Weeks later, she persuaded a deputy editor to run the item on page 7. ”Shortly afterwards the government admitted it believed Philby had indeed fled to Russia,” the Guardian writes. Hollingworth was a famously hard worker, obsessive and seemingly tireless. She loved covering war and conflict  —   one colleague told the Guardian that Hollingworth ”actually enjoys war. She’s not at all bloodthirsty, she’s actually very humane and kind, but she gets a huge kick out of it.” ”I enjoy action,” Hollingworth told the BBC. ”I enjoy being in a plane that’s bombing something, or being on the ground in the desert when they’re advancing.” ”She was always in the right place at the right time,” John Simpson, world affairs editor at the BBC, said in a video produced for Hollingworth’s 104th birthday. ”Who did the first interview with the shah of Iran? Clare Hollingworth. Who did the last interview . .. after he fell? Clare Hollingworth.” She later became a   correspondent for The Telegraph. In her early 90s, living a quieter life in Hong Kong, Hollingworth told the Guardian that she still didn’t consider herself retired she called in regularly to the London newsdesk. Toward the end of her life, most of her life savings were stolen by a fellow expat in Hong Kong, as the Telegraph reported at the time. But her   and biographer says she was able to maintain her ”independent lifestyle in Hong Kong, closer to her beloved Foreign Correspondents’ Club.” At her 105th birthday this past October, she was feted at the club by admiring journalists and friends. She also received a   message from Margo Stanyer, who had fled Hungary as a    in 1939. As the BBC reports, Hollingworth had helped Margo and her family arrange visas and travel to London. Some 77 years later, Stanyer, an      recorded a video message for Hollingworth. ”Thank you to Clare, again and again and again. I think of you a lot, until the end of my life,” she said, tearing up. ”Wish you all the best. Live for a hundred years again.”"
221,"Scientists have found the inspiration for a lifesaving tool in an unusual place  —   a children’s toy. The invention may soon help health care workers diagnose malaria in places where standard laboratory equipment is hard to find. Diagnosing malaria in the field isn’t all that difficult, but you need a device called a centrifuge that can spin a blood sample very quickly, causing different types of cells in blood to separate from each other. Most centrifuges are bulky, require electricity and are expensive. Because of that, many field hospitals in developing nations don’t have easy access to the technology. Manu Prakash, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University who developed the new tool, saw the need firsthand during a trip to Uganda. ”We were out in a primary health center talking to health care workers and we found a centrifuge used as a doorstop because there’s no electricity.” The workers said that they really needed a powerful centrifuge that they could use anywhere. And it needed to be cheap. When he got back to California, Prakash began experimenting with all kinds of things that spin, including toys. Toys might seem like a strange place to start, but Prakash didn’t think so. Who doesn’t love toys? And, he explains, ”Toys hide in them pretty profound physical phenomena that we just take for granted.” The researchers started to experiment with  . But the   didn’t spin fast enough to work as a centrifuge. Then they stumbled upon the children’s toy known as the whirligig, or buzzer. The toy is made of a disc that spins when a person pulls on strings that pass through the center. And it spins much faster than a  . The scientists clocked their version at 125, 000 revolutions per minute. According to the authors, that’s the fastest rotational speed reported for a   device. By comparison, the internal combustion engine of a Formula One race car rotates at about 15, 000 rpm. And so the paperfuge was born. The paperfuge is made out of paper coated in a polymer film that makes it extra strong, string and PVC pipe or wood. Blood samples are attached to the center disc and pulling the strings causes the cells to separate, just like in the more expensive electrical centrifuge. The samples can then be processed and tested for parasites. To prove that the paperfuge could work in the field, the researches took a prototype to Madagascar for a test run. It worked as advertised, allowing local health care workers to spin blood and test for parasites. Prakash and his colleagues reported their results Tuesday in Nature Biomedical Engineering. This isn’t the first time that Prakash has invented a   tool for use in   areas. A few years ago, his group also invented a $1 paper microscope called the Foldscope. The paperfuge is inexpensive, costing just 20 cents apiece to make. They can be made by hand or by machine, and the spinning disc can be made of paper or plastic. Using a desktop   printer, the study authors printed over 100 paperfuges in one day. That means if the paperfuge catches on, it could be relatively easy to make and distribute to   areas. Now that Prakash’s group has shown that it’s effective in identifying malaria, they are working on developing different variations of the paperfuge that could help diagnose other diseases."
222,"In 1889, Bethlehem Steel brought engineer Frederick Taylor on board in an attempt to streamline its vast operation. Taylor had recently invented a theory of ”time management” in which the same principles used to optimize machines was applied to people. Taylor stalked the floors of the Bethlehem plant armed with a stopwatch and a clipboard noting the time it took for workers to complete tasks, like loading iron bars onto waiting railcars. Taylor’s eventual recommendation to the company’s executives were simple: The workers should be made to do more in less time. Some 120 years later, the plan Taylor laid out for big business has now become internalized within us all. Called the ”Personal Productivity Movement,” it’s subtly woven into the fabric of our digitally mediated lives. That’s not a good thing. There is an argument to be made that our emphasis on personal productivity is not only slowly killing us, it’s also doomed to fail. In fact, this exact argument was made in a piece of   journalism by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian late last month. Since my last book focused on the links between changing cultural ” ” and changing scientific conceptions of time, I found a lot to agree with in Burkeman’s piece. So, today, let’s spend a few moments unpacking our mania for personal productivity, its historical roots  —   and the reasons why it’s a long road to nowhere. Google ”personal productivity” and, pretty quickly, you’ll get the gist of what this movement means. There’s the ”The 7 Rules of Personal Productivity” and ”8 Simple Rules to Extreme Personal Productivity” and ”20 Suggestions to Boost Your Personal Productivity.” Clearly, there are a lot of rules. Here are a few of them: write things down avoid distractions schedule your email and social media checking balance focused work with focused rest. There are, not surprisingly, personal productivity apps to help you stick to these rules. Some will keep your lists and help you prioritize them. Others go further. For example there’s ATracker to help you track ”repetitive daily routines at work.” And Eternity Time Log that allows you to ”track many projects and   generate and export detailed hierarchical reports to know exactly where your time goes.” Burkeman correctly links the birth of this mania for efficiency and productivity with Frederick Taylor’s scientific time management. But while it was Big Business that kept workers ”at the sharp end” of Taylor’s proposals, in our digital age we have mostly volunteered to do that job ”to” ourselves. The reasons for this are manifold. Much of the gospel of personal productivity begins with an eye towards our jobs. Since we live in an age where you can answer   emails at 9 p. m. well, then, shouldn’t you? Are you risking your position by not answering it? As Burkeman puts it: ” In an era of insecure employment, we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.” But, as Burkeman shows us, the new and inherently unfair economic conditions driving the range for personal productivity won’t change its outcome. As he explains: ”An awkward truth about Taylor’s celebrated efficiency drives is that they were not very successful: Bethlehem Steel fired him in 1901, having paid him vast sums without any clearly detectable impact on its own profits. (One persistent consequence of his schemes was that they seemed promising at first, but left workers too exhausted to function consistently over the long term.) Exhaustion. That’s the key word. That’s why our personal productivity efforts are bound to fail in the same way they failed in Taylor’s day. In our modern, digitally rendered age we are all are caught by the promise that we can squeeze more out of our time. By abstracting life into a series of digitally manipulatable lists, we’re told we can optimize ourselves. In this way, we come to believe we really can get more quality parenting time, while still getting to the gym everyday, while still reading more books, while still learning to cook Indian food and so on and on and on. The list literally goes on forever  —   and that’s the problem. The list is a lie. What struck me most when I was writing my book about the braided evolution of scientific and cultural time was the role of invention in both. I found that every culture invented ways of parsing the day. These were what I called cultural  . They were nothing more than social constructions built from the imagination and the dominant technology each culture had at its disposal (i. e. rope and sail, gears and springs, wires and silicon chips). The real point was that none of them was any more real than other. A culture built on hunting and gathering would have one way of organizing the day, while one built on farming would have another. Neither was more ”true” than the other. But seen from within, each culture’s   was invisible. It seemed obvious. It seemed given. It just was. From that vantage point, our mania for personal productivity is just a reflection of the technology we’ve built our modern culture upon. Our machines now parse time in nanosecond chunks. They do more than earlier machines could because they make more time by moving faster. We, however, do not have that option. Even though our digital technologies give us tools to exactly meter time, it is not really our time. It’s not the kind of time we were born to as biological entities enmeshed in a living world. Burkeman rightly ends his essay by pointing out how much of our mania for personal productivity can be traced back to a much older impulse  —   a fear of death: ”The more you can convince yourself that you need never make difficult choices  —   because there will be enough time for everything  —   the less you will feel obliged to ask yourself whether the life you are choosing is the right one.” That is where the choice comes back to us. Every culturally imposed   is an invention. It’s something we made up. The   we dreamed up in building this new version of society has some great aspects, not because it allows us to do more things but because it allows us to do things we could not do before. That should be enough. We lie to ourselves if we think we can get more out of time. That’s because, ultimately, the time we get will always be all the time there is. Adam Frank is a   of the 13. 7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a   ”evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4"
223,"Iran’s former president, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was buried Tuesday, and the large outpouring of grief at his funeral reflects the uncertainty facing Iranian moderates. Rafsanjani may have risen along with the country’s 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the U. S.  shah, but in later years, his pragmatic streak and respected position made him a leading voice of moderation. Rafsanjani was seen as one crucial pillar in the power base of President Hassan Rouhani, who won election in 2013 after the conservative Guardian Council rejected Rafsanjani’s own candidacy. The other major source of Rouhani’s support is another former president, Mohammad Khatami, who has effectively been under house arrest in recent years. Rafsanjani’s death, just months before Rouhani is expected to stand for   in May, leaves the moderate wing of Iran’s political establishment without one of its most important voices. ”It really does create a political vacuum in some ways,” says Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. With Rafsanjani gone and Khatami under wraps, he says, this hole has opened up at a crucial time. Ansari says the months ahead will be a real political test of whether Rouhani, who shepherded a controversial nuclear agreement with world powers past hardline opposition, has enough of a power base of his own to make up for the absence of Rafsanjani. ”You know, I have my doubts about it,” he says. ”I’ve never felt that Rouhani is as big a player as some of the previous generation.” At stake is Rouhani’s  —   and Rafsanjani’s  —   belief that Iran’s best hope for the future lies in outreach to the world and better relations with other countries, not the     often preached by Iran’s hardliners, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani’s legacy, In an appraisal in The New Yorker, Robin Wright wrote that Rafsanjani advocated better ties with the West, including America. Not long ago, he tweeted, ”World of tomorrow is one of negotiations, not the world of missiles.” A different take on Rafsanjani’s political legacy and the impact his absence will have on the political scene comes from Gary Sick, senior researcher at Columbia University’s Middle East program. ”Contrary to some of my colleagues, my guess is that Rafsanjani’s departure will have very little actual impact on the course of developments,” he wrote in a blog post. ”If I were in Rouhani’s shoes, I would certainly be sorry to lose an ally with such sterling revolutionary credentials. After all, the centrists need all the friends they can get,” he added. ”However, the outcome of the next election will depend on Rouhani’s ability to persuade Iranians that they are better off with the nuclear agreement and that he is capable of defending Iran’s interests better than any alternative choice.” Last year’s nuclear accord remains one of Rouhani’s chief accomplishments, and it has brought an infusion of cash, as frozen overseas Iranian assets were released. There have also been major commercial aviation deals and a notable increase in Iranian oil exports since the deal. But economists say the benefits have yet to trickle down to the Iranian street, where they might do Rouhani some political good. Presidential election in May  So far, Rouhani has not announced his intentions for the May elections, though supporters say he’s likely to run again. Thus far, only a few other candidates have announced. Analysts say former Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ghalibaf may make another run. Hardliners are eager to make Rouhani a   candidate. The man he succeeded, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been mentioned as a possible contender, though a number of Iran analysts consider him unlikely to run. With Rafsanjani’s passing, the number of Iran’s founding revolutionaries still in roles of influence is shrinking. Some analysts see an imminent ”generational change” for the Islamic Republic. Ansari, for one, wonders if that change will mean more moderation  —   or less. ”I think the worry for some of us is that really, what you have with Khamenei and . .. many of those in the Revolutionary Guard, but also the political elite following on, [is a group that’s] much less interested in the West, and much more tied to a sort of Russian alliance,” he says. ”So it’s not at all clear that the change in guard will lead to a more moderating influence.”"
224,"Over the weekend and into Monday morning, a powerful storm in Nevada and Northern California resulted in mudslides and flooding, caused more than a thousand people to evacuate their homes, took out power lines and brought down a famous sequoia ”tunnel tree.” That storm is over, but residents can’t relax yet: Starting on Tuesday, a second potent winter storm is expected to hit the region. Emergency workers are taking advantage of the ”  respite from the rains,” as The Associated Press puts it, to rescue people stranded by the storm and assess the extent of the damage. Capital Public Radio in Sacramento reported that some places in the Sierra Nevada received more than a foot of rain over the   storm that ended Monday. A long stretch of Interstate 80 was closed after a   mudslide, the radio station reports. The weekend was relatively warm, The Los Angeles Times reports, which means some of the snow dropped by the storm melted quickly and contributed to floodwaters. Flooding was extensive, with some roads remaining closed on Monday. Placer County tweeted video of a big rig overturned on a road covered with standing water, and urged drivers not to disregard signs marking roads as closed. KQED reports minor flooding ”all over the [San Francisco] Bay Area,” with mudslides and fallen trees closing highways and major roads, and nearly half a million people losing power. California’s wine country was badly hit, The Associated Press reports the Russian River in Sonoma County rose to its highest level in a decade, leaving vineyards submerged ”with just the tips of vines visible in completely flooded fields,” the wire service reports. At least one person was killed in the storm, the AP writes: A woman was struck by a falling tree as she walked on a golf course on Saturday. Emergency crews have used boats and helicopters to rescue people stranded by floodwaters, according to the AP. They have a narrow window of time before the second storm hits the area on Tuesday. It has ”the potential for more heavy rain over the already very thoroughly soaked North Bay counties,” KQED reports. Capital Public Radio also warns of high winds, with gusts up to 50 miles an hour in the Sacramento Valley. This storm is expected to be colder, too, bringing more snow that will stick around instead of melting. The National Weather Service used an exclamation point in its official prediction for snow totals in the Tahoe area, above 7, 000 feet elevation: ”  feet!” The forecast also calls for 150 mph winds on ridge tops. The National Weather Service warns of ”dangerous and potentially life threatening blizzard conditions” possible in the Sierra Nevada. ”Strong winds will produce zero visibility in whiteout conditions along with high drifting snow,” the weather forecast office in Reno says. ”Even a short walk could be deadly if you become disoriented. Avalanche danger will remain high.” Widespread flooding and perilous blizzard conditions have authorities urging people to hunker down, stay safe and avoid travel. But there’s a silver lining to these clouds. California has been suffering through a lengthy, devastating drought. Two storms, no matter how intense, aren’t enough to undo years of persistent drought  —   but the LA Times reports that if the wet weather continues, ”2017 could prove a turning point for the epic dry spell.”"
225,"Sylvana Simons got her start as a soul music VJ on the Dutch version of MTV. She went on to anchor the evening news in the Netherlands, and performed on the local version of Dancing with the Stars. Simons, 45, is black and was born in the former Dutch colony of Suriname, in South America. Her family moved to the Netherlands when she was just one. She’s spoken out against the Dutch Christmas tradition of Black Pete, in which Santa’s helper is often played by a white person in blackface. That prompted someone to make a satirical music video about her, in which dancers in blackface sing, ”Oh Sylvana, why don’t you pack your bags and leave this country.” After that, someone photoshopped pictures of her face onto old archive photos of lynching victims from the American South. ”I’ve also received emails and written letters in which people described how they would like to see me killed, raped, burned alive,” Simons told reporters in a rare interview in early December. ”It’s been an ongoing thing for the past two years.” So Simons filed a police complaint, quit her media job  —   and went into politics. ”I have made this conscious decision to enter politics because I feel we are not just fighting racist people one by one,” Simons says. ”What we need is a change of the system. We live in a system that has been designed hundreds of years ago, not to serve everybody, but to serve the dominant white race.” Parliamentary candidate, Simons is running for parliament in the Dutch elections this March. At first, she announced her candidacy with a new Dutch political party called Denk, or ”think.” It’s one of the first parties in Europe founded by recent immigrants to represent their interests. Denk’s candidates include a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf, people of Turkish and Moroccan descent and black people like Simons. All of them say they’ve felt left out of Dutch politics, especially now that the     leader Geert Wilders is surging in the polls. ”People of color are not recognized as proper Dutch, and there is where the anger is, from people who are seen as   citizens, while they were born here,” says Sandew Hira, an economist and historian who leads the International Institute for Scientific Research, which studies colonialism and is based in The Hague. Denk, founded two years ago by two   members of parliament, says it wants to establish a national racism register to track hate speech, build a slavery museum in the Netherlands and ban portrayals of Black Pete. But the new party has already had some internal disputes. Over the Christmas holiday, Simons announced a surprise split from Denk, to start her own party. She told the Dutch media she wants to widen her political platform to fight for gay rights and fair hiring practices, and that Denk’s other members weren’t receptive. Denk’s leaders did not reply to NPR’s request for comment. Obstacles to integration, On a typical Sunday morning in a small Dutch town, parents cheer for their children on the sidelines of a youth soccer game. One of the dads points out his son playing for the visiting team, in blue jerseys. ”The blue team is from Haarlem, a bigger city, and the orange team is from [the smaller town of] Voldendam. If you look, the orange team, they’re only Dutch,” father Bulent Ozturk says. ”And the blue team, they’re all foreign  —   Turkish and Moroccan kids, mainly.” The Ozturk family has lived in the Netherlands for three generations, yet they still call themselves foreigners. ”I can’t explain what it means to be Dutch. Holland is a very small country. It doesn’t really have an identity,” Ozturk says. ”You could easily be talking about German or Danish identity, because they’re similar. I guess you can start talking about windmills and clocks and tulips.” Ozturk’s parents arrived from Turkey some 50 years ago, in the 1960s, as guest workers. At the time, Dutch companies were recruiting workers from rural parts of Morocco and Turkey. ”They came to do jobs that Dutch people wouldn’t like to do or they couldn’t find people to do. So they were very welcome,” Ozturk says. ”But I don’t feel at home here anymore.” He says he plans to vote for Denk in the country’s   election. ”It’s a shame that we don’t vote on a political basis, but on a race basis,” Ozturk says, shaking his head. About a million of Holland’s 17 million citizens are immigrants or their children or grandchildren  —   a potentially powerful group at the polls."
226,"The online classified website Backpage. com said it has suspended its adult ad pages, citing government pressure about the content being shared there. A 2016 Senate report called the website the ”largest commercial sex services advertising platform in the United States” and said that ”Backpage officials have publicly acknowledged that criminals use the website for sex trafficking, including trafficking of minors.” The report also accused Backpage of not complying with congressional requests for information about its revenue. On Tuesday, links to advertisements for escort services in U. S. cities linked instead to a press release from the company as well as links to the websites of organizations that advocate for free speech rights. In the press release, the company wrote it had suspended adult content as a ”direct result of unconstitutional government censorship”: ”For years, the legal system protecting freedom of speech prevailed, but new government tactics, including pressuring credit card companies to cease doing business with Backpage, have left the company with no other choice but to remove the content in the United States.” Escort advertisement links appeared to remain active for cities outside the U. S. including in Canada. Around the world, Backpage also hosts advertisements for goods and services other than sex, including child care, housing and auto parts. In October, the CEO of Backpage. com, Carl Ferrer, was arrested in Houston and dozens of law enforcement officers then searched Backpage’s Dallas headquarters, as we reported. ”Ferrer, 55, is charged with pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. Two controlling shareholders of Backpage  —   Michael Lacey and James Larkin  —   also are charged with conspiracy to commit pimping,” NPR’s Camila Domonoske reported. The website’s owners have faced similar charges in California and Washington, according to The Associated Press. The California complaint alleged Backpage. com didn’t just host ads for sex, some of which were trafficking minors, because the site helped advertisers write ads that would elicit clicks. ”The Washington state Supreme Court similarly ruled last year that the company didn’t just host the ads, but helped develop the content,” the AP reported. ”That ruling allowed a civil lawsuit to continue by three minors who attorneys said were in the seventh and ninth grades when adult professional sex traffickers used Backpage to sell them as prostitutes.”"
227,"Marketplace officials calculate a customer’s subsidy, so why is the customer held responsible for repayments? Why are so many of my prescriptions held up for authorization by my Medicare drug plan? Here are answers to some recent questions from readers. When I applied on the exchange for health insurance I had to predict my income. I submitted four paycheck stubs so they could figure out how much premium tax credit I qualified for. But they figured it incorrectly, and now I have to repay $8, 000 to the Internal Revenue Service. It was their error, but I’m told they’re not responsible. Is that legal? It is. When you apply for a marketplace plan, your premium tax credit is based on your own and the marketplace’s best estimate of your income for the upcoming year, using tax records and other available electronic data, or sometimes pay stubs as in your case. Especially for people who have multiple sources of income or whose income is variable, ”the projections are difficult” and verifying them ”can be tricky for the marketplace,” said Tara Straw, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Even so, it’s your responsibility to keep the marketplace informed if during the year your income is higher than expected so that the tax credit you’re receiving can be adjusted downward and you don’t get blindsided with a big bill at tax time. For most people who receive too much in subsidies, repayment is capped between $300 and $2, 500, depending on the person’s income and tax filing status. However, there’s no repayment cap for people whose income is above 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $47, 000). Unfortunately, it appears you fall into this category. I have a Medicare prescription drug plan with a $300 deductible. I don’t need many prescriptions, but the drugs I do need require prior authorization, meaning they make you wait three days after the doctor calls in the prescription to decide if they are going to cover it. This is true even for my routine drugs. My pharmacist says insurers are doing this more and more. Is that true? Your pharmacist’s impression is correct. The number of drugs for which insurers require prior authorization in Medicare   drug plans has been inching up for years, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. In 2016, 26 percent of the drugs that were listed in Medicare drug plan formularies, or preferred lists, required the insurer’s OK before they could be dispensed, up from 23 percent the year before. Insurers use other strategies to control drug spending as well, but prior authorization is the most prevalent. They may limit the number of doses of a drug that can be provided over a set period of time, for example, or require patients to try a cheaper drug in the same category before approving a more expensive one. Overall, the number of drugs that have some sort of ”utilization management” requirement, as it’s called, has more than doubled since 2007, to 41 percent. I plan to get married in June. I am currently enrolled in an Obamacare plan. Can I switch to my husband’s employer coverage right away after the wedding or do I have to wait until the next open enrollment period in the fall? You can switch right after the wedding. Marriage is one of several   events that creates a window of opportunity for people to change health plans, whether they’re covered on the health insurance exchange or by an employer. Other events include divorce and the birth or adoption of a child. It’s a good idea for your fiancé to notify his employer about the impending change before the wedding so the company can process it and you can avoid a gap in coverage, said Tracy Watts, a senior partner at benefits consultant Mercer. That way, your new coverage can start on the first day of the month following your wedding date. You’ll need to inform your current plan that you’re dropping that coverage on a certain date as well, of course. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Michelle Andrews is on Twitter:@mandrews110."
228,"NPR’s YouTube channel, Skunk Bear, answers your science questions. This week, we picked one in honor of David Bowie. Bowie was born on Jan. 8 and would have turned 70 on Sunday. Tuesday, Jan. 10, marks the first anniversary of his death. Bowie filled his songs with references to space, and his first big hit, ”Space Oddity,” was released just days before humans first walked on the moon. So today we’re tackling a very   question from an anonymous Tumblr user: ”Can you tell me how long it would take to walk to the moon? Could I make it there in my lifetime?” Ridiculous, of course. What would you walk on? How would you breathe? Where would you put all the trail mix? But we decided to take the question seriously. If a human set out walking at a reasonable pace today, stopping to eat and sleep and take a day off once in a while  —   how long would it take to travel the distance that separates Earth and the moon? We attempt the trip  —   virtually  —   in a 360 degree environment. As you watch our video, you’ll be able to rotate your view by clicking and dragging (or by moving your mobile device*) to see the things a   hiker would see. What does Earth look like from the height of the Hubble telescope or from the height of a weather satellite? To help pass the time, we brought along some of Bowie’s music. It’s only right that his major hits serve as milestones on our way to the moon. You can submit your science questions to Skunk Bear here. (Maybe we’ll tackle, ”Is there life on Mars?” next.) Subscribe to our YouTube channel to follow the answers. *Unfortunately Safari doesn’t support 360   you’ll have to use the Chrome browser or the youtube app on an iPhone. "
229,"Things were already going pretty badly for Florence Manyande. Then one day last spring, while walking down the street, she was hit by a car. ”This woman saw, and she pulled me out of the road.” recalls Manyande, 50. ”She tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t talk then. I had a lot on my mind.” Her run of bad luck had begun in 2010, when Manyande’s husband skipped out on her and her three kids. ”I had no way to pay school fees for my children,” she says, and no way to pay rent. ”Even my relatives were shunning me. They couldn’t take me in because they said, ’We have our own problems. ’” By the time Manyande had her accident, she was thinking about killing herself. Then her fortune took a turn. The woman who found her, injured, on the road happened to be a health worker. She took Manyande to the clinic to get bandaged up. ”While I was there,” Manyande says, ”she introduced me to the Friendship Bench.” A Friendship Bench is quite literally a park bench  —   with a higher calling. In Zimbabwe, where Manyande lives, friendship benches are located on the grounds of medical clinics around Harare and other major cities. They’re a safe place where trained community members counsel folks struggling with what they, in the local Shona language, call kufungisisa (”thinking too much”) or what Americans call depression. Dr. Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatrist at the University of Zimbabwe, came up with the name Friendship Bench  —   or chigaro che hushamwari in Shona  —   back in 2006. In Zimbabwe, as in most places, there’s a lot of stigma around mental illness. Patients may feel uncomfortable with the idea of going to a mental health clinic. Traditionally, Zimbabweans with depression may see a healer about an exorcism  —   many view mental illness as a curse. And there is a shortage of professional help: 13 psychiatrists serve a population of 13 million. While completing his master’s in public health, Chibanda was looking for a solution. After speaking with various community leaders and health workers, he figured out that while people were loathe to head to a mental clinic and speak with a   medical professional about their mental health, they were generally willing to sit on a park bench and share their worries with someone within their own community, At these benches, community counselors and patients meet weekly to discuss intimate issues  —   and develop a plan to overcome difficulties. As part of the treatment, there are also group therapy sessions, when patients gather and sit around the bench. ”It’s all about empowering people to go and solve their own problems,” Chibanda says. The strategy seems to be working, according to a new study published in JAMA. The study followed 573 patients in Harare with anxiety or depression for a   period. Half of them received the standard treatment: A nurse spoke to them about what they were going through and prescribed medication as needed. The other half went to a Friendship Bench to meet with community members who’d been trained to give both    and group counseling. Six months later, half of those who received basic treatment still showed symptoms of depression, whereas only 13 percent of those who participated in Friendship Bench program still had symptoms. Mental health interventions often ”select good therapists and basically bus them in,” adds Dr. Melanie Abas, a psychiatrist at King’s College London and one of the study’s  . ”This is really one of the few examples where treatments for common mental health problems have been delivered by people who actually live and work in the community.” Most of the Friendship Bench counselors are older women who already command respect within their communities. And they’ve played a big role in stemming fears about seeking help for mental health issues, The counselors avoid the Western terms ”depression” and ”anxiety,” which to many might sound foreign and unrelatable. Instead, the counselors may suggest that someone has been ”thinking a bit too much” and guide them through the different stages of talk therapy, which in Shona are called kuvhura pfungwa (”opening of the mind”) kusimudzira (”uplifting”) and kusimbisa (”strengthening”). ”We use indigenous terms,” Chibanda says. ”These are words that people in the community can identify with.” Traditionally, Zimbabweans with depression may see a healer about an exorcism  —   many view mental illness as a curse, Abas notes. People are more likely to admit they’ve got mental health issues when offered the relatively   alternative of chatting on a park bench. The Friendship Bench initiative is now being expanded throughout Zimbabwe. So far, 27, 000 people suffering from common mental health disorders have tried the program. This strategy is not without drawbacks, Abas says. The community counselors require continual training and supervision, which is why they report to a district supervisor with more formal medical and psychological training. And funding is another issue. Right now, the program depends on grant money the researchers say that the government will eventually have to pitch in to sustain the program. Despite those complications, ”it’s just a great model, and it’s impressive,” says Brandon Kohrt, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University who wasn’t involved in the development of the Friendship Bench program or in the recent study. ”It’s often very stigmatizing to have to go to a mental health professional,” Kohrt says. ”So it’s great that their approach didn’t require people to go to a location  —   like a psychiatric hospital  —   that was seen as somewhere only really ill incurable people went.” The program also attests to the power of community, says Kohrt, and harnessing the community to support those suffering mental illness. He believes that ”the lessons from this can be applied globally, even in high income countries.” For Florence Manyande, at least, beyond helping her quell suicidal thoughts, the Friendship Bench has helped her build the sort of community she had been craving. At a group therapy session, Manyande says, ”I made a friend who introduced me to a sister who had accommodation.” No longer homeless, Manyande learned to crochet bags, which she now sells to make money until she can find   employment. ”My relationship with my relatives has also improved,” she says, ”now that I don’t go to their houses begging for money or food.” Most important, ”I realized at the Friendship Bench I have someone who is willing to listen to my problems,” she says. ”I was so happy about that.”"
230,"It’s still unclear whether Verizon will follow through on a $4. 8 billion deal to buy Yahoo’s core internet business, but if the sale is finalized, there’s a name for what will be left behind. For months, as the deal has made its way through negotiations and regulatory reviews, Yahoo referred to the hypothetical remains of its business as ”RemainCo.” Now, the company has unveiled a slightly less literal name: ”Altaba.” The Wall Street Journal explains the Altaba origin: ”Altaba’s remaining assets include Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Yahoo Japan. The name is a combination of the words ’alternate’ and ’Alibaba,’ a person familiar with the matter said.” As The New York Times points out, the name is very close to ”” a Pakistani scissors manufacturer. The sale would also bring big changes to Yahoo’s current leadership. According to a regulatory document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, six members of the company’s current   board would step down  —   including Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive. Eric Brandt, who joined Yahoo’s board in March 2016, would take over as chairman of Altaba’s board. He is a former executive at Broadcom, a semiconductor company. As of Thursday, Brandt took over as chairman of Yahoo’s board, replacing Maynard Webb, who had served in that position since 2013 and now becomes the chairman emeritus. According to the regulatory filing, the purpose of the change was ”to facilitate the transition of the Company to an investment company” following the sale to Verizon. But it’s still unclear whether the sale will go forward. Following revelations of multiple major hacks of Yahoo user accounts, Verizon said it would ”evaluate” the potential impact on the deal. Last week, AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong told CNBC that ”I remain hopeful the deal will close and I think we’ll see what the outcomes are of the Yahoo investigations in the meantime.” Verizon purchased AOL in 2015. Also last week, a senior executive at Verizon said the company was unsure about its plan to buy Yahoo’s Internet business. ”I can’t sit here today and say with confidence one way or another because we still don’t know,” said Marni Walden, president of product innovation and new businesses at Verizon, according to Reuters. Speaking at the Citi 2017 Internet, Media  Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas, Walden said that if the deal does go through, ”we think it will take weeks at least. We don’t have a desire to have it drag on forever, that’s not our intent.”"
231,"Eduardo made a mistake 10 days before he turned 18 in New York City. ”Basically every single day, I relive that moment,” says Eduardo, who is now 32 and still regularly passes by the spot where he was arrested for the first and only time in his life. Police caught him selling cocaine on the sidewalk next to the apartment building he’s lived in since he was a kid. His plan, he says, was to make some money to pay for marijuana. Instead, it stalled his college years and landed him a     sentence in an adult prison. He convinced a parole board to let him out early after more than seven months. Still, he came home at 18 years old with a criminal record. ”Shortcuts, they won’t get you anywhere, man. Just give you a hard time,” he says. ”They’ll give you a lot of time to think.” He asked NPR to identify him only by his first name because he’s worried a future employer or landlord might find out about his criminal record. He says it’s cost him plenty of jobs since he left prison. ”The initial interview would go great, but towards the end when it was time to run that background check, that’s when reality hit,” he explains. ”I’ve heard the word ’no’ so many times. It’s hard, man. It’s hard to keep telling yourself you’re not going to give up.” But just before the new year, Eduardo finally got the phone call he had been waiting for. One of his attorneys called him late one night to tell him that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was granting him a pardon. It’s one of the first pardons in New York state for former offenders who committed a nonviolent crime when they were 16 or 17 and have stayed   for at least 10 years. Anyone convicted of a sex crime does not qualify, and pardons can be withdrawn if the recipient is  . Cuomo announced the first group of 101 pardons on Dec. 30, after creating the youth pardon program in late 2015. About 10, 000 people could benefit from this program for New York residents, according to an estimate from the governor’s office. So far, it’s received 260 applications. For Eduardo, receiving the governor’s pardon means the conviction record that’s haunted him into his early 30s is now sealed from the general public. Some government agencies that require a deeper background check through fingerprinting can still access his rap sheet. Still, sealing his conviction record could help get rid of many of the barriers to jobs and housing Eduardo and thousands of other former teen offenders have faced. ”They serve no good public safety function, and yet they really make it even more difficult for people to readjust to the community once they’ve completed their prison term,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project. He says New York’s program could serve as a model for other states, including North Carolina. That’s the only other state like New York that charges   and    for all crimes not as juveniles, but as adults. Mauer adds that records in the adult justice system can be harder to seal than in the juvenile system. In fact, adult records about misdemeanors in New York are never sealed. ”You can be 16 years old, you can hop a turnstile, you can get convicted for theft of services, and that will be on your record the rest of your life,” says Laurie Parise, executive director of Youth Represent and one of the attorneys who helped Eduardo apply for Cuomo’s pardon. While many advocates for criminal justice reform hail the pardon program as an important way to help former teen offenders, they also see the need for pardons as a reminder that New York has one of the country’s toughest sentencing laws for teenagers. ”The real solution to this is for New York to raise the age,” says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to proposals to change state laws so that   and    are tried as juveniles. ”That way kids will be treated as kids and not subjected to the scars of a criminal conviction. They’ll be more likely to be able to stand on their own feet.” Cuomo, a Democrat, supports reform efforts in New York. But lawmakers in the   state Senate have pushed back against recent proposals to raise the age of criminal responsibility, citing concerns about how a change would put more pressure on courts and housing for juvenile offenders. While they wait for a legislative solution, advocates at Youth Represent and other organizations are trying to find more former teen offenders in New York to apply for a second chance in time for the next round of pardons. ”We can’t continue to define young people by the worst mistake they ever made,” Parise, Eduardo’s attorney, says. ”We have to give people a chance.” Eduardo’s still waiting for his chance to become a health educator. Since finishing his prison sentence, he’s completed his associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. For now, he’s working two jobs to help raise his    daughter. More than a decade later, memories of his arrest and time in prison still motivate him today. ”I tell myself, ’I am better than this.’ I am much better than what a piece of paper or what this judge has sentenced me,” he says. ”I know that this is not who I am.”"
232,"This has been updated at 10:00 pm ET with Clapper statement,   Donald Trump denounced as ”fake news” Wednesday reports that Russia had compromising information about him before the election. He also acknowledged for the first time that Russia was behind the hacking of emails from the Democratic National Committee, although he seemed to couch it later in the news conference by saying it ”could have been others.” In his first news conference since last summer, the   additionally said he would be handing over control of his businesses to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric refused once again to release his income tax returns and said his administration would reveal its plan to replace the Affordable Care Act as soon as his nominee for secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, is confirmed by the Senate. Trump said the unverified and unsubstantiated reports about the Russian intelligence were put together by political opponents, whom he called ”sick people.” The reports, he said, were ”a disgrace,” and he vehemently denounced BuzzFeed News, which published a   memo purportedly outlining the Russian intelligence, as ”a failing pile of garbage.” He also denied a question from a CNN reporter, which first broke the story of an intelligence report but did not publish the documents or the lewd details. But Trump didn’t answer a question as to whether his presidential campaign had been in contact with the Russian government, which the report alleged. CNN reporter Jim Acosta noted later on the network that reporters followed up on that point as Trump was heading to the elevators off camera, and Trump said no one ”associated with him or his campaign was in contact with the Russians” during the campaign. Trump was also critical of U. S. intelligence agencies for ”maybe” leaking the report to news organizations, charging that a meeting he had recently with the agencies immediately leaked out even though he had kept it secret from his closest staff. In the evening, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement saying he had spoken with Trump and they agreed the leaks were ”extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.” But Clapper denied the media got the alleged Russian evidence from his agencies: ”I emphasized that this document is not a U. S. Intelligence Community product and that I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC. The IC has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable, and we did not rely upon it in any way for our conclusions. However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.” During the news conference, Trump also talked about the hacking of DNC servers and said, ”I think it was Russia,” but he added ”it could have been others also.” U. S. intelligence publicly stated last October  —   and in congressional hearings and an unclassified report since  —   that the Russian government was to blame for the cyberattack. Trump called hacking ”bad” and said he would tell Russian President Vladimir Putin ”he shouldn’t have done it. I don’t believe he will be doing it more.” But he also said he would consider it ”an asset, not a liability,” if Putin likes him. ”I don’t know if I’ll get along” with the Russian leader, Trump said, ”I hope I do.” Trump also denied taking part in any salacious behavior in a Moscow hotel room, saying he always tells people to be very careful when he travels abroad, because ”you have cameras in the strangest places. You’d better be careful or you’ll be watching yourself on nightly television.” Plus, he added, ”Does anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.” Trump held his news conference in the   lobby of Trump Tower in New York, speaking alongside a table piled with manila file folders, which he said were the agreements he has signed giving control of the Trump Organization to his oldest sons. He introduced attorney Sheri Dillon, of the firm Morgan, Lewis  Bockius, who said that at Trump’s request she had designed a structure ”that will completely isolate him” from the management of the company. Trump is conveying leadership and management of the company to his adult sons and longtime Trump executive Allen Weisselberg. Dillon said the three will ”make decisions for the duration of the presidency without any involvement whatsoever” by Trump. Dillon also said the trust agreement ”imposes severe restrictions on new deals. No new foreign deals will be made whatsoever during the duration” of Trump’s presidency. New domestic deals will be allowed, but they will go through ”a vigorous vetting process.” Trump will not be informed of such deals and will only learn of them if he ”reads it in the paper or sees it on TV.” And, she said, Trump will donate to the U. S Treasury all profits made from foreign governments who stay at his hotel. On health care, Trump said ”the easiest thing” would be to let the Affordable Care Act ”implode” this year, because of increased premium rates. He said Obamacare ”is the Democrats’ problem,” but that he will offer a plan to repeal and replace that is ”gonna take the problem off the shelves for them.” The plan will be ”far less expensive and far better,” he said, and will be submitted almost simultaneously as his HHS secretary is confirmed. Trump also revealed he will be nominating David Shulkin as secretary of the Veterans Administration. Shulkin is currently the No. 2 at the troubled agency and would be one of the first holdovers from the Obama administration. Trump called him an incredibly gifted doctor. Trump also took a shot at the U. S. pharmaceutical industry, which he charged ”has been disastrous.” He said drugmakers have been leaving the country left and right and that new bidding procedures are needed for the industry ”because they’re getting away with murder.” Trump’s comments caused drug stocks to fall on Wall Street."
233,"For the first time in 167 days,   Donald Trump held a   news conference. NPR’s politics team, with help from reporters and editors across the newsroom,   the speech. Portions of the transcript with added analysis are underlined in yellow, followed by context and fact checks below. Note: The transcript was updated throughout the press conference. While we are working to correct errors, it may contain discrepancies and typographical errors."
234,"Out of nowhere, a shocking video appeared on a Russian TV news program late one evening in March 1999. A surveillance tape showed a naked,   man who resembled Russia’s top prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, cavorting with two unclothed young women. Neither was his wife. The ensuing scandal included a press conference by the head of Russia’s FSB security service at the time, Vladimir Putin, who made clear it was Skuratov in the video. Skuratov soon lost his job, not to mention his dignity. President Boris Yeltsin was apparently impressed with Putin’s handling of this episode. Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Skuratov, who was believed to be looking into Kremlin corruption. Several months after the video surfaced, Yeltsin named Putin to be prime minister, and a few months after that, Putin took over as president. The Skuratov case is a leading example of what Russians call kompromat, or compromising material used to discredit rivals in politics or business or just settle personal scores. From the Soviet playbook, Kompromat is straight from the old Soviet playbook and has often involved photographs and videos  —   real or fake. Russians often use it for internal battles, though it is also deployed to blackmail foreign diplomats serving in Russia. A diplomat lured into an affair might be willing to quietly cooperate with the Russia government rather than having a career and marriage upended. Now there are unverified claims that Russia may have compromising material on   Donald Trump. NPR and other news organizations have reported on the existence of the allegations since the story broke Tuesday evening. NPR has not reported the details since they are unproven. Trump denied the reports in a news conference Wednesday. The Kremlin also issued a denial, with Putin spokesman Dmitri Peskov stating flatly: ”The Kremlin does not collect compromising materials.” While claims and counterclaims are still flying, what’s clear is that Russian kompromat does continue to thrive in the   era, aided by the march of cyber technology. Kompromat is considered part of the larger Russian espionage arsenal that also includes disinformation, fake news and computer hacking. U. S. intelligence agencies have blamed the Russians for hacking into Democratic Party emails to harm Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign. Russia has denied this. A long history, Russia even has a website, kompromat. ru, where anyone can pay the site to post embarrassing stories. Many are about alleged corruption and have already been published elsewhere but have not received much attention. The businessman who created the website, Sergey Gorshkov, said he came up with the idea from the Skuratov sex scandal back in 1999. He said his operation was purely business, not politics. In some cases, the site has provided the Russian government a convenient outlet when it wanted to leak material that would undermine a critic. However, the site also published allegations against figures in the Kremlin and the Russian government, angering many powerful officials. The Russian government, meanwhile, is still deeply involved in kompromat, according to analysts. Last year, a sex tape of opposition politician Mikhail Kasyanov was broadcast on   television. Kasyanov once served as prime minister to President Putin before turning against him. The tape came out five months before parliamentary elections, a disclosure seen as harming Kasyanov and his party in the polls. In other recent cases, Russian operatives have been suspected or accused of placing child pornography on the personal computers of individuals they were attempting to discredit. Russian Vladimir Bukovsky, 73, a longtime critic of Soviet and Russian leaders, now lives in Britain, where he faces charges related to child pornography. But the case was delayed while investigators checked to see whether the images on Bukovsky’s computer were placed there by an outside party, The New York Times reported last month, citing other similar cases. ”The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Bukovsky told the newspaper. ”You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.”"
235,"Updated at 9:24 a. m. ET on Wednesday, Top U. S. intelligence officials have briefed leaders in Washington about an explosive  —   but unverified  —   document that alleges collusion between Russia and   Donald Trump, NPR has learned. The brief, which NPR has seen but not independently verified, was given by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain to FBI Director James Comey on Dec. 9. Details from it have been part of presentations by Comey and other intelligence leaders to Trump, President Obama and key leaders in Congress. On Tuesday night, Trump and his attorney named in the report separately characterized the document as untrue. Without mentioning the report directly, Trump tweeted, ”FAKE NEWS   A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” Wednesday, a Kremlin spokesman said the document was an ”absolute fabrication.” Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had no compromising material on   Donald Trump and that the document was a hoax intended to further damage U. S.  relations. Trump has scheduled a news conference for Wednesday  —   his first since one in July in which he quipped that Russia should hack materials related to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The alleged intelligence document appears likely to dominate the upcoming session.  NPR is not detailing the contents of the brief because it remains unverified, but it describes a concerted effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to cultivate a relationship with Trump and his camp. The document, which describes information provided by Russian government and other sources, details behavior by Trump that could leave him open to blackmail, as well as alleged secret meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials called to discuss the campaign against Clinton and potential new business relationships. The U. S. intelligence services declined to comment on Tuesday evening. Members of Congress on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees also declined to comment. Obama told NBC News on Tuesday in an interview ahead of his farewell address that he hadn’t seen the news reports and wouldn’t comment on classified information. He reminded Lester Holt that he ordered the investigation released Friday of Russia’s meddling in the presidential election and that the U. S. needed to continue strengthening its  . ”My expectation and my hope is that this work will continue after I leave that Congress, in possession of both the classified and unclassified reports, that the   and his administration  —   in possession of both the classified and unclassified reports  —   will take it seriously and now get to work reinforcing those mechanisms that we can use to protect our democracy.” Members of Trump’s camp issued their own denials separately from Trump. ”Once again these reports have no documentation,” Trump confidant Roger Stone told NPR. ”So far we have ’assessments’ and ’briefings.’ The special report prepared for Trump even noted that no evidence was included and that ’such documents are so top secret they must remain confidential.’ ” Attorney Michael Cohen, who is a key figure in the allegations detailed in the report, denied to The Atlantic on Tuesday evening that he had made a trip to the Czech Republic that it describes. ”I’m telling you emphatically that I’ve not been to Prague, I’ve never been to Czech, I’ve not been to Russia,” as reporter Rosie Gray quoted him on Twitter. Cohen posted a photo of his passport on his own Twitter account with the hashtag ”#FakeNews.” The timing of the appearance of the dossier is significant  —   following a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday about Russia’s campaign to disrupt the 2016 presidential election and ahead of Trump’s planned news conference. Democrats on Tuesday urged the FBI to reveal whether it is conducting any investigation into the Trump camp’s connections to Russia, but Comey rebuffed them. Separately, Sen. Al Franken,  . pressed Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee to become attorney general, about what he knew of Trump’s dealings with Russia. Sessions said he wasn’t aware of any activities and couldn’t respond. The dossier, which originated with a former British intelligence officer, does not contain the standard caveats or guidance about levels of ”confidence” that are common in U. S. intelligence community documents. It brought another twist in the sometimes surreal story about Trump’s historic political success. And it followed a hearing in which senators and intelligence leaders described the dangers of foreign mischief in the political systems of the U. S. and its allies. The   dossier could be a quintessential example. If it’s genuine, it tops what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other top intelligence bosses called an unprecedented spike in Russian meddling inside the U. S. If it’s phony, or parts of it are fabricated, it’s yet another turn in the hall of mirrors in which American voters have found themselves since Trump exploded onto the political scene, and debunking it could vindicate repeated denials by Trump and his aides that they have had improper relationships with Moscow. Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was forced to resign after information became public about his ties to   leaders in Ukraine, which Putin invaded in 2014. Russian Foreign Ministry officials boasted in the press about their contacts with Trump’s camp. Manafort, for his part, denied the allegations. ”I have never had any ties to Russia or Putin,” Manafort told NPR in a text message. ”The references to me regarding speaking to [former Trump foreign policy adviser] Carter Page and Michael Cohen are totally wrong and not true.” Putin sent Trump a telegram after his election congratulating him on his win and reciprocating the overtures he had made about healing the relationship between the two nations. NPR correspondents Mary Louise Kelly, Carrie Johnson, Sarah McCammon and Tamara Keith contributed to this report."
236,"A federal judge in South Carolina formally sentenced Dylann Roof to death on Wednesday, one day after a jury recommended that he be executed for murdering nine people in a Charleston church. Under federal sentencing laws, the death penalty can be imposed only if all 12 jurors agree on it, and the judge cannot overrule the jury’s decision. Roof is the first person to be sentenced to death in a federal trial that included hate crimes charges, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1988, three of the 81 people sentenced to death have been executed by the federal government. After he was sentenced, Roof asked for new attorneys, saying he did not trust his defense team, which includes multiple experienced capital punishment defense lawyers. During the guilt portion of the trial, Roof’s lawyers actively defended him, but Roof chose to represent himself during the penalty phase, with his attorneys providing backup counsel. U. S. District Judge Richard Gergel denied the request and gave Roof 14 days to file an appeal if he wishes. On Tuesday, lead attorney David Bruck suggested in a statement that his team intends to appeal the sentence. Before he read the sentence, Gergel opened the floor to dozens of family members and friends of those who died in June 2015. They addressed Roof directly, taking the stand and turning to face the    who kept his eyes down, according to reporters in the courtroom. Many of them asked Roof to look at them. He did not. All expressed anguish and frustration. Some described their hatred of Roof. Others voiced forgiveness. ”Dylann! Dylann! I know that you can hear me,” said Jamie Scott, whose nephew Tywanza Sanders was killed. ”I wish you would look at me, boy, but I know that you can hear me,” she was quoted as saying by Charleston’s Post and Courier. ” ’How dare you sit here every day looking   and acting like you did nothing wrong,’ ” the newspaper said Ashland Temoney yelled at Roof, who murdered Temoney’s aunt, DePayne Middleton. ”You are the biggest coward I have ever seen in my life,” Temoney told Roof. Felicia Sanders lost both her son and her aunt, Susie Jackson, in the attack, but she herself survived. ”I cannot shut my eyes to pray,” she said Wednesday. ”Even when I try, I cannot. I have to keep my eye on everyone that is around me.” ”Yes, I forgive you,” Sanders continued. ”That was the easiest thing I had to do. . .. But you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. May God have mercy on your soul,” the Post and Courier reported. South Carolina Public Radio’s Alexandra Olgin said that family members in the courtroom embraced after the jury recommended the sentence on Tuesday. Olgin reported: ”Melvin Graham, the brother of victim Cynthia Graham Hurd, says there are too many senseless shootings in this country. ’I just want this to stop. I really do. I’m tired. Every time I hear about a shooting I cry. We have to stop this.’ ”Graham says he supports the death sentence for his sister’s killer. ”During the trial prosecutors repeatedly showed through Roof’s writings how much he hated black people. ” ’If Dylann Roof was named Abdul, we’d call him a terrorist and say he’d been radicalized. And he was radicalized! But not in the way some people think. Radicalized himself to believe this thing, and felt that he had to act on it, just like any other terrorist.’ ” As The   has reported, Roof told investigators that his beliefs about race were shaped by things he read on the Internet after an initial Google search for information about Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed in 2012. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church member Marsha Spencer said the shooting left her ”broken.” ”What happened to you, Dylann?” she asked, according to a tweet by the Post and Courier’s Abigail Darlington, who was inside the courtroom. Before the final phase of jury selection in November, the judge ordered an evaluation of Roof’s competency to stand trial after his defense team brought up concerns. The competency evaluation was submitted to the parties in the case, but it has not been released to the public. Records from a hearing about that evaluation have also remained sealed  —   the judge believed the contents could potentially prejudice the jury  —   but are scheduled to be made public once the sentencing phase is over. Roof is facing separate murder charges brought by the state of South Carolina, which is also seeking the death penalty."
237,"Alt. Latino’s corner of the Latin music world gets better and better every year: The music continually explodes any idea of genre restrictions and constantly surprises. And it looks like 2017 is not going to disappoint. On this week’s show, we’ve got previews of stunning new records from familiar names (Cafe Tacvba, Dayme Arocena) and folks you should know about (Ani Cordero, Gabriel Garzon Montano). They sing in Spanish, they sing in English, they come from across Latin America and the U. S. The styles are as different as the cultures from which they come. What they have in common is that they redefine the notion of ”Latin music” in a way that almost makes the term obsolete. Almost. There’s still something that ties them all together and makes their music Latin: sabor. Listen in this week and hear it for yourselves. "
238,"Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson had a tense confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, clashing even with Republican members over his views on Russia, international human rights violations and the lobbying and   of Exxon Mobil when he was CEO. The    was an unconventional pick for   Donald Trump, having no former government service but plenty of international business experience. It’s that work with foreign governments, particularly Russia, that’s come under scrutiny. In 2013, the Kremlin awarded Tillerson the Russian ”Order of Friendship.” Predictably, many of the committee’s questions had to do with Tillerson’s views on how he would deal with Russia. Trump has expressed unusual admiration for the country and its president, Vladimir Putin, and openly desired a better relationship, even as U. S. intelligence has found that the country engaged in cyberattacks to meddle in the U. S. elections. Sen. Marco Rubio,  . had particularly sharp questions for Tillerson and sounded at times like he could be leaning toward opposing Tillerson’s nomination. At several points during Tillerson’s testimony, committee Chairman Bob Corker,  . interjected to try to help clarify his answers. Here are top moments from the   hearing: Aggressively pushed by Rubio in his initial round of questioning, Tillerson wouldn’t label Putin as a war criminal over the Russian military’s alleged involvement in the Syrian civil war in targeting and killing civilians. ”Those are very, very serious charges to make and I’d want to have much more information before reaching that conclusion,” Tillerson said. He also wouldn’t say whether he believes the Kremlin is behind the killing of journalists and Putin critics, saying he would need to see more classified information to make a determination. In a second round, Rubio pushed him on whether he viewed the Philippines and its president, Rodrigo Duterte, as human rights violators, but Tillerson dismissed news reports on atrocities there and in Saudi Arabia and its treatment of women. Citing his background as an engineer, Tillerson pushed back, saying he would simply need more information to make such a broad pronouncement and that, ”I’m going to act on factual information. I’m not going to act on what people write about in the newspapers.” ”My interests are the same as yours. Our interests are not different, senator,” Tillerson told Rubio. ”There seems to be some misunderstanding that I see the world through a different lens. I do not. I share all the same values you share and want the same things, the world over, in terms of freedom.” But overall, Tillerson still sounded a more hawkish tone against Russia than the incoming commander in chief he would serve. ”We aren’t likely to ever be friends. . .. Our value systems are starkly different,” Tillerson said of Russia, adding that, ”we need to move Russia from being an adversary always to being a partner sometimes.” The idea that Tillerson was in a unique position to be an intermediary to the country and smooth over relations, while also projecting U. S. strength and ideals, was something that witnesses speaking in support of his confirmation told the committee in introductory remarks. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who served in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, called Tillerson the ”right person at the right time” to work on U. S.  relations. Former Sen. Sam Nunn,  . an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation, said Tillerson’s past business relationships with Russia and with Putin were ”assets, not liabilities.” Tillerson also sounded a different tone from Trump on how he would have dealt with Russian aggression into Crimea. ”That was a taking of territory that was not theirs,” Tillerson said, adding that he would have recommended that Ukraine use its military assets to line up along the eastern border and that the U. S. and NATO should have also helped with supplies and air surveillance. Russia would have understood and responded to such a ”powerful response,” Tillerson said. Asked whether he believed U. S. intelligence reports that Russia was involved in cyberattacks intended to meddle in the U. S. elections, Tillerson said he had not seen the classified information but that the public report ”clearly is troubling.” He said it was a ”fair assumption” that Putin was directly involved. There were two more big breaks from Tillerson with his future boss. When asked about a potential ban on Muslims coming into the U. S. which Trump proposed during the campaign, Tillerson said he did ”not support a   rejection of any particular group of people.” And he also rejected the idea of any type of registry of Muslims in the U. S. too, saying, ”[You] would need to have a lot more information on how such an approach would even be constructed.” He also said he didn’t oppose the   Partnership trade deal, which Trump frequently railed against on the campaign trail and has pledged to abandon. On the Paris climate accord, Tillerson said the U. S. would be ”better served by being at that table than leaving that table” Trump has said he would pull the deal. The   chief diplomat was pressed multiple times on whether he believed in the efficacy of sanctions, especially when it came to Russia. As with Crimea, he said he believed there needed to be additional consequences, backing some type of military action along the border. But he also said that ”[when sanctions] are imposed, they, by their design, are going to harm American businesses,” although he did admit that they could be a ”powerful and important tool.” He said that at Exxon he had never personally lobbied against sanctions and that the oil company ”to my knowledge” had never ”directly lobbied” against sanctions. However, Politico reported last month that Exxon Mobil had in fact lobbied against a bill that would have made it harder for Trump to lift sanctions against Russia. After that admission, Democrats entered into the record evidence of the oil company’s registration to lobby on the sanctions, but Tillerson maintained he still had no knowledge of the actions. ”Were we lobbying for the sanctions or lobbying against the sanctions?” he asked Sen. Robert Menendez,  . J. during one line of questioning. ”I know you weren’t lobbying for the sanctions,” Menendez replied, incredulously. Tillerson later said that the company had ”participated in understanding how the sanctions are going to be constructed” in Russia, and his former company later tweeted out a statement to back that up. On other issues of what Exxon Mobil had engaged in  —   a company where he worked for 40 years  —   Tillerson also said he didn’t recall whether it had done business with Iran, Syria and Sudan. Tillerson also expressed his belief in climate change, but he wouldn’t answer whether he believed humans were contributing to it. ”The risk of climate change does exist and the consequences of it could be serious enough that action should be taken,” Tillerson said. But asked by Corker whether it was worsened by human activity, Tillerson demurred, saying that ”the increase in the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect” but that the ”ability to predict that effect is very limited.” Sen. Tim Kaine,  . his party’s nominee for vice president against Trump, also pushed Tillerson on reports that Exxon Mobil had misled the public over climate change. Tillerson initially dodged, but Kaine pushed on: ”Do you lack the knowledge to answer my question or are you refusing to answer my question?” ”A little of both,” Tillerson quipped."
239,"Update: This post was updated on February 16, 2017, and will continue to be updated as other appointments are made. At a Thursday press conference, Donald Trump named one more person to his list of cabinet nominees: Alexander Acosta, dean of the Florida International University College of Law and former member of the National Labor Relations Board, is now nominated to head the Labor Department. He is taking the place of Andrew Puzder, who dropped out of the process this week in part due to questions about his past employment of person in the country illegally (including taxes paid in that instance) and personal life. NPR is tracking Trump’s Cabinet as it grows, counting up the diversity and experience of his appointees, as well as a few specifics they might have in their resumes. So here’s what Trump’s Cabinet looks like by the numbers. Acosta’s nomination means that 21 of 22   positions (not counting the vice president) will have nominees  —   the CEA still doesn’t have a nomination for its chairman. For the sake of    comparisons, we’ve compared all of those 22 posts across five presidents’ initial Cabinets (for Trump we only count everything as a percentage of 21, as he has only chosen 21 people, and for Reagan and Clinton, we only count 21 appointees, as there was no Department of Homeland Security during their presidencies). Trump’s Cabinet breaks with a trend toward diversity, Of the 20 people he has chosen thus far, Trump’s Cabinet has 15 white men. That’s roughly in line with Ronald Reagan’s initial Cabinet. However, it’s also a swing away from a trend toward diversity over the last few presidents. President Obama’s Cabinet in particular gained notice for its relative lack of white men. To draw a line between white and nonwhite, we used Census Bureau race and ethnicity categories, though unlike the census, we counted all Hispanics as nonwhite (the Census Bureau counts Hispanic as an ethnicity and not a race, meaning a person can be white and Hispanic). Alexander Acosta is the first Latino appointee to the Trump cabinet. The Census Bureau’s system undersells diversity in some ways, though. For example, Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, George W. Bush Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, and Clinton HHS Secretary Donna Shalala are all  . In the census, that counts as white, though some   disagree (and the Census Bureau itself is considering adding that category). Furthermore, it’s not that the trend toward diversity has been as steady as the above chart seems to show after all, these are just the presidents’ first Cabinets. President Obama took some criticism for a less diverse circle of advisers in his second term. Diversity can mean bringing different perspectives to the administration. Of course, white men can be empathetic and   as National Urban League head Marc Morial recently told PBS NewsHour, but many Americans also look to the Cabinet as a sign of whether they are  . ”The question is, do people feel their voices are heard? That’s really important, that communities feel someone is at the table with my point of view,” he said. Trump has chosen the outsider Cabinet, Of course, there are other types of diversity  —   geographic, socioeconomic and experience, for example. And while Trump’s team has been criticized for its economic profile (i. e. it includes multiple billionaires) it does break with usual Cabinet norms by being relatively light on established government figures. We’ve attempted to quantify this by classifying each Cabinet member by his or her most prominent jobs prior to joining the Cabinet (for example, Colin Powell had spent much of his working life in the military before joining George W. Bush’s Cabinet). This required more than a few judgment calls  —   Glenn Hubbard (George W. Bush’s CEA chair) had spent two years at the Treasury, but we decided he was primarily an academic, as he spent many more years in that field. Some of these are arguable: Was Hillary Clinton’s career more prominently in ”government”  —   that is, her time as senator  —   or as a first lady (which we’d classify as ”other,” a category that includes people who are in politics but are not officeholders, like Reince Priebus)? We made her one of the few listed as more than one, as she straddles the line between the two worlds. Here we can see not only whose Cabinets were particularly heavy with people from the public sector (Obama) or the business world (Reagan, Trump) but also where different presidents have broken with tradition. Trump, like most of the last five presidents, will have someone from the business world heading the Small Business Administration. However, he will be the only president out of these to have a defense secretary (Mattis) with a chiefly military background. True, Donald Rumsfeld had been in the military, but afterward he made a career of working in government, while Mattis remained in the military through retirement. For a more holistic count of these Cabinet secretaries’ careers, here is a breakdown of four different distinctions that Cabinet secretaries commonly hold. We counted up the initial Cabinet members who have had any experience in the military or government (at any level, from city to federal) as well as those who have served as CEOs or have earned Ph. D.’s. (This means these numbers will differ from those in the above table. Someone known best for government service may also have served in the military or have a Ph. D. or have been a CEO, for example  —   or even all four.) Once again, there were some judgment calls  —   does serving as the ”CEO” of Chicago Public Schools  —   as Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan did  —   really count as being a CEO? (We decided no we’re trying to count a type of business experience here, and public schools are a government entity. A similar but tougher call went into deciding that Timothy Geithner’s time as New York Fed CEO didn’t count either.) One other judgment call: we drew the line at Ph. D. s and excluded professional degrees, meaning that someone like Ben Carson, who of course studied extensively to be a neurosurgeon, would not be counted. There is also some debate about whether someone holding a law degree (a J. D. or juris doctor) should be considered a ”doctor.” For simplicity’s sake, we decided to draw our border at Ph. D. This is not meant to imply that these are the only four ways someone might be qualified to serve as a Cabinet secretary. Rather, these are four ways of measuring what type of a Cabinet a president has. A Cabinet that’s relatively heavy with academics (Obama, Clinton) might work and think differently than does a Cabinet with more CEOs (Trump, George W. Bush)."
240,"The U. S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday in a dispute that advocates describe as the most important case involving public school special education in three decades. At issue is whether federal law requires public schools to provide more than the bare minimum in special services for children with disabilities. With millions of children qualifying for these services, the court’s ruling could have a profound effect. In the 1970s, Congress found that most children with disabilities were treated as   in the public schools, either ”totally excluded” or left to sit ”idly” in regular classrooms until they were old enough to ”drop out.” In 1975 Congress passed a federal law, since then strengthened multiple times, which requires school districts to provide an individually designed public education for each child with a disability so that he or she can learn with peers and achieve his or her individual potential. In exchange, the federal government provides some of the funds for these services. The question before the Supreme Court on Wednesday was what level of services the schools must provide. Must it be the bare minimum, meaning just enough for the student to show what the lower courts called just above ”trivial” progress, or is it something more? In an interview after the argument, Stanford Law professor Jeffrey Fisher, representing an autistic boy from Colorado and his parents, argued for something significantly more. ”The school district here is saying, so long as we give barely more than a de minimus benefit, just we teach you a little bit of something, that is enough,” Fisher said. ”We think that’s a recipe for   citizenship.” But Francisco Negrón, chief legal officer for the National School Boards Association, said that if the Supreme Court tightens the standard, it could cost some school districts lots of money. ”Congress promised basically 40 percent funding years ago, and it’s only historically been funded at 15 percent,” he observed. Inside the courtroom, Fisher argued that the standard specified by Congress in its most recent amendments requires sufficient services so that children with disabilities can keep up with their peers. Chief Justice John Roberts balked, noting that in this very case, the student’s disability was so severe that he could not keep up, even with the help of an aide. Fisher replied that when the school refused to provide more specialized services, the parents sent the boy to a private school for children with autism. When he made marked progress there, the parents returned to the school district, asking that some of the same expertise be provided in the public school. When the school refused, that’s when the parents sued the school district for the annual $70, 000 private school tuition. Justice Anthony Kennedy focused on what would be reasonable for a school district to pay. Fisher said most services do not cost much at all, but he conceded there are some extreme cases  —   like a child with a ventilator  —   where the costs are $30, 000 or $40, 000. Nonetheless, Fisher contended, costs ”can’t trump” what the law requires. Justice Stephen Breyer didn’t like the idea of a    standard. ”I foresee taking the money that ought to go to the children and spending it on lawsuits and lawyers,” he said. ”That is what’s actually bothering me.” Representing the school board, lawyer Neal Katyal maintained that Congress has not established a specific standard for compliance with the law rather, that it has established procedures for designing individual plans for each child. But, interjected Justice Elena Kagan, when there is a dispute, if the standard that has to be met is ”so low . .. so easy to meet,” then the question is whether the student is receiving a free appropriate education. ”You’re reading [the law] as requiring some benefit,” Chief Justice Roberts said. The other side, he continued, changing his inflection, ”is reading it as saying some benefit.” ”It makes a difference,” he observed. After all, Roberts said, a school district could provide five minutes a day special instruction, and that’s some benefit. But, he added, the law says ”significant, meaningful, whatever. It’s more than simply de minimus.” Justice Samuel Alito called all this ”a blizzard of words” meaning nothing. But by the end of the argument, there appeared to be a majority of justices willing to put more bite into the guarantee of a free appropriate public education for children with disabilities."
241,"Colin Ozeki, 17, doesn’t like to sugarcoat how autism spectrum disorder has affected his interactions with others, his emotions and his own  . He sees it as an issue to confront, something about himself to work on and improve in order to fully participate in life around him. He appreciates the adage, ”It’s a difference, not a disability.” But he disagrees with it when it comes to himself. ”I don’t think I would be at this place that I’m at right now if it weren’t for people acknowledging the idea that I had some kind of problem per se,” says Colin. ”I might have just been this confused person forever, and somewhat underdeveloped.” We know a lot more about children with autism spectrum disorders than we did just a decade ago, but nationwide students with autism are enrolling in college in relatively low numbers. Colin, now a senior at Millennium Brooklyn High School, has been part of a program in the New York City schools aiming to change that. It’s called ASD Nest (ASD refers to students with autism spectrum disorder) and he’s been with it his entire school career. A key underlying philosophy of the program is that education  —   the classroom  —   provides the most effective treatment for autism. The program, run jointly by the city’s Department of Education and NYU Nest Support Project, places students with autism who are capable of doing   work in classrooms with their   peers. The program came about in 2003 in response to poor academic outcomes among students with autism, including those like Colin, who were academically strong. Very few of these students were graduating high school, attending college and having careers. Nationwide, these numbers are improving, as public schools work to meet students needs and as more colleges create programs to support students with autism. Still, a small minority of these young people attend   colleges. Numbers are even low compared to students with other disabilities, such as learning disabilities or   issues. Colin is part of the first wave of students to participate in ASD Nest from kindergarten through high school. He benefited from a   model that had two teachers in the classroom, intensive behavioral support and extra help with social skills. He said that people did not begin to make sense to him until middle school. He struggled with behavioral outbursts, which are now rare. ”I don’t think very many students are being thrown in the hallway because they are stabbing themselves because of a schedule change,” he says with candor and dose of humor. When he started the Nest program, it was only in its 2nd year, at one New York City school. Nearly 15 years later, it’s grown to 39 schools, serving more than one thousand students. And there is now much more joy in Colin’s school life. He participates in class discussions and has true friends. He’s on track this year to graduate with an advanced diploma."
242,"There’s a new jungle Jedi out there. Scientists who discovered a new primate, which lives in eastern Myanmar and southwestern China, are such big Star Wars fans, they named the ape after Luke Skywalker. They also chose the name, skywalker hoolock gibbon, because the Chinese characters mean ”Heaven’s movement,” according to the BBC. The new species is also known as the Gaoligong hoolock gibbon, named for Mt. Gaoligong on the border between China and Myanmar. The word ”hoolock” refers to the   of gibbon, which live across much of Asia. Hoolocks are endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which keeps track of species around the world. The researchers estimate there are fewer than 200 skywalker hoolock gibbons living in China. So, what sets the jedi ape apart from his fellow gibbons? ”Notably, the shape of the eyebrows and the color of the eye rings,” write the authors in a paper describing their findings, published Jan. 10 in the American Journal of Primatology. According to the paper, all hoolock gibbons have white eyebrows and some have white beards, but the skywalker hoolock gibbon has distinctive downturned brows  —   they tend to make the fluffy animal look pensive  —   that stand out against the black fur of the head. The light (brow) against the dark, one might say. The paper also includes a full genetic comparison showing the skywalker species is genetically distinct from other hoolock species. Upon learning of the new species, actor Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movies, tweeted ”So proud of this! First the Pez dispenser, then the Underoos  U. S. postage stamp. .. now this! #GorillaMyDreams #SimianSkywalker #JungleJedi.”"
243,"When Noel Anaya was just a year old, he and his five brothers and sisters were placed in the California foster care system. He has spent nearly all of his life in that system and has just turned 21. In California, that’s the age when people in foster care ”age out” of the system and lose the benefits the system provides. That process becomes official at a final court hearing. Anaya, along with Youth Radio, got rare permission to record the proceeding, where he read a letter he wrote about his experience in the foster care system.  Walking into court for my very last time as a foster youth, I feel like I’m getting a divorce from a system that I’ve been in a relationship with almost my entire life. It’s bittersweet because I’m losing guaranteed stipends for food and housing, as well as access to my social workers and my lawyer. But on the other hand, I’m relieved to finally get away from a system that ultimately failed me on its biggest promise. That one day it would find me a family who would love me. Little things, like when my judge Shawna Schwarz mispronounces my name, serve as a constant reminder that, ”Hey, I’m just a number.” I often come away feeling powerless and anonymous in the foster care system. ”Well, I’m reviewing my notes and it looks like the first time I got involved in your case was back in 2003,” Schwarz says. ”You’ve been in the system a long time.” I don’t have any pictures of my five siblings and me together as babies. Not a single one. Which makes Throwback Thursdays (#TBT) a little challenging. My biological parents weren’t ready to be parents. My father was abusive. Eventually Child Protective Services got involved, and my siblings and I went into the foster care system. We were separated and shuffled between foster homes, group homes, shelters, and for at least one of my siblings, incarceration. That’s why it was really important to me to make a statement in court, going on the record about how the foster care system failed my siblings and me. ”You have been pretty much one of our more successful young adults. Is there any advice you’d give us?” Schwarz says. I clear my throat. To whom it may concern. This is the year that I divorce you, your grey hands can no longer hurt me, your grey hands can never overpower me, your gray hands can never tell me that you love me because it’s too late. . ..  I use ”gray hands” to describe the foster care system, because it never felt warm or human. It’s institutional. Opposite the sort of unconditional love I imagine that parents try to show their kids. Your gray hands just taught me how to survive in a world. We never learned how to love ourselves unconditionally. I’ve been with multiple foster families, I’ve been with multiple shelters. How does a person like me not end up with a family. . .. In an ideal world, being a foster kid is supposed to be temporary. When it’s stable and appropriate, the preference is to reunite kids with their parents or family members. Adoption is the next best option. I used to dream of it. Having a mom and dad, siblings to play with . .. a dog. But when I hit 12, I realized that I was getting old. That adoption probably would never happen for me. In the system, I constantly had new social workers, lawyers, and case managers, which left me vulnerable. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized one of the main causes for the turnover was because of low wages and overflowing caseloads. Even my lawyer is currently juggling 130 other clients. At 21 you happily kick us off to the curb and say good luck I wish you well, I wish you the best but don’t come back because we can’t take you in. I’ve seen too many of my people give up on the educational system. . ..  I had hoped to finish college by the time I aged out of foster care, but I’m still in my junior year. I’m committed to getting my bachelor’s, despite the odds being terrible. According to the National Working Group on Foster Care and Education, only somewhere between 2 and 9 percent of former foster kids complete their college degree. I hope that you hear my words. And I hope that you listen to my signal of distress. I thank you for giving me closure. Thank you.  As the judge reads her final orders closing out my case, I promise myself that I’ll leave all the rage I feel about the foster care system inside the courtroom. That I won’t carry that hate and frustration with me for the rest of my life. There’s one more thing I need before I leave the courtroom  ” for the judge to bring the gavel down on this chapter of my life. ”Is that it?” I ask. ”No hammer?” ”You want me to do the gavel?” the judge says. ”One time please.” ” Alright, I’ll do the gavel,” Schwarz says. ”You know we never do that in real life.” I felt goosebumps when the gavel slapped down on my judge’s desk. Happy because, I’m no longer cared for by a system that was never that good at actually caring for me. And I’m anxious, too, about what life might be like next. This story was produced by Youth Radio. You can learn about how children journey through the foster care system at their website."
244,"The outcome of the    Obamacare debate could affect more than you might think, depending on just how the GOP congressional majority pursues its goal. Beyond the Affordable Care Act’s marquee achievements like guaranteeing health coverage for people with   conditions and allowing children to stay on parents’ plans until age 26, the roughly   law created a host of other provisions that affect the health of nearly every American. Some of these measures are evident every day. Some enjoy broad support, even though people often don’t always realize they spring from the statute. Here’s a sampling of sleeper provisions that could potentially land on the   floor: 1. Calorie counts at restaurants and   chains, Feeling hungry? The law tries to give you more information about what that burger or muffin will cost you in terms of calories, part of an effort to combat the ongoing obesity epidemic. Under the ACA, most restaurants and fast food chains with at least 20 stores must post calorie counts of their menu items. Several states, including New York, already had similar rules before the law. Although there was some pushback, the rule had industry support, possibly because posting calories was seen as less onerous than such things as taxes on sugary foods or beverages. The final rule went into effect in December after a   delay. One thing is still not clear: Does simply seeing that a particular muffin has more than 400 calories cause consumers to choose carrot sticks instead? Results are mixed. One large   done before the law went into effect didn’t show a significant reduction in calorie consumption, although the authors concluded that menu labeling is ”a relatively   education strategy that may lead consumers to purchase slightly fewer calories.” 2. Private   pumping space at work    but going back to work? The law requires employers to provide women break time to express milk for up to a year after giving birth and provide someplace other than a restroom to do so in private. In addition, most health plans must offer   support and equipment, such as pumps, without a patient copayment. 3. Limits on surprise medical bills from ER visits, If you find yourself in an emergency room, short on cash, uninsured or not sure if your insurance covers costs at that hospital, the Affordable Care Act provides some limited assistance. If you are in a hospital that is not part of your insurer’s network, the law requires all health plans to charge consumers the same copayments or   for    emergency care as they do for hospitals within their networks. Still, the hospital could ”balance bill” you for its costs, including ER care, that exceed what your insurer reimburses it. If it’s a nonprofit hospital, and about 78 percent of all hospitals are, the law requires it to post online a written financial assistance policy, spelling out whether it offers free or discounted care and the eligibility requirements for such programs. While not prescribing any particular set of eligibility requirements, the law requires hospitals to charge lower rates to patients who are eligible for their financial assistance programs. That’s compared with their gross charges, also known as chargemaster rates. 4. Community health support from nonprofit hospitals, The health law also requires nonprofit hospitals to justify the billions of dollars in tax exemptions they receive by documenting how they go about trying to improve the health of the community around them. Every three years, these hospitals have to perform a community needs assessment for the area the hospital serves. They also have to develop strategies to meet these needs and update them annually. The hospitals then must provide documentation as part of their annual reporting to the Internal Revenue Service. Failure to comply could leave them liable for a $50, 000 penalty. 5. A woman’s right to choose her   Most insurance plans must allow women to seek care from an   without having to get a referral from a primary care physician. While the majority of states already had such protections in place, those laws did not apply to   plans, which are the type often offered by large employers. The health law extended the rules to all new plans. Proponents say direct access makes it easier for women to seek not only reproductive health care, but also screening for such things as high blood pressure or cholesterol. 6. Expanded therapy coverage for children with autism, Advocates for children with autism and people with degenerative diseases argued that many insurance plans did not provide care their families needed. That’s because insurers would cover rehabilitation to help people regain functions they had lost, such as walking again after a stroke, but not care needed to either gain functions patients never had, such as speech therapy for a child who never learned how to talk, or to maintain a patient’s current level of function. The Affordable Care Act requires plans to offer coverage for such treatments, dubbed habilitative care, as part of the essential health benefits in plans sold to individuals and small groups. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation."
245,"When Donald Trump won the presidential election, he made a pledge to every citizen: that he would be president for all Americans. In the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, we’re going to hear about some of the communities that make up this nation, from the people who know them best, in our series Finding America. Gabriel Otero’s family has lived in Tucson, Ariz. for five generations. The region about 70 miles from Mexico has a complicated history. Lots of people have called it home. Otero is both Chicano and a member of an indigenous tribe, the Pascua Yaqui. At the Catholic Mission San Xavier del Bac, you can see this blending of Tucson’s heritage. Indigenous people, Latinos and people of European ancestry all worship there. It was founded more than 300 years ago, when the area belonged to Spain. Later, it became part of Mexico and finally the United States. For Otero, it is a sacred place. ”If someone’s ill, we visit ’em,” Otero says. ”If someone’s hungry, we feed ’em. That’s just our culture. It’s native, Hispanic, Mexican, Chicano. Our culture is very colorful, and you know, if you come here, you’ll feel that. And you’re gonna love it.” Use the audio link above to hear the full story. "
246,"Laura Marling’s latest taste from what may be her best album so far is ”Wild Fire,” a beautiful, breezy reflection on the universal search for identity and purpose. It’s an immediately arresting mix of spare, fluttering percussion and gospel harmonies with gently strummed acoustic guitars. Marling lets the song breathe and slowly open up. It feels like the dawn. ”Would you die to know how you’re seen?” Marling sings. ”Are you getting away with who you’re trying to be?” This is the second single the singer has released from her next   Semper Femina. She previously dropped the album opener ”Soothing,” which we featured on All Songs Considered. Semper Femina is due out on Marling’s label, More Alarming Records, March 10."
247,"There’s a   charity movement starting to take hold in neighborhoods across the country. Think of those ”little free library” boxes, but with a twist: These are small pantries stocked with free food and personal care items like toothbrushes and diapers for people in need. They’re found near churches, outside businesses and in front of homes. Maggie Ballard, who lives in Wichita, Kan. calls hers a ”blessing box.” ”I felt like this is something that I could do  —   something small that you know, would benefit so many people so long as the word got out about it,” she says. The bright red box is about 2 feet wide and is mounted on a post near the street. Ballard and her son check on it every day and restock as needed. ”My son is 6 years old, so it gives him a little chore to kind of watch it and see what comes and goes and who comes and goes, and maybe learn a little lesson from it,” she says. There’s a door on the front of the box but no lock, so anyone can take what they need  . In the beginning, Ballard was providing all of the food. Then word spread and donations from the community starting pouring in. Stacey Schwanke has stopped by with food donations a few times since the box went up in October. ”We dropped off some breakfast food, some pasta, some sauce, some crackers and some soups,” Schwanke says. The food pantry idea has been spreading through social media over the past six months. Ballard’s friend built hers after she saw a picture of one on Facebook. Similar ” ” food pantries have gone up across the country, in states like Oklahoma, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida and Minnesota. Much of it seems to trace back to Jessica McClard, who created what she calls the ”little free pantry” in northwest Arkansas. ”The products that are stocked are put directly inside the pantry and turnover is in about 30 to 45 minutes,” McClard says. ”The frequency of the turnover and the fact that other sites in town are also turning over that frequently, it suggests to me that the need is tremendous.” All of the items inside the boxes are free and there are no forms to fill out. Those using the boxes come and go as they wish. And that sense of anonymity is something you won’t find at traditional community food pantries. Ballard has seen only a few people using her pantry, because most visitors come when it’s dark. ”Most of the traffic is in the middle of the night, I would say between midnight and 7 in the morning,” she says. Ballard says it’s both awesome and sad to see the turnover of goods every day. On Christmas Eve she watched as a family of three opened her box to find a bag of bagels and started eating them right there. McClard says these   pantries are multiplying because of their simple concept. ”We’re all short on time and money, and this is a way that people can feel like they are making a difference,” she says. The food pantries come in all sizes. Some have religious connections and are located near churches. Others are adopted by businesses whose employees want to pay it forward. All are serving up food and supplies to anyone in need."
248,"For all of the terrible things that have happened to his city of Jalawla in northern Iraq, Yacub Youssef seems like a happy man. Youssef is the   director  —   essentially the mayor  —   of this small city just a few miles from Iran and about 90 miles north of Baghdad. ISIS occupied it in 2014, a few days after it took over Mosul. When the ISIS fighters were driven out two months later, Jalawla was left in ruins. As we walk around town, Youssef stops and jokes with residents in Arabic and Kurdish, kisses babies and laughs some more. He shows us a concrete bridge across the Diyala River, repaired after ISIS blew it up. It’s the town’s biggest achievement. ”If the government would have done it, it would have cost millions,” he says, and taken two or three years. Instead, he persuaded 35 local residents to kick in the $180, 000 cost and they repaired it in less than a year. Local contractors donated some of the labor. Jalawla is part of Diyala Province, controlled by the central Iraqi government. But it is part of a large swath of territory also claimed by the Kurdistan regional government, which broke away from Baghdad in 1991. When the Iraqi army retreated after ISIS attacked three years ago, Kurdish forces moved in and have made clear that they’re not leaving. Although both the Iraqi and Kurdistan governments claim Jalawla, neither has been willing to take responsibility for rebuilding it. ”I called Diyala [authorities] and they said, ’We can’t help you.’ The Kurdish Regional Government said they were going through difficult circumstances, so I had to search for another solution,” Youssef says. His solution was to ask townspeople to pitch in. In a country where people expect the government to provide jobs, health care, electricity, water and even land to build houses, this wasn’t easy. ”You need to convince the citizen to pay from his own pocket,” Youssef says. ”It’s not normal. He’s coming from a catastrophe  —   he sees his house destroyed, there’s no work and he’s been in a camp for two years, and you say, ’Give me’? It’s difficult.” Youssef, a former sports teacher, says once explosive experts cleared hundreds of explosives laid in the city, he brought families back in stages and persuaded them to clean up their own streets. Residents pooled money to buy neighborhood generators for electricity. His wife sold her jewelry to help repair the primary school, he says. Local electrical workers soon figured out how to restore Jalawla’s downed power lines and replaced missing transformers. ”I told the governor of Diyala we had electricity and he said, ’Where did you get it from? ’” Youssef says with a laugh. Students are back in school, which was repaired by residents after it was damaged in fighting. Townspeople even pooled their books for a book fair, to make sure every child had something to read. Youssef says those who rebuilt the bridge won’t get their money back, but their names will be recorded in history as having restored the ”Challenge Bridge.” Jalawla’s history, as well as its future, is complicated. In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who saw Kurds as a threat, expelled hundreds of thousands of them from their homes in the north of Iraq and resettled Sunni Arabs in their place. The city is now 80 percent Sunni Arab. Youssef is paid by the provincial government, which gets its funding from Baghdad. But he is a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the area. ”I have to balance my relations,” he says. His own background helps. His father, a train conductor, is Arab. His mother is Kurdish. He is married to a Turkmen, the third biggest ethnic group in Jalawla. Youssef says he is Iraqi before he is Arab or Kurdish. ”When we first came back to Jalawla, it was in ruins. Desolate,” he says. ”The government offices were destroyed, the market destroyed, the houses burned . .. It would never occur to you that just a few months before, there were 63, 000 people living here.” His own office was blown up and his house leveled. But he says city officials discovered how much residents loved their city. And international organizations came to help. ”An organization came to us and said, ’Our funds are from Israel. I said, ’It doesn’t matter where you [are] from. I am grateful that you are coming to support Jalawla.’ It’s like my car is stuck in the mud. I will not ask where you are from and say, ’Don’t push the car because you are Muslim or Christian.’ I need someone to push it with me.” Here, as in other communities, families whose relatives join ISIS are barred from coming back. Youssef says he is negotiating with security authorities to allow those he knows are not a threat to return. On the main street, shopkeepers have repaired the damage and reopened. Ruffled white and pink wedding dresses flutter in the breeze outside dress shops. Omar Najeeb came back a year ago to find his storehouse of secondhand appliances completely looted. He says townspeople like Youssef because ”he works 24 hours a day. He is close to us.” Hadi Abid hangs up brightly colored head scarves in a corrugated iron stall. Asked if residents want to be part of Iraq or part of Iraqi Kurdistan, he shrugs. ”We don’t care if one side or the other provides our security,” he says, ”as long as our lives are back to normal.” As for Youssef, he says he is trying to figure out how to improve services and beautify the city. ”The city is our mother,” he says. ”From her, we learn and we progress. She gives us life. Our duty is to be good to our mother.”"
249,"Volkswagen has agreed to pay $4. 3 billion to settle civil and criminal allegations over its diesel emissions cheating scheme involving some 590, 000 vehicles in the U. S. The company has also agreed to plead guilty to three criminal felony counts. The settlement amount includes $2. 8 billion in criminal penalties and $1. 5 billion in civil claims, according to a statement from the Justice Department, which announced the deal Wednesday in Washington, D. C. The company also agreed to work with an independent monitor for a period of three years. ”For years, Volkswagen advertised its vehicles as complying with federal   measures, calling them clean diesel,” U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters. ”But our investigation has revealed they were anything but.” Volkswagen has admitted installing software in diesel vehicles that cheated on emissions tests, then lying about it to regulators. The Justice Department lists the three felony counts as: The plea deal is subject to federal court approval. ”This wasn’t simply the action of some faceless, multinational corporation,” Deputy U. S. Attorney General Sally Yates said. ”This conspiracy involved    individuals who used their positions within Volkswagen to deceive both regulators and consumers. From the start of this investigation, we’ve been committed to ensuring that those responsible for criminal activity are held accountable.” Six of the company’s   executives have also been indicted by a federal grand jury in Michigan in connection to the conspiracy, which unfolded over the course of nearly 10 years, the DOJ said. All are charged with ”conspiracy to defraud the United States, defraud VW’s U. S. customers and violate the Clean Air Act by making false representations.” Four are charged with further Clean Air Act violations, and four are charged with wire fraud. All of those executives are German nationals and five of them are currently in Germany, Lynch said. She told reporters it was too early to speculate how the case will proceed, but added that ”we’ve always worked very well with out German colleagues on various law enforcement matters.” One of the executives indicted, Oliver Schmidt, was arrested last weekend in Miami. The company said Tuesday that the settlement is subject to approval by ”competent U. S. courts” as by its management and supervisory boards, and boards of several affiliated companies. The EPA says the emissions scandal included Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche models with 2.  and 3.  diesel engines that were released from model years 2009 to 2016. All told, some 11 million vehicles worldwide were equipped with the cheat devices. In October, a federal judge signed off on a separate, $14. 7 billion settlement between VW, consumers and the U. S. government. Volkswagen agreed to pay as much as $10 billion to buy back or repair vehicles involved in the scandal and to pay nearly $5 billion in environmental remediation. That agreement was, as we reported, ”the largest civil settlement in automaker history, and the largest false advertising case the Federal Trade Commission has ever seen.”"
250,"In late October, just weeks ahead of the election,   Donald Trump made a quick detour to Washington for the official opening of his new   hotel, just a few blocks from the White House. During a   ceremony, Trump told the crowd that the   roughly $200 million renovation project at the historic Old Post Office Building was done ahead of schedule and under budget, thanks to what he called an incredible team of people  —   ”including hundreds of construction workers, electricians, maintenance workers and so many others who helped make this project a reality. They’re really the important ones.” Now some of those companies would like final payment for their work. Documents obtained by NPR show three   companies have filed liens against Trump International Hotel totaling more than $5 million. One company, Joseph J. Magnolia Inc. filed a $2. 98 million mechanic’s lien in December. According to the filing, the firm worked on the hotel from September 2014 to December 2016 and ”completed all plumbing, mechanical and HVAC work, along with site sewer, water, storm and water services.” AES Electrical Inc. based in Laurel, Md. says it’s owed $2. 075 million for its work on the hotel for the same period of time as Magnolia. Sterling, Va.  AD Construction filed a lien in November saying it was owed $79, 700. The firm’s lawyer, Richard Sissman, says AD is a small,   company that was subcontracting on the Trump hotel project. ”The nature of the work was . .. trim and casework and architectural millwork, wall base, crown molding this is all fine carpentry,” he says. Sissman says AD’s lien is relatively small compared to the other two, but it’s a lot of money to his client. ”On these big jobs these should be paid. It’s ridiculous that a   operator has to beg for its money,” he says. ”It’s put him in a very bad situation right now.” Trump has faced many liens  —   and lawsuits  —   for alleged nonpayment for work in the past. Steven Schooner, a contracts specialist with the George Washington University law school, says resolving the liens in this case could ultimately involve the federal government because it holds the lease on the building where the Trump hotel is located. ”The way the lease is structured, it said they may step in and discharge the lien but they’re not actually required to,” he says. Still, Schooner says as a rule, the government wants its tenants  —   like Trump International Hotel  —   to solve its own problems. Requests for comment from Trump’s communication team about the liens were not returned."
251,"Sometimes, in the process of recording music, a band’s sweat, calluses and grit go in one end and 0s and 1s come out the other with a sort of sterility that belies the original wild magic. It is difficult, and far more rare, to capture music burning with all the fury, fire and grit that make you fall in love with a live band in the first place. It is alchemy. And it’s achieved in spades by a band known as The Wooden Sky. In the title track from its fifth   record, Swimming In Strange Waters, the Toronto   transports you to frontman Gavin Gardiner’s home studio. Gardiner’s guttural and rousing vocals, the psychedelic swirl of screaming guitars and whirling organ and a rhythm section that feels at once deeply rooted and dangerously unpredictable are all mixed by the deft hand of John Agnello. You can feel it swelling into an almost uncomfortable wave of power  —   and that’s before you consider the intense and important story behind the song. ”’Swimming In Strange Waters,’” Gardiner says, ”is my attempt to come to terms with the anger I still have about my grandfather’s sexual abuse of my mother and its lasting effects on my family.” Listen, and listen again. Tucked in alongside the wailing guitars and warbling synths, you will find a brave poet is using his voice to make the unknown knowable  —   or, in his own words, an artist who ”feel[s] the weight of responsibility to act and make things better for the people to come.” That sense of responsibility has always been present for The Wooden Sky, which has previously written about the violence endured by indigenous women and whose upcoming record will include both a rallying cry against the Keystone XL pipeline and a song inspired by refugee families. This is a band that handles delicate subjects with psychedelic swagger and a depth of lyrical intelligence that is never too    but always powerful. Swimming In Strange Waters comes out April 7 via Nevado Music."
252,"Democrats don’t have too many opportunities to set the agenda in Congress right now. They don’t decide what bills are called for a vote, and, due to changes in Senate procedures, won’t be able to block any of   Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks without Republican defections. One thing Democrats can affect are the headlines coming out of the first wave of confirmation hearings. So on Tuesday, Senate Democrats did their best to pressure Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, nominee for attorney general, and Gen. John Kelly, nominated to lead the Department of Homeland Security, into distancing themselves from their likely future boss on key issues  —   and raise controversial statements Trump has made. The playbook worked, with questions from Democratic lawmakers leading to moments where Sessions disagreed with Trump’s initial campaign vow to ban Muslims from entering the United States, and Kelly doubting the value of a border wall as a deterrent to immigrants entering the country illegally. Here are six moments where Democrats (and one Republican) took digs at Trump as they questioned his first Cabinet nominees. While the Kelly and Sessions hearings were viewed as successes for both nominees, headlines like this are one reason why it’s advantageous for Senate Republicans and the Trump transition to have so many in such a tight window  —   so numerous statements like these compete for attention. Multiple   hearings will compete for attention again on Wednesday, as   Trump is scheduled to hold his first press conference since being elected. If Democrats force Rex Tillerson and other nominees to distance themselves from Trump, Republicans hope fewer eyes will be drawn to those statements. Here’s what’s on tap for Wednesday’s hearings: Russia has been dominating the headlines out of Washington  —   even in the hours leading up to Tillerson’s hearing  —   and that will likely be a major theme when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questions Trump’s pick to lead the State Department. Rex Tillerson knows Russia well. As Exxon Mobil CEO, he has negotiated deals with a Russian energy giant, Rosneft, including a project to drill in the Arctic, which was put on hold because of U. S. sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its actions in Eastern Ukraine. With Exxon Mobil shareholder interests in mind, Tillerson opposed those sanctions. The ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Ben Cardin,  . plans to press Tillerson about how he would approach this topic now if confirmed as America’s top diplomat. ”I think you’re going to find that there’s going to be a great deal of interest as to whether Mr. Tillerson understands that he is no longer going to be CEO of Exxon Mobil but that he’s going to be secretary of state, the nation’s top diplomat,” Cardin told reporters on the eve of the hearing. Cardin was one of 10 senators to introduce the ”Countering Russian Hostilities Act of 2017.” The bipartisan legislation would impose more sanctions on Russia over its   as well as its actions in Ukraine and Syria. In his prepared remarks, Tillerson is to tell the senators that he’s ” ” about Russia and believes Moscow should be held to account for its actions. ”Our NATO allies are right to be alarmed at a resurgent Russia. But it was in the absence of American leadership that this door was left open and unintended signals were sent,” he plans to say. Activists are encouraging U. S. senators to also press Tillerson on his views about climate change and whether he will distance himself from the interests of an energy company, where he spent his entire career, often doing deals with autocratic states. ExxonMobil severed ties with Tillerson to clear up concerns about conflict of interest. That too will come under scrutiny.   Diplomatic Correspondent Michele Kelemen  Compared to the tough grilling Tillerson could get, Transportation   Elaine Chao is expected to breeze through her confirmation. Members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will likely have a lot of questions for Chao about highway, rail and aviation safety regulations, new technologies such as   cars and trucks, and most notably,   Trump’s call to invest up to a trillion dollars in the nation’s infrastructure. But tough questions seem unlikely. ”It should be a piece of cake,” the ranking Democrat on the committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, told Politico. Chao, 63, served as labor secretary for eight years under President George W. Bush, and previously in transportation posts during the first Bush and Reagan administrations. She’s considered experienced, politically savvy and has been praised by transportation industry groups. ”I don’t know if they could have found a more qualified, dedicated public servant,” said Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who served as transportation secretary during President Obama’s first term. ”She knows how to run an agency and she will bring lots of experience and expertise,” LaHood told NPR recently. He also said she will be an ”outstanding secretary of transportation.” Chao is also a longtime Washington insider  —   seen as one key appointment who defies Trump’s call to ”drain the swamp.” As the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, she has close friendships with many of the senators who will be voting on her confirmation. So if any of Trump’s Cabinet choices are a sure bet to win confirmation, Chao is it.   Transportation Correspondent David Schaper  The Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its consideration of Trump’s nominee to be attorney general on Wednesday, though Sessions finished his testimony after a full day in front of his fellow senators on Tuesday. Outside witnesses will testify about the record of the Alabama senator on the second day  —   both for and against. The high profile supporters who want to see him lead the Justice Department include former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and the head of the Fraternal Order of Police, Chuck Caterbury  —   in addition to law enforcement officials from Alabama. Civil rights groups are opposing the Sessions nomination, and the head of the NAACP, Cornell Brooks, and ACLU legal director David Cole will both testify on the second day of the Sessions hearing. Two of Sessions’ colleagues from Capitol Hill will also oppose him. Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, is expected to highlight concerns about whether Sessions will enforce civil and voting rights laws. So is Sen. Corey Booker,  . J. in an extraordinary step. His decision to testify against the nomination of a fellow senator  —   who has received a warm reception from many other colleagues  —   is being widely described as unprecedented.   Justice Correspondent Carrie Johnson"
253,"Updated at 8 p. m. ET, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, broke with the   on many of his key campaign promises on immigration during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, including a border wall, Muslims coming into the U. S. and torture techniques. The former head of the U. S. Southern Command, Kelly agreed with a question from Sen. John McCain,  . over the strategy to defend the country’s southern border, both from immigrants crossing into the U. S. illegally and from drug traffickers, saying that a border wall would not be enough. ”A physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job. It has to be a layered defense,” Kelly said, calling for more human patrols and assistance from drones and other sensors. Kelly also stressed the need to work with other Latin American countries to forge better relationships to stop drug trafficking. Kelly agreed with McCain that waterboarding should continue to be prohibited and that the Geneva Conventions should be followed. ”I don’t think we should ever come close to crossing a line that is beyond what we as Americans would expect to follow in terms of interrogation techniques,” Kelly said. During the campaign, Trump pledged that he would bring back the controversial form of torture in order to fight terrorism. Kelly also said he had ”high confidence” in U. S. intelligence reports that found that Russia had engaged in cyberattacks in order to influence the U. S. elections. Trump has cast doubt on those findings. Pressed by Sen. Gary Peters,  . on whether it was lawful to conduct surveillance on mosques or create a database of Muslims in the U. S. Kelly agreed that would violate the Constitution. ”I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to focus on something like religion as the only factor,” Kelly said. The Department of Homeland Security is a sprawling enterprise, with a budget of some $40 billion and a   employees. Its responsibilities encompass everything from natural disasters (FEMA) to airport security (TSA) presidential security (U. S. Secret Service) the Coast Guard and cybersecurity. DHS agencies are also responsible for defending the nation’s borders and overseeing the immigration system. It’s those areas that are most in the sights of the incoming president, who has called for measures including a wall along the U. S. border with Mexico, the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the U. S. and ”extreme vetting” of immigrants wishing to enter the country. Trump said on the campaign trail that screening should be focused on those coming from ”some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism.” Those comments were an adaptation of the ban on Muslims entering the U. S. that Trump had proposed at the end of 2015. Asked by Sen. Kamala Harris,  . about deportation priorities, Kelly suggested that undocumented children who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would ”probably not be at the top of the list” and that he would ”keep an open mind.” Kelly said that the incoming administration’s immigration policy is still ”ongoing,” but that he has ”not been involved in those discussions.” Overall, Kelly was   by both Republicans and Democrats during his testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Ranking member Claire McCaskill,  . praised him during her opening statement and later tweeted that he was a ”good choice” to lead DHS. Kelly was introduced by McCain, Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations. Kelly was an adviser to Gates at the Pentagon. Gates praised Kelly, calling him ”one of the finest people I have ever known,” also saying, ”I would trust him with my life.” The    Kelly had appeared before lawmakers before, in his role as head of the U. S. Southern Command, which is responsible for military matters in the Caribbean, Central and South America. Kelly’s nomination is unlikely to be met with much opposition, and the questions on the committee bore that out. He has built up relationships with lawmakers who respect his service and his sacrifice. (Kelly lost a son to combat in Afghanistan.)"
254,"  Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he plans to nominate David Shulkin to be his secretary of veterans affairs, a position that requires Senate confirmation. Shulkin is currently the undersecretary for health at the VA, which means he runs the Veterans Health Administration. He was nominated for that position by President Obama in March 2015 and confirmed by the Senate that June. Shulkin’s official bio says he is a physician  —   a   internist  —   and was the chief executive or chief medical officer of several hospitals and hospital systems. He is also an entrepreneur who founded a health care information company called DoctorQuality. Notably, he is not a veteran. As NPR’s Quil Lawrence reported last month, the VA has always been headed by a veteran. ”I have no doubt Dr. Shulkin will be able to lead the turnaround our Department of Veterans Affairs needs,” Trump said in a statement following the announcement. ”Dr. Shulkin has the experience and the vision to ensure we will meet the healthcare needs of every veteran.” Last year, NPR and several member stations jointly reported on the flaws and failures of the VA’s ”Veterans Choice” program, which is meant to allow veterans to find private doctors. As the head of the Veterans Health Administration, Shulkin spoke with NPR about the experiences of veterans left waiting months for treatment under the program. ”When I hear stories like that, it’s completely unacceptable,” he told NPR: ”The first responsibility that we have to our veterans is to make sure those that need urgent care are getting care on time. ”This is a different VA. We’ve brought in people from the outside who have private sector experience. And what we’re saying is that we have to do business differently. . .. We know how to make this program work better.” Trump considered a series of possible VA secretaries before deciding on Shulkin  —   he said on Wednesday that he interviewed more than 100 candidates. Quil reported that the   met with Iraq veteran Pete Hegseth, who favors privatizing VA health care, as well as former Sen. Scott Brown,  . who is a National Guard veteran.   Republican Rep. Jeff Miller, who was the head of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, was a Trump adviser who was also considered a candidate. Both Politico and The Washington Post report that several possible candidates for VA secretary rejected Trump’s overtures. The secretary of agriculture and chair of the Council of Economic Advisers are the only   positions for which Trump still has not announced his choice of nominee."
255,"It’s been used to buy drugs. Guns. Child porn. And to launder money. But   institutions like the World Bank, UNICEF and USAID think it could be a force for good, helping the poorest of the poor. It’s a technology called blockchain  —   a global, online ledger that’s free for anyone to use and that isn’t regulated by any one party. Maybe you’ve heard of it. And maybe you don’t know exactly what it is. That’s because it’s not easy to define. Indeed, in a list of ”ins and outs” for 2017, the Washington Post included ”not being able to explain blockchain.” But we’ll try to explain it  —   and also explain the way it could be a boon to humanity. What’s the big deal?  By now, you’ve probably heard of bitcoin. It’s made headlines over the past few years for being the digital currency of choice for legitimate online purchases and money transfer  —   and also for laundering money and illicit purchases. It’s built on an underlying technology called blockchain  —   which is basically an online database that’s considered to be secure, private and generally hackproof. But blockchain has the potential to do more than send money. It can help people store information securely and permanently on the Web. For economists and technologists who work in the developing world, this opens up a world of opportunity. What if blockchain could be used as a force for good  —   a safe place, say, for a poor Kenyan farmer to store the documents that prove he really does own his land? How does it work, exactly? Imagine you have a bit of important information that you’d like to store on the Web, like a birth or health care record. You may choose to store it in one of many blockchain networks to keep those data safe. To do that, you must add your record to something called a ”block,” a chunk of data on the Web. But that’s just the first step. To be archived  —   in other words, to become a permanent record  —   your data must be linked to the ”blockchain” in a global network of millions of computers. Think of the blockchain as a 21st century version of the   paper ledger that businesses once used to keep track of their transactions. Once the block is linked to the chain, everyone in the network gets an updated copy. So if one computer gets shut down, that’s not a problem. The millions of others in the network have a copy of the blockchain, and your record is safe. But don’t worry. Your data, once on the blockchain, become what is known as ”” which means people can see that a transaction was made but won’t see any specifics. Here’s what else makes the blockchain so special: It cuts out the middleman. There are already lots of places where information can be stored online. Your bank keeps track of your financial transactions. Facebook is a compendium of what your friends are up to. The U. S. Patent and Trademark office keeps registration of new contraptions. In each of these cases  —   and many, many others  —   there is someone who owns and manages all that information. And that could present problems. First of all, that middleman is holding your data and in theory could do whatever he wants with the information  —   sell it to another party, for example. Some middlemen aren’t willing to serve everybody. Poor people, for example, might not have enough money to open a bank account. And there’s another problem: The middleman could also be hacked. Once your data are part of the blockchain, it’s difficult to change or remove those data. A group of special users in the network, called miners, help keep it honest by verifying the transactions. If that doesn’t happen, the blockchain won’t work. Some apps and software built using the technology have had weaknesses. In 2016, more than $50 million was siphoned from a project called the DAO. And in 2014, $480 million was stolen by hackers from a digital currency exchange called Mt. Gox. Still, experts believe that blockchain technology is more secure than any other system on the Web right now. ”Across all these computers, [these networks] are using the highest level of cryptography, infinitely more secure than the computer systems we have at the CIA and the Democratic National Party,” says Don Tapscott, author of Blockchain Revolution. He gave a TED Talk on the technology in August.  Why it could be a game changer, The nature of blockchain technology  —   that it’s secure, hard to mess with and open to both the rich and the poor  —   is precisely why it could be a game changer for people living in   countries or fragile states at risk of economic collapse, corruption or conflict, says Rosanna Chan, an economist at the World Bank. Say you’re a small farmer in Haiti. You’ve dutifully registered your land, which your family depends on for food and income, with the government. The paper copy of your registration was then filed in a storeroom. But the earthquake in 2010 destroyed all the municipal buildings where they were stored. Now you don’t have proof that you’re a landowner. Or let’s say the record of your registration is a digital file on a government database. It could be tampered with or erased, or maybe the database uses technology that is outdated or unsearchable. But if you filed your land deed in a blockchain, perhaps you could avert those problems. That’s why Chan, who formed the World Bank’s Blockchain Working Group in February, calls it a ”magic ledger.” On a small scale, some farmers are already storing land deeds on a blockchain. Bitland, a blockchain platform that registers land in Ghana, has filed 500 deeds since January 2016. The platform hopes to move to Botswana, Kenya and Uruguay next. Blockchain has other potential benefits. A platform called BitPesa is helping to speed up the flow of cash from businesses in China to their African employees, who then send the money back home to their families. The   startup, launched in 2013, uses bitcoin to facilitate   instant payments online. The old way of making payments is usually handled by finance companies like Western Union. It could take days and the sender might have to pay high fees. According to the World Bank,   Africa is the most expensive region to send money to, with average remittance costs reaching 12. 4 percent in 2012. There’s also a   startup called Grid Singularity that’s exploring how ”pay as you go” solar power in developing countries could be made more secure and efficient, with financial transactions recorded on a blockchain. And in February, Sony Global Education adapted blockchain to file academic records, showing its promise in the education space  —   an area the World Bank has been watching. But there’s one problem . .. People in     countries are ”in a poor position to adopt the technology,” says Brett Scott, author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance and a February paper on blockchain for the U. N. Research Institute for Social Development, an independent group within the United Nations. Right now, if people want to use a   platform, they need a computer or smartphone and an Internet connection. The majority of people in   Africa don’t have these things. The challenge, says Scott, is ”how do you make it function on a simple mobile phone?” Chan from the World Bank and others across the global development community are eager to work that out. ”Right now, it’s like we have a hammer. And we’re not sure what it looks like or how to use it,” she says. ”But we get the sense that this hammer is useful.”"
256,"Italy has been described as the world’s biggest   museum. And with illegally excavated antiquities, looting of unguarded,   churches and smuggling of precious artworks, it’s also an art theft playground. But thanks to an elite police squad, Italy is also at the forefront in combating the illicit trade in artworks  —   believed to be among the world’s biggest forms of trafficking and estimated to be worth billions. Italy’s Carabinieri for Protection of Italy’s Cultural Heritage recently sponsored an exhibit at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini museum, showcasing some of its biggest successes. A fifth grade class of a Roman elementary school came to see some 200 artworks that were stolen and then recovered. Lt. Sebastiano Antoci, a   veteran of the elite squad, told the kids how its investigations work. ”We tail suspects or use wiretaps so we can listen to the bad guys’ phone calls or we check their bank accounts. And when we’re out in the field,” he said, ”we look like everyone else, we don’t wear uniforms.” The   listened attentively to the art detective as he pointed to two medieval frescoes. ”We recovered the lamb in Switzerland,” he said, ”and the Christ in the United States. They’re back together again for the first time since they were stolen”  —   in 1978 from a small church in Guidonia, a town south of Rome. In 1969, Italy created the world’s first specialized police force to combat art crime. It now numbers 280 investigators who also safeguard artworks in regions struck by floods and earthquakes. The unit also combats antiquities trafficking fueled by conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan. At the Rome exhibit, Antoci showed the schoolchildren a marble sculpture that depicts a man and his two sons. It originates from the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra  —   which recently came under ISIS control. Adding to his knowledge of art history the excitement of a detective tale, Antoci tells the kids the story of the sculpture, which was tracked down as part of an investigation into financial irregularities and dates back some 2, 000 years. ”It’s a funerary sculpture,” he tells them. ”The terrorists smuggled it out of Syria and put it on the illicit antiques market. We tracked it down to an Italian businessman in Piedmont, who bought it just it a few months ago.” Gen. Fabrizio Parulli, the commander of this unique police force, explains what’s needed to become a good art sleuth. ”First of all, you need to be a good investigator,” he says. Speaking in his Rome office  —   located in a Baroque square that looks like an opera stage set  —   Parulli says his agents start as police officers and then get specialized training in art history, archaeology, restoration and recognizing counterfeit works. But the heart of the investigative work is done elsewhere, in a large barracks in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood. Sitting at a computer, Lt. Francesco Ficarella demonstrates the jewel in the crown of the cultural heritage protection squad  —   a database known as Leonardo, containing names and photos of close to 6 million registered artworks, mostly from Italy. Of those, 1. 2 million are listed as stolen, missing, illegally excavated or smuggled. Leonardo, he says, ”is a crucial instrument not only for our national police forces but also for those abroad  —   it’s the biggest artworks database in the world,” he says. The squad’s recovery record is high. In 2014, it managed to recover 137, 000 works with an estimated value of $500 million. Until they’re returned to the owners, recovered pieces are warehoused on the ground floor of the Trastevere building. Behind an armored door, tens of thousands of artworks are stored  —   wooden crucifixes, marble busts, bronze statues and hundreds of paintings, all carefully labeled. These recovered pieces serve as evidence in criminal cases that are still open. One of them, ”Leda and the Swan,” by 16th century painter Lelio Orsi, was auctioned for $1. 6 million in New York. Smuggled out of Italy, it was tracked down, thanks to cooperation from U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But there’s one piece that has eluded this elite art squad for almost three decades: a    canvas of the Nativity by the Baroque master Caravaggio. It was stolen in Sicily in 1969, the same year this special unit was created. Lt. Calogero Gliozzo says the painting’s whereabouts were known until the early 1980s. ”We know the names of the robbers and we know the Mafia family that was hiding it,” he says, ”but then there was a Mafia war and we lost track of the painting.” One Mafia informant told police he had heard that the canvas had been destroyed by rats at a farm where it was hidden. But here at the police squad, the art sleuths are convinced the masterpiece still exists  —   and that one day, they will succeed in recovering this No. 1 artwork on their most wanted list."
257,"It was on a routine patrol in 1986 that Steven McDonald’s life took a dramatic turn. McDonald, who was just two years into his service with the New York Police Department, and his partner confronted a trio of boys in Central Park. Within seconds, one of those teens drew a handgun and shot McDonald three times. That shooting left him paralyzed from the neck down. Yet his life was arguably shaped as much by those three bullets as by the three words he famously expressed afterward: ”I forgive him.” McDonald died Tuesday at the age of 59, after being hospitalized Friday for a heart attack. In the more than three decades after his paralysis, McDonald took on the stature of a    symbol of forgiveness  —   a police officer whose sacrifice was heralded by generations of mayors and institutions in New York City. ”No one could have predicted that Steven would touch so many people, in New York and around the world,” NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill said in a statement. ”Like so many cops, Steven joined the N. Y. P. D. to make a difference in people’s lives. And he accomplished that every day.” Perhaps never more so than on the day his son, Conor, was baptized in 1987, roughly nine months after the shooting. In a letter read to the media by his wife, Patricia, McDonald wrote of his anger toward his shooter  —   and his hope for healing. ”I’m sometimes angry at the   boy who shot me,” she read, according to The New York Times. ”But more often I feel sorry for him. I only hope that he can turn his life into helping and not hurting people. I forgive him and hope that he can find peace and purpose in his life.” In the years that followed, McDonald opened and carried on a correspondence with the teen who shot him, Shavod Jones, who served 8   years in prison for attempted murder. The correspondence ended after McDonald ”turned down a request from Mr. Jones’s family to seek parole,” according to the Times, saying ”he was not knowledgeable or capable enough to intervene.” Jones died just days after his release from prison in 1995, from injuries sustained as a passenger during a motorcycle accident. McDonald went on to become something of an ambassador for the NYPD and for his Catholic faith. He met with Pope John Paul II, spoke to New York City classrooms,   a book on his recovery, campaigned for gun control and against stem cell research, even had an award named in his honor by the New York Rangers. The Rangers remembered him in a video tribute Tuesday night. He is survived by his wife and longtime caregiver, Patricia, and his son, Conor, who was an infant when McDonald’s famous statement was delivered. Conor McDonald was recently promoted to the rank of detective in the NYPD."
258,"”A Newborn Calf Isn’t Afraid of Tigers” is a typical chapter title in Lotus, Lijia Zhang’s compelling debut novel. Readers will find the entire text rich in Chinese proverbs, as well as folk wisdom of a more prosaic variety. Characters employ sage sayings in spoken form, as a kind of parlor game, and the author scatters aphorisms liberally throughout the narrative, with an effect that is both charming and   after the titular Lotus loses face, she keeps on going despite the hurt, because ”a cracked jar doesn’t mind being smashed again.” These lines could come across as stilted, but here they delight, as does so much of this sensitively drawn literary world. Lotus herself is a charmer her given name is Luo Xiangzhu, but she uses the nickname when working as a ji, or prostitute. She has escaped the provincial village of her birth, Mulberry Gully, and as a teenager journeyed a thousand miles south to Shenzhen, a seaside city just north of Hong Kong. Winding up in a red light neighborhood that she comes to call home, she enters the oldest profession on an inebriated whim. China’s Communists rejected prostitution as strictly a capitalist phenomenon  —   but it existed, and it reflected a class system the Party also tried to deny. At the top were ”second wives”  —   a version of the classic concubine. In descending order, came   call girls, dance hall workers, masseuses and street hookers. Lotus, occupying the lowest rung but one, thinks about ”how she had spent hours of her life . .. smiling her red smile at every passing man.” Burdened by the clichéd heart of gold, she builds her clientele at the Moonflower Massage Parlor, sending home money to bankroll her younger brother’s college education. Beautiful, modest and soulful, Lotus attracts the attention of an aspiring photographer and intellectual named Hu Binbing, or Bing. He becomes enmeshed in the lives of Shenzhen’s massage parlor denizens while doing a magazine photo essay Lotus serves as the star of the piece, identified only as ”Girl A.” An arresting image of her face launches Bing into new realms of fame and opportunity. Zhang delicately sketches Bing’s growing infatuation with Lotus and hers with him. They come together, fall apart, reunite. You root for them not necessarily as a romantic couple, but as two souls finding their true mission in life. But this is above all Lotus’s story, in which she fights her way out of the sex trade to become a beloved primary school teacher. Though the personal relationship remains in the foreground, the political and economic realities of modern China lend the novel greater depth, a heady mix that might be called  . The author has a light touch, even when delineating the underbelly of contemporary Chinese culture. She conducted research in the red light districts of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Beihai, Tianjin and Beijing, so there is a documentary verity to the telling, giving starch to fiction that might otherwise be flabby. Zhang also brings a personal stake to the book, dedicating it to her grandmother, who was sold to a brothel as a   ”flower girl,” or courtesan. Some first novels, especially those birthed in creative writing classes (Zhang, a former rocket factory worker in China, studied at the University of Iowa) go heavy on   poetic language. The author tries too hard and the reader suffers. The images Zhang gives us, in contrast, are uncomplicated, concise and touching. Young Lotus’s ”pencil was homemade, simply the broken end of a pencil’s lead discarded by her classmates, stabbed into a piece of soft wood.” Concerning Bing’s emotions, Zhang writes, ”He had been like an ant on a hot pan ever since the girls’ visit.” Book groups be advised: Readers will learn quite specific tricks of the trade. Lotus is undeniably earthy but thankfully spare, letting its characters, and its proverbs, do the talking. When Bing wants to get serious with Lotus, we hear about the development a proverbial way: ”What luck, this offer. A pancake fallen from the sky, as her grandma would say.” We can count ourselves lucky to get this glimpse into the fascinating world of Lotus. Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin."
259,"In Weathersfield, Vt. a town once dotted with small milking farms, about 60 cows peacefully chew hay at their home on Fuller Farm. They are the last remaining dairy herd in Weathersfield, and they’ll be auctioned off this week. This is a growing trend in the changing dairy industry  —   in the state and beyond. David Fuller has been a dairy farmer here since 1977. He says it’s the life he’s loved since he was a small child. He says when he was a kid, his mom couldn’t figure out why he and his brother were throwing up grass. ”She let us go out . .. and there we were under the picnic table eating grass,” he says. ”She said, ’Why are you doing this?’ and I told her, ’I just want to be a cow!’ ” he laughs. He continues: ”How fun is that . .. and look where it got me!” Years later, Fuller says there is no longer enough money in running a small dairy farm. He says his children have their own careers and they don’t see a future in dairy farming. ”I think that the kids that grew up on small farms hear their parents always struggling with money,” he says. ”I think they all ask themselves, ’Why do I want to do that?’ So there wasn’t a transition to go to the family.” That’s the case with a lot of dairy farms in Vermont. Just a couple years ago, Weathersfield, which has a population of about 3, 000, had about 10 dairy farms. ”They were all small farms, and they all went the same way. Either a family member didn’t want to continue or there were economic reasons,” Fuller says. In 2010, Vermont had more than 1, 000 dairy farms, but by the end of last year there were just more than 800. According to a national census by the United States Department of Agriculture, in 1950 there were about 3. 5 million farms with milking cows. By 2012, that number had plummeted to 58, 000. Fuller says milk prices aren’t enough to sustain business these days. He gets about the same amount of money for his product as he did when he started about 40 years ago, while the cost of living has skyrocketed. ”When I started milking, my first check came from a company called Yankee Milk  —   that was $14 [per hundredweight of milk] in 1977 in May,” he says, looking over his cows. ”This last month, on the first check that we got for pay for our milk, they estimate the cost at $15. 50.” Diane Bothfeld, director of administrative services at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, says the prices of milk used to be based on national trends. That has changed. ”Now, it’s global,” she says. ”What’s happening in China, what’s happening in Australia and New Zealand. ’Oh, the European Union did this’  —   it is just global pressures on the prices for milk.” But Bothfeld says dairy products are still Vermont’s largest agricultural receipts. In a 2014 study on the economic impact of cows in the state, it was found that for every one cow, about $12, 000 was added to the state economy. ”[For every cow that leaves the state] there will be fewer trips to the hardware store or the feed store, or the tractor dealership doesn’t get as much business,” Bothfeld says. ”So it really does have an impact throughout the community.” Peter Vitaliano, chief economist for the National Milk Producers Federation, says the number of small   dairies around the United States has been steadily dropping for years. ”Since 1986, every year that number has dropped by between 5 and around 9 percent,” he says. However, milk production is not necessarily decreasing. While the dairy industry used to be run by individual families, Vitaliano thinks that today it is far more lucrative to run   dairy farms, with 500 cows or more. ”In the U. S. more and more milk is being produced every year,” Vitaliano says. ”If there are fewer farms and more milk, guess what? [That] means that the average farm is getting bigger  —   and that is indeed the case.” In 2012, the most recent year the USDA collected data, almost   of dairy farms had fewer than 100 cows, but those farms only produced about 14 percent of the nation’s milk. Vitaliano is optimistic about milk production and prices in the year to come, but like others, sees that the business model of the American dairy farm is changing rapidly."
260,"Facebook is unveiling a new journalism project Wednesday. No, the Silicon Valley giant isn’t hiring a team of reporters. Facebook says it wants engineers  —   the tech talent at local and global publishers  —   to   earlier on to develop technologies that make Facebook a more powerful platform to distribute news and discuss it. Facebook Live has become a visceral way to share breaking, even disturbing news  —   such as the death of    Philando Castile, who was shot by police minutes before his girlfriend began to   his dying in a car. (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams. NPR has been invited to be part of the new project.) Facebook wants to build new tools that draw in audiences and drive engagement with news content. A senior official says the company is looking for a new mode of working with publishers, and that Facebook’s approach has evolved based on feedback it is getting. This move signals that news publishers are important to Facebook  —   and that the company plans to deepen, not lessen, its role in the news business. The company has not specified what new products are on the horizon, but the goals include helping local news outlets target their audience on the app, so that it’s easier for residents of a specific town to have a debate about high school football or a city council bill. Facebook also plans to experiment with letting news consumers become subscribers to their favorite news outlet  —   get a free trial  —   within the Facebook app. In recent months, Facebook has come under fire for distributing fake news and not having transparent editorial standards when it comes to what speech is permitted or censored. In today’s announcement, the company is not inviting the news industry to help solve those charged problems. Last week, Facebook hired former TV journalist Campbell Brown to lead news partnerships."
261,"On campuses today almost every educational interaction leaves digital traces. Assignments and feedback are given through online portals debates and discussions happen via learning management systems as well as in classrooms, cafes and dorm rooms. Those and other digital crumbs give technologists the opportunities to examine the processes, practices and goals of higher education in ways that were largely impossible a decade or so ago. We’ve reported here and here on Stanford physics Noble Laureate Carl Wieman’s ”active learning” revolution. Another     (is there something in the physics lab water?) named Timothy McKay sees great promise in ”learning analytics”  —   using big data and research to improve teaching and learning. McKay, a professor of physics, astronomy and education at the University of Michigan argues in a recent white paper, that higher ed needs to ”break down the perceived divide between research and practice.” There are privacy and ethical concerns, of course, which in turn has prompted fledgling codes of conduct to spring up. I reached out to Professor McKay, who also heads Michigan’s Digital Innovation Greenhouse, to dig deeper on how learning analytics work in higher ed. Give us an example of how new and better data is helping universities and professors understand students better. I’ll give you an example that’s drawn from my own experience. I’ve been teaching here at the University of Michigan for more than 20 years. Most of my teaching has been large, introductory physics courses . .. from 400 to 700 students. Now, the way universities have traditionally done this is to provide a kind of industrial approach, to go to that large group of people and to offer them the same materials, ask them to do the same kind of activities at the same pace, and evaluate all those people in exactly the same way. Everybody gets the same course. If it’s   it’s pitched perhaps for the median student in that class. It kind of works well for that median student, but it doesn’t work well for anybody else. What I discovered when I began to look at data about my own classes is something that should have been obvious from the start but wasn’t really until I examined the data. I came to understand just how different all the students in my class were, how broadly spread they are across a variety of different spectra of difference, and that if I wanted to teach them all equally well, it doesn’t work to deliver exactly the same thing to every student. You’re better able to personalize and   for students who might need help, who might have a different background, who might have a different perspective? Or different goals. A lot of times, the discussion will be about students who might be behind or   but it’s also true for students who are really excelling academically. They also need special kinds of attention. The first thing that happened for me was to open my eyes to the real challenge, the real importance of personalizing, even when we’re teaching at scale. Then what followed that was a realization that since we had, in fact, information about the backgrounds and interests and goals of every one of our students, if we could build tools, use information technology, we might be able to speak to every one of those students in different ways to provide them with different feedback and encouragement and advice. We’ve built this tool here called ECoach, which is a   communication system that allows us to speak to a student with detailed knowledge of their background, interests and goals, and be able to do that at scale. Some of that is automated, but you can tailor it to each student? It’s interesting. It’s automated in a way, but in another way, it’s all generated by people. The content that we are going to provide, the way we create it, is to sit down together and look at the kinds of people who are present in our classes and think about how we would change the message if one of those students sat down in front of us. We might be changing, of course, what we’re saying. Some students are very well prepared to take a physics class and, in fact, might have studied it for two years in high school before they get to my class. There’s one kind of message for them. There are other kinds of students who have never seen this subject before. And there, I might want to really focus on points like how taking a physics class is different from taking other kinds of classes that they have. We sit down and think about what we would say to these people if they sat in front of us, and technology like ECoach just enables us to say it to all the students, instead of just the few who can get appointments in our office hours. OK, say a bunch of freshmen in a 20th century American lit class, the papers they do for that class, is there relevant data there that could be useful in a learning analytics way?  Absolutely. That’s a great example of the new kinds of data that are emerging, the new forms of data. It used to be, when you and I went to college, that you wrote that paper for that class and you handed it in, perhaps, on typing paper. Right? The instructor took it and marked it up with a pen and handed it back to you, and then it was gone from the system. It left no record. The only record that it left, in fact, was the grade that your instructor wrote in a column in a little accounting book. Now, since those assignments are all turned in through online systems, it’s actually possible to go back after the class is over and examine all the work that students did. You could even imagine, for example, if you’d taught a course like that year after year, being able to begin to understand whether student writing was changing in any significant way over the year because that evidence remains. It exists, and it is possible to use it as input to the process of understanding and improving teaching and learning in a way that it didn’t used to be. It just was inaccessible before. What, if anything, changed in 2016 in higher ed learning analytics? Has it been more widely adopted? Has the kind of data you’re going after changed? A kind of tool that many, many institutions have adopted are tools that aim to make sure that they don’t fail to recognize students who might be in trouble. I would say that the first big application of learning analytics systems has been to notice when a student, even in a large institution, is running into the kind of difficulty that might be crucial for them, that they might fail a class or that they might drop out of a semester or that they might not complete their degree. A lot of institutions have done some really good work in using the data that they have to identify students who might be at risk, and then thinking carefully about how they might go to work to support those students to move them back to a track that’s leading towards success. Most of the time, the actions that have been taken are actually human actions. What we’re beginning to see is people putting this kind of information to work in richer ways. One example of that is the kind of coaching technology we’re building. It enables us to build on the experience of thousands of students who’ve taken these classes before, and share the lessons that are learned from that with each individual student. In 2016, schools got better at using learning analytics for more things than, ”Joe Smith is going to fail freshman physics. He might need tutoring. He might need an intervention.” Some schools are now looking at a broader range of things  —   from the idea of the college transcript to the admissions process?  Yeah. We are asking questions about our own admissions criteria. It turns out that many of our admissions, our sense of how we should do college admissions, is grounded as much in tradition as it is in evidence. We’re having a big conversation about what we reflect in the transcript. You know, the transcript is the famous, official record of a student, the things that a university provides to the world to reflect on the nature of their experience while they were in college. The transcripts we use right now really were invented in the early 20th century and are stuck in a very industrial mode of education and even in some kind of prior technologies. You know the way a transcript mostly lists with one line about every one of your classes? That was done so that the transcript would fit on a few pages, so that it could be folded up and stuck in an envelope and mailed to somebody. There’s really no reason in an information age to say that the record we keep that reflects on what you did in a class needs to be restricted to a single line on a page, right? If we could enrich that record: If, for example, in that literature class that you described, instead of just assigning a grade to a student, if we actually kept some of the work of the student as the object that represents what you did in that class. In other words, in principle it could be made available to people who wanted to know, What did you do in that class? You would approach writing that paper as a student in a very different way from the way you do today. The paper wouldn’t just be for the instructor, or you wouldn’t just be after the grade. You would actually be after producing a paper that you would be proud of showing to the world to represent what you did in this class. We’re really turning this kind of analytic approach to thinking about pretty existential questions about the nature of how we do our business on campus. I think in the next few years you’ll see a lot of change as campuses take advantage of the opportunity that all this information provides to better understand what’s going on. What would you say to a more traditionalist professor who says, ’My teaching is more art than science, and you have to be open to serendipity and improvisation, and I don’t want to be led around by my nose and big data?’ Harumph.  I totally understand this perspective. People who assert that are often quite correct. Another thing that has emerged in our understanding of the Michigan campus is that we teach an incredible variety of classes. We have 9, 200 classes on this campus, and they range in enrollment from one to 2, 000. They’re very different, one from the other. I would say that this kind of learning analytic approach is especially important in environments where we’re teaching a lot of people, where we’re teaching people who come from a wide variety of backgrounds or have a wide variety of interests and goals, and those environments are typically the places where we’re teaching kind of foundational classes when students come into a campus like this. Then there are a lot of teaching and learning environments where the best thing we can do is to put that expert faculty member in a room with 18 students. A really, truly great learning experience can happen there. So for those in big college classes, don’t fear the data?  I think they should not, because I think it has a lot to bring to help them. I do have colleagues who still are skeptical about this, and a part of the challenge for all applications of data across our lives is for us all to assess the way we feel about reducing experienced to a limited number of data points and then trying to learn from that. I think in most of our lives, we’ve seen that data perhaps in your Netflix recommender, it’s kind of useful. Right? It doesn’t solve all your problems, but it has a role to play. I think as we expose more and better ways to put data to work in support of students, we will see people get comfortable with the idea that, yeah, it does have something to bring to the table. It doesn’t solve every problem, but it does have an important contribution to make."
262,"President Obama awarded outgoing Vice President Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Thursday afternoon. Calling the former longtime Delaware senator ”the best vice president America’s ever had” and a ”lion of American history,” Obama gave his White House partner the surprise award in an emotional ceremony, initially billed as a farewell. After extolling the job that Biden has done, Obama ended it with the unexpected news that he was giving the vice president the nation’s highest civilian honor, with distinction  ” a designation most recently given to President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Gen. Colin Powell. ”To know Joe Biden is to know love without pretense, service without   and to live life fully,” Obama said. Overcome with tears and completely caught off guard by the award, Biden praised the president as ”remarkable man who did remarkable things for this country” who had truly treated him like an equal partner in governance. ”This honor is not only well beyond what I deserve, but it’s a reflection of the generosity of your spirit,” Biden told Obama. ”I don’t deserve this. But I know it came from the president’s heart.” The two have enjoyed an unusually close working relationship over the past eight years, and Obama himself even joked at the outset of the ceremony that ”this also gives the Internet one last chance to talk about our ’bromance.’ ” Throughout the ceremony it was evident not just how close the two men were but how close their families and staffs had become, and Obama said his ”family is honored to call ourselves honorary Bidens.” Obama has frequently said that picking Biden, his former primary rival, as his running mate in 2008 was one of the best decisions he ever made. Before accepting the nomination, Biden had spent more than three decades in the Senate, amassing a large portfolio and body of work, including stints as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. The president said, laughing, that the people of Delaware sent Biden to the Senate as soon as they could, electing him to the Senate at the age of 29 (he turned the constitutionally required age of 30 before he was sworn in). But before Biden could even head to Washington, his life would be marked with unspeakable tragedy for the first time. While Christmas shopping, his first wife and    daughter were killed in a car wreck his sons Hunter and Beau were injured in the accident. Biden considered resigning before he even took office but was persuaded not to. He was sworn into office at the hospital beside his sons, and for years he would famously commute back and forth every day on Amtrak to be with his family. Later on, he would meet and marry his   Jill, and they would have a daughter together, Ashley. In 2015, tragedy would strike the Biden family again when his eldest son, Beau, the former Delaware attorney general who was long seen as his father’s political heir, died at the age of 46 from brain cancer. The loss came as the elder Biden was weighing whether he should make his own run at the Oval Office to succeed Obama. Months later, the still very emotional vice president acknowledged his window had passed and said that he wouldn’t launch his own presidential campaign."
263,"In the closing weeks of 2016, an explosive document was floating around in media and security circles. Reporters tried, and failed, to verify the claims it contained  —   that Donald Trump colluded with Russia, and the Kremlin held lurid blackmail material as leverage over Trump. Reporting on the document, which was first compiled as opposition research, was rare and carefully vague. Meanwhile, a man named Christopher Steele was living quietly outside London. He was ”eating his favorite tapas and pottering around Victoria, home to his newly refurbished office,” The Guardian reports. He ran a private intelligence company, but aside from a spare LinkedIn page had almost no presence on the Internet searching for his name would bring up hits on a porn actor, a musician and a TV doctor instead. This week, everything changed. On Tuesday, CNN reported on the dossier’s existence and said it had been put together by a former British intelligence agent. Hours later, BuzzFeed published the document in whole (and Trump and the Kremlin issued prompt and furious denials). On Wednesday, one outlet after another  —   first The Wall Street Journal, then The New York Times and NBC and The Telegraph and The Guardian  —   identified Christopher Steele as the former MI6 agent and Moscow expert who assembled the dossier. The U. K. government asked the British media not to report the name, saying it put Steele’s personal security ”directly at risk,” but it was too late. Steele’s name was everywhere, and the man himself nowhere to be found. On Wednesday, he asked a neighbor to look after his cat, The Telegraph reports. He said he’d be gone for a ”few days.” The BBC reports that it was either Tuesday or Wednesday  —   and that it was actually three cats. Either way, Steele left his house early this week and ”hasn’t been seen publicly since,” NPR’s Frank Langfitt reports from London. ”No one showed up for work this morning at the offices of Orbis, the private intelligence consultancy Steele   in central London,” Frank reported Thursday. The Telegraph, citing an anonymous source, says Steele was ”horrified” when his nationality was made public. Now, the source tells the newspaper, Steele fears a Kremlin backlash and is ”terrified for his safety.” His wife and children were not at home as of Wednesday night, the Telegraph reports. The work of assembling the dossier was ”bold and high risk, in that it implicated both Trump and the Kremlin,” Frank notes. Steele, if he is indeed the author, would certainly know about the potential dangers. The Guardian reports that the former intelligence agent spent two years living in Moscow in the ’90s and continued to specialize in Russia during his later career at MI6. The newspaper writes: ”[Steele] was, sources say, head of MI6’s Russia desk. When the agency was plunged into panic over the poisoning of its agent Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, the then chief, Sir John Scarlett, needed a trusted senior officer to plot a way through the minefield ahead  —   so he turned to Steele. ”It was Steele, sources say, who correctly and quickly realised Litvinenko’s death was a Russian state ’hit.’ ” As you might expect with a story about a spook, all the published reporting on Steele relies heavily on anonymous sources. NPR has not independently confirmed any of these details. But according to all available accounts, Steele was   within intelligence circles both for his work at MI6 and for his private security work after he left the spy service. The Guardian reports that Steele, in his early 50s, is an Oxford graduate and was ”one of the more eminent Russia specialists” at the British spy agency. ”Former colleagues of Steele describe him as ’very credible’  —   a sober, cautious and meticulous professional with a formidable record,” the newspaper writes. Reuters reports that with Orbis Business Intelligence, Steele investigated corruption at FIFA and passed the information on to the FBI. It was that work that ”lent credence to his reporting on Trump’s entanglements in Russia,” Reuters writes, citing U. S. officials. The Guardian and The New York Times both theorize that to compile the   dossier, Steele probably didn’t travel to Russia but relied on inside contacts there. For the record, intelligence experts say they take the dossier seriously and that it was not meant as a hoax, but they caution that raw HUMINT  —   ”human intelligence”  —   is messy and always requires   and context. Experts see the document as important and potentially useful, which is not the same as believing the claims are factually true. The document ”does not contain the standard caveats or guidance about levels of ’confidence’ that are common in U. S. intelligence community documents,” NPR’s Philip Ewing reports."
264,"Updated at 4 p. m. ET, The Justice Department’s watchdog has launched a sweeping review of conduct by the FBI director and other department officials before the presidential election, following calls from Congress and members of the public. Top advisers to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton have blamed FBI Director James Comey, in part, for her loss in November. Now, federal investigators say they will examine whether public statements by Comey in July, October and November 2016 ran afoul of policies that caution officials not to influence the outcome of an election and to avoid making derogatory comments about people who haven’t been formally charged with wrongdoing. Comey has previously told friends and employees that he had few good choices in the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information on her private email server. In a statement Thursday, Comey said, ”I am grateful to the Department of Justice’s IG for taking on this review. He is professional and independent and the FBI will cooperate fully with him and his office. I hope very much he is able to share his conclusions and observations with the public because everyone will benefit from thoughtful evaluation and transparency regarding this matter.” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he would not ”substitute” his judgment on the declination to prosecute Clinton for that of prosecutors and the FBI. And he said the review could expand based on what his investigators encounter along the way. Among the issues the IG will scrutinize: Former Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon called the inspector general’s announcement ”highly encouraging and to be expected given Director Comey’s drastic deviation from Justice Department protocol.” Fallon said the probe is ”utterly necessary in order to take the first step to restore the FBI’s reputation as a nonpartisan institution.”"
265,"So far, more than half of all U. S. states have legalized marijuana for medical use, and eight (plus the District of Columbia) have legalized the drug for recreational use. Varieties of cannabis available today are more potent than ever and come in many forms, including oils and leaves that can be vaped, and lots of edibles, from brownies and cookies to candies  —   even cannabis gummy bears. A report published Thursday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine analyzed more than 10, 000 studies to see what could conclusively be said about the health effects of all this marijuana. And despite the drug’s increasing popularity  —   a recent survey suggests about 22 million American adults have used the drug in the last month  —   conclusive evidence about its positive and negative medical effects is hard to come by, the researchers say. According to the report, that’s at least partly because the federal drug enforcement agency’s designation of the drug as a Schedule I substance  —   having ”no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”  —   entails so many restrictions that it has been difficult for researchers to do rigorous research on marijuana. We just need ”far more information,” Dr. Marie McCormick, chair of the NAS committee and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, tells Shots. Some of the highlights of her committee’s   report on marijuana include: Medical Benefits, Health Risks, ”The adolescent brain is very sensitive to these kinds of substances,” McCormick says. ”So they continue to use it  —   and may use it in increasing amounts  —   and are at risk for developing problematic cannabis use.” Erik Altieri, who directs the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, says he thinks the legalization of marijuana by many states may actually reduce the problematic use of the drug by teens. ”That’s because we are taking marijuana off of the street corner,” he says, ”and out of the hands of drug dealers, who have nothing but incentive to sell to everyone and anyone.” Legalizing the drug, he points out, puts it ”behind the counter of a regulated business that has to check for ID, answer to the government and has oversight.” So far, states that have legalized recreational marijuana have not seen an increase in use among underage teens, Altieri says. ”By legalizing it and normalizing it,” he says, ”it’s become just another everyday thing that adults partake in  —   it doesn’t have that same draw to it that it used to.” Still, McCormick says, many health questions remain to be answered by better research. The increased legal availability of cannabis products in many states, and their increased potency, she says, make that rigorous research more important than ever."
266,"The 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, from Fort Carson, Colo. has begun moving into Poland as part of the biggest U. S. military deployment in Europe since the end of the Cold War. It’s part of an Obama administration effort to deter perceived growing Russian aggression in Eastern Europe. The Kremlin isn’t happy. ”These actions threaten our interests, our security,” President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. ”Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s not even a European state.” But for Poles like retired metal worker Andrezej Kozlik, the American presence is something he’s come to yearn for since the fall of Communism in 1989. The    appeared oblivious to the icy temperatures on Thursday as he patiently waited at a sleepy border crossing 100 miles southeast of Berlin for the U. S. military convoy to arrive. ”We are very happy that the Americans are coming and supporting and protecting us,” Kozlik said. Like many Poles, he’s reluctant to name the country he wants protection from. A former tank man in 1974, in what was then Communist Poland’s army, Kozlik said he really wants to see an American tank up close. But only Humvees and support vehicles were in Thursday’s convoy. The brigade’s 87 tanks are being moved here gradually on trains and other heavy transport, according to U. S. military spokesmen. In the nearby town of Zagan  —   known for notorious POW camps the Nazis set up, including one featured in the 1963 blockbuster The Great Escape  —   officials and residents waving small American flags celebrated the arrival of what will be a continuous, rotational presence of U. S. and NATO armored brigades in Eastern Europe. The   is partly an attempt by President Obama to calm the nerves of NATO’s newer members after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and destabilized that country’s eastern flank. More recently, the Kremlin deployed   Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, a sliver of Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania, and conducted military exercises along its borders with former Soviet satellite countries. Russian officials insist the   is in response to NATO actions. Polish Army Maj. Gen. Jaroslaw Mika, whose soldiers will be training with some of the U. S. brigade’s 3, 500 troops, said he’s thrilled they are here. He added it’s important to ”be together, to build our common relationship and to provide more security”  —   not only for Europe, he said, but the world. U. S. Army Col. Christopher Norrie, who led Thursday’s convoy, was feted by Polish trumpets. He described the new mission as a ”cornerstone” to preserving freedom across Europe. ”To arrive at this point so swiftly is proof that when we work as a team . .. no challenge is too large to overcome, no distance is too far to cross, when the need arises,” Norrie said in Zagan. But whether   Donald Trump  —   who is highly critical of NATO  —   will withdraw the brigade after taking office is a question mark, said Michael Mazarr, associate director of the RAND Arroyo Center’s Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program. ”I wouldn’t see that as likely very quickly, particularly given the likely role of general and secretary of defense nominee [James] Mattis in the process,” Mazarr said. It would be better, he said, ”to shoot above that target and go to Russia and say: ’Look, we’ve had a lot of misunderstandings lately, we recognize that some of what the United States and NATO have done may be perceived by you as provocative. Let’s find a way to work this out that might lead to some kind of an agreement where in a year, we’re pulling some of those troops back, but we’re doing it in concert with Russian withdrawals from the western military districts of Russia.’ ”That would seem to me to be the more likely and ultimately more productive kind of response of the new administration to this deployment,” Mazarr said. But in Germany, which is home to the U. S. Army in Europe headquarters, a new populist party with growing support from German voters, wants the American troops gone from Poland. The   of the Alternative for Germany party, Frauke Petry, argued that antagonizing Vladimir Putin hasn’t cut down on violence in Ukraine or Syria. ”NATO sort of surrounding Russia is not going to help,” she told NPR. ”It’s going to deepen the conflict. But I’m hopeful that Trump and Putin are going to end the situation.” Polish Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, on the other hand, has said he hopes any effort to reconcile with Russia ”does not happen at our expense.” For now, military officials say the Fort Carson brigade will fan out across Poland and send some of its soldiers to the Baltic States, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to train with local troops there."
267,"The Affordable Care Act brought the rate of uninsured Americans to a record low 9 percent in 2015. It’s the major achievement of the controversial health care law and one the Obama administration likes to tout whenever it can. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell did just that in an interview with NPR on Tuesday. ”We have the lowest uninsured rate in the nation’s history,” Burwell said. ”Twenty million Americans have insurance that didn’t have insurance before the Affordable Care Act. For many people, they consider it just a basic part of their health care.” But many of those surveyed in a new   poll got it wrong. About half believed that the number of people without insurance had increased or stayed the same, or said they didn’t know what the law’s effect has been on insurance coverage. That was a failure of communication on the part of the Obama administration, says Bill Pierce, a senior director at APCO Worldwide, who advises health care companies on strategic communications. ”They needed to use the president more,” said Pierce. ”If this was his No. 1 achievement, and something he was proud of doing, it was the kind of thing that he needed to be out there and talking about all the time.” Democrats were better informed than Republicans, with 54 percent of Democrats saying the law had reduced the number of people without insurance, compared to 41 percent of Republicans. One problem, Pierce said, is that the law was passed in 2010 but didn’t go fully into effect for years. In that time, the website that housed the insurance exchange, the most public part of the program, failed. ”By the time the insurance rate started to fall, a lot of minds were already set,” he said. NPR’s poll was designed to gauge the public’s knowledge of some basic aspects of the U. S. health care system. The results come as Republicans on Capitol Hill are working to repeal the law. The Senate early Thursday morning passed a measure taking the first step toward dismantling the law. While many people in the poll were misinformed about the big picture when it comes to Obamacare, they had stronger knowledge about the details of the law. The majority of those surveyed know that the ACA protects people with   conditions from being refused coverage and that it requires insurance companies to pay for preventive care. However, the heated debate during the 2008 presidential race over   ”death panels” left a mark. About a third of those surveyed believed Obamacare places limits on    medical care and another half were not sure. Only 18 percent correctly said that no such limits exist under the law. Beyond Obamacare, many people had a good grasp of the overall quality of the U. S. health care system. The majority was aware that Americans generally pay more for health care than people in other countries and that even so, health care outcomes in the U. S. do not have ”the best results in the world.” The poll also reiterated findings from a separate survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation last week that showed that people are about evenly split on their view of the Affordable Care Act. Still, most people don’t want lawmakers to repeal the law until they have a replacement plan in place. Only 14 percent favor repeal without a replacement plan. That message seems to have gotten through to lawmakers. Earlier this month, Republican leaders in the House and Senate were advocating an immediate Obamacare repeal, with a slow phaseout while they consider ways to replace the law so people who have insurance can still get it. But many lawmakers walked those plans back this week in statements and via Twitter. Some, including   Donald Trump, said they did not want to see a repeal until a replacement is ready. ”We’re going to be submitting, as soon as our secretary is approved, almost simultaneously  —   shortly thereafter  —   a plan. It will be repeal and replace. It will be, essentially simultaneously,” Trump said in a news conference Wednesday. The poll surveyed 1, 011 adults on Jan. 4 and 5, 2017."
268,"At about 1:30 a. m. on Thursday, Republicans moved one step closer to repealing a law they have railed against since the moment it was passed nearly seven years ago. By a final vote of   the Senate approved a budget resolution that sets the stage for broad swaths of the Affordable Care Act to be repealed through a process known as budget reconciliation. The resolution now goes to the House, where leaders are hoping to approve it by the end of the week. The powerful tool sets up a fast track for repealing large parts of Barack Obama’s major domestic achievement the best guess is that the Senate is still several weeks away from largely repealing Obamacare. But as the process continues, large questions still loom over how  —   and when  —   Republicans will replace the health care law. An expedited repeal, starting with a    The vote took place during a session known as a ”  .” These     happen surrounding budget resolutions, which allow senators to propose unlimited amendments, as the New York Times’ Thomas Kaplan explained this week. The passage of the resolution kicks off the budget reconciliation process. That process is special because a reconciliation measure cannot be filibustered, meaning it allows the Senate to pass a bill with a simple majority (as opposed to needing 60 votes to overcome a filibuster). That’s good for Republicans, who hold 52 of the Senate’s 100 seats. Once the House approves the measure, which could happen as soon as Friday, committees from both chambers will meet to create instructions telling the budget committee what repeal should look like. Once repeal legislation is drafted, both houses can pass it with a simple majority, and then it would go to President Trump for signature. Should that repeal legislation pass both houses and be signed by a President Trump, it would cut out important provisions of Obamacare, but would still not repeal the entire law. Budget reconciliation only allows Congress to repeal parts of the bill  —   more specifically, the parts that deal with how much the government spends or taxes people. That means this process can’t repeal, for example, the parts of the bill that allow young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance or the rules saying companies couldn’t deny coverage for people with   conditions. But those are the parts of the law that end up costing a lot of money, while the parts that can be repealed through budget reconciliation  —   like the mandate that people have coverage (which is enforced through a tax) billions of dollars in Medicaid funds and subsidies for private coverage  —   bring money into the system to help balance out the cost equation. Democrats try to send their own messages, Democrats went into Wednesday night with a messaging plan: Use    to get Republicans on the record about what may come next. That plan consisted of proposing amendment after amendment to force Republicans to vote on Medicaid expansion, funding for rural hospitals, women’s access to health care and other popular programs. Democrats know this is a train they can’t stop. As the night drew to a close, all they could do was stage a protest. Senators aren’t supposed to give speeches during a vote, but Sen. Tammy Duckworth,  . a disabled Iraq War veteran, ignored the rule. As the presiding senator was gaveling for order, Duckworth said, ”For all those with   conditions, I stand on prosthetic legs to vote no!” The gaveling continued as Sen. Al Franken,  . said, ”I vote no on behalf of the more than 2. 3 million Minnesotans who can no longer be discriminated against because of the ACA!” What’s next (and when)? That’s complicated. .. Republicans are united on wanting to repeal Obamacare. But they’re more divided over the timeframe of that repeal, as well as what happens next. At one point, it appeared likely that congressional Republicans would take a ”repeal and delay” approach  —   that is, pass repeal legislation that would only be implemented far down the road, to allow time to craft a replacement for Obamacare. But now divisions are growing. House Speaker Paul Ryan this week said he would like a repeal and a replacement for Obamacare to come ”concurrently.” And in a Wednesday press conference,   Donald Trump indicated that he would like the two to happen in quick succession, though he didn’t provide much more clarity on that timeframe. ”It will be repeal and replace. It will be, essentially simultaneously,” he said, later adding, ”It will be various segments, you understand, but will most likely be on the same day or the same week  —   but probably the same day  —   could be a same hour.” Other Republicans, however, believe the process won’t be so abbreviated. ”I don’t see any possibility of our being able to come up with a comprehensive reform bill that would replace Obamacare by the end of this month,” said Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson also seemed to say on Tuesday that the process could take a while, involving multiple intermediate steps. As he told WBUR’s Here and Now: ”If you had a bridge that’s about ready to collapse, you know, the first thing you would do is you’d start working to repair that bridge,” he said. ”You aren’t going to blow it up I mean, at least people have a bridge to use. Repair that so people can use it while you start building other bridges.” Collins is one of five Republican senators who this week proposed that the resolution provide more time for committees to craft their instructions. One big concern for Republicans here is repealing a law they detest without disrupting the lives of the roughly 20 million people insured because of that law, including 6. 4 million Americans insured through ACA exchanges. Americans definitely want some sort of change  —   in an   poll released Thursday, 38 percent said the ACA should be ”strengthened or expanded,” and close behind, 31 percent said it should be repealed and replaced. Meanwhile, only 6 percent said it should be ”left  ” (the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3. 5 percentage points). With reporting from Susan Davis."
269,"Tying a knot can be tricky. Just ask any kid struggling with shoelaces. And scientists have it even harder when they try to make knots using tiny molecules. Now, in the journal Science, a team of chemists says it has made a huge advance  —   manipulating molecules to create the tightest knot ever. ”Historically, knotting and weaving have led to all kinds of breakthrough technologies,” says David Leigh at the University of Manchester in the U. K. who notes that knots led to prehistoric innovations such as fishing nets and clothes. ”Knots should be just as important at the molecular level, but we can’t exploit that until we learn how to make them, and that’s really what we’re beginning to do.” The first molecular knot was created by chemist   Sauvage, one of three scientists who won last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for work in creating parts for future molecular machines. His knot had loops that made it look a bit like a   clover. This ”trefoil knot” is the simplest kind of knot possible, Leigh says, ”and then for the next 25 years, chemists weren’t able to make any   knots than that.” That’s surprising, he says, considering that mathematicians have come up with billions of possible knots. But in just the past few years, scientists including Leigh have managed to produce a few more complex knots. His team’s latest knot is the most intricate yet. It looks a lot like a Celtic knot and is designed to effectively tie itself in a test tube. Molecular strands wrap around metal ions that act like knitting needles and set up strand crossings in just the right spots. ”You can’t tie the knots by grabbing the ends and mechanically tying them like you would a shoelace in our everyday world,” Leigh says. ”Instead, you have to use chemistry.” Three molecular strands get braided together in this knot, he adds, ”and being able to braid, like you braid a girl’s hair in elementary school, allows you to make much, much more complicated knots and ultimately opens the door for weaving as well, which will be very exciting.” That’s because molecular weaving could produce materials with interesting new properties. ”It’s fantastic,” says Edward Fenlon, a chemist at Pennsylvania’s Franklin  Marshall College who has a special interest in knots but was not part of this research team. ”It’s really impressive that they’ve been able to go beyond some of the more simple knots with just three crossings.” This new knot has eight crossings, he says, and what’s more, it’s the tightest knot ever, which he says is defined by just ”the length of your rope, and then how complex the knot is, how many crossings you have.” In this case, the ”rope” is very short  —   just 192 atoms long, or 500 times smaller than a red blood cell, Leigh says. ”Knots are really fascinating objects or geometric shapes. They have always been around you observe them in art, in nature. As a Boy Scout you learn how to tie knots,” says Rigoberto Advincula, a chemist at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, who notes that knots also are found in DNA and proteins. ”It’s one of the fascinating things to stretch chemistry in terms of your ability to make synthetic objects.”"
270,"It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. NPR’s Kelly McEvers talks to Mike Sutter, food critic for the San Antonio   about his ”365 days of Tacos” series, in which he eats at a different taco joint every day for a year. He’s done it before, in Austin, where he ate more than 1, 600 tacos in 2015. But now he’s moved to San Antonio, and he’s finding that the taco scene there is a bit different, and in fact is tied to a cultural identity that spans back many decades. Kelly McEvers: My main question is not whether or not you can do this, because you’ve done it before. But why? Mike Sutter: If we want to take it from a health perspective, then we’ll look at the year that I did this before. I lost 10 pounds. I know that sounds completely counterintuitive, but a good reason to eat tacos every day is they’re pure protein, they’re wrapped in a light layer of carbohydrates and they’re farm fresh. We talk about the    movement  —   the taquerias have been doing that since time immemorial. Have you ever seen a taqueria open in the morning or a taco truck about to open at night? You see the cooks coming back with these giant bags of tomatillos and tomatoes and fresh jalapenos and these big vats of marinating pork. They’re cooking that to order. It’s healthy food. It was      before that was a popular thing in food. What kinds of tacos are we talking about? Breakfast tacos are generally available all day, but I’m not just going to stick with that, although one of my favorites is just a basic    taco in a good flour tortilla. I had that yesterday at a taqueria that you might have called ”fast food.” If fast food were like that, it wouldn’t have such a bad name. This was a taco that was stuffed with . .. these wonderful dirty potatoes and freshly scrambled eggs, and you really just had to wrap it with both hands to get it up into your mouth. What, for you, makes a good taco? The tortilla is the    point. If you’re not starting with handmade flour or corn [tortillas] you’re already doing it wrong. Whether it’s that fluffy and dusty flour tortilla that San Antonio loves, or the   corn tortillas from Austin taco trucks, if the tortilla’s wrong, the taco’s never right. I also look for faithfulness to the form. If you’re going to do a breakfast taco, cook the eggs to order. Let’s not just dip them out from a steam pan. If you’re going to do a bean and cheese, let’s have it in the right ratio so that it melts together and doesn’t squish out the sides. .. Food is all about ratios and that holds true with tacos. Is there one taco that sticks out, for good or for bad? A form that I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to was the puffy taco. Ask anyone from San Antonio and they’ll tell you it was born there, and a lot of people will tell you it was born at Ray’s  . I think the best taco I’ve had in San Antonio so far was the beef puffy taco from Ray’s  . You just take this nice pile of masa, flatten it out, fry it. It gets puffy and crisp but a little bit soft so you can fold it. And then you put that together, and it’s a perfect little taco purse. It’s dressed with lettuce and tomatoes and cheese  —   it’s got a little bit of a hybrid appeal to it. Are there enough taquerias in San Antonio to give you enough material for an entire year? There’s a broader discussion to be had about that, because tacos were a part of the fabric of life here long before popular food culture and media discovered tacos. So instead of that itinerant popularity of tacos, you’ve had people whose taquerias aren’t measured by months or years, they’re measured by decades. They’ve been in those buildings, and there’s history in the bricks. The hard part in San Antonio is going to be narrowing the list to 365. I had to work hard to get to 365 in Austin. How different are the tacos in Austin and San Antonio? The culture in Austin doesn’t go back quite as far, so what you’re looking at is taco trucks. So, it’s trucks vs. taquerias. In that yearlong series [in Austin] I must have gone to a hundred trucks. Half of those are gone already. Do you feel like in some ways you’re giving San Antonio its due? I think it’s time we paid tribute to the people who formed the bones of the San Antonio dining scene. We love to talk about the latest    bistro and what the hotshot chef guys are doing, but people who eat every day out of convenience and necessity  —   they’ve been going to these places since they were kids. They’ve been taking tacos in their lunchboxes, and there was a little bit of bigotry attached to that. Now it’s just time to recognize and give the same level of importance to the kind of food we eat every day instead of just on a special occasion. You’re a white dude. You’re in a Latino city writing about tacos. Is that an issue? I don’t think I have to be born in the blood to appreciate the form. I think if you approach it with respect, it doesn’t matter what your background is."
271,"Free speech advocates see   Trumps’s testy relationship with the media and his     tweets reacting to critics as evidence that he is  —   at best  —   insensitive to the First Amendment. And they say one recent controversy, the decision by Simon  Schuster to publish a book by social media provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, has grown out of an atmosphere that encourages hate speech. Now, PEN America  —   an organization dedicated to defending the right to free speech all over the world  —   is starting to pay more attention to what’s happening on the home front. PEN is   a protest which will bring a host of   writers to the steps of the New York Public Library to protest threats to free expression. ”We need to be, as citizens, ready to come out,” says PEN America executive director Suzanne Nossel, ”stand together for basic rights that six months ago we might have been able to take for granted, but that we no longer can.” Nossel sees these threats coming from several directions: The  ’s attacks on the press and his critics, the proliferation of fake news and the pattern of trolling on social media. ”People feel more free to speak their mind,” she says, ”even if it crosses what would have been considered boundaries of hatred or racism or misogyny, and so I think it then becomes incumbent on others to speak more loudly.” But the job of advocating for free speech has become ever more complicated in the age of social media  —   which Nossel says can be both an incredible tool for free expression and a threat to it. ”It has a dampening effect on the depth of discourse, it can lead to this online mobbing and trolling where someone who says something controversial is then targeted, ridiculed. So this is not about the government silencing speech, but it’s about speech silencing other speech.” Perhaps no one has crossed the line on social media more boldly than Milo Yiannopoulos, who was kicked off of Twitter after he spearheaded a nasty campaign against black actress Leslie Jones. Yiannopoulos likes to describe himself as a free speech fundamentalist: ”What the left wants to do is it wants to enable its extremists on its own side, the sexists and misandrists of feminism, the black supremacists of Black Lives Matter, they want to enable extremists on their own side, and silence the extremists on the other. Well, I don’t like the extremists on either side.” Yiannopoulos, an editor at the   Breitbart News, seems to take delight in infuriating people with remarks that are viewed as racist, misogynistic and  . So it’s not surprising that Simon  Schuster’s decision to publish his book drew strong criticism and calls for a boycott of the company. Dennis Johnson is the head of Melville House, a small independent publisher, ”Nobody in the protest is saying ’you have no right to be published,’” he says. ”’You have no right, Simon  Schuster, to publish this guy, and this guy, you have no right to be published’  —   nobody’s saying that. What they’re saying is, ’we’re shocked and we’re outraged that you would stoop so low to make a buck as to publish this purveyor of vile hate speech. ’” Johnson is highly critical of a statement issued by the National Coalition Against Censorship on behalf of a number of industry groups representing publishers, authors and booksellers. The NCAC says anyone has a right to call for a boycott of Simon  Schuster  —   but that such a protest will have a ”chilling effect” on publishing. Joan Bertin, executive director of the NCAC, says similar protests have already led to censorship: ”We know of instances in which books that contain certain kinds of content have been shelved, deferred, redacted, edited deeply to remove content that people might object to.” Both the NCAC and PEN America say the best response to hate speech is not more censorship. ”Trying to suppress hateful speech doesn’t make it go away,” says Bertin. ”I mean, I think the whole idea of free speech requires us to be active participants, and when we hear ideas that we think are bad and harmful, it requires us to say ’why,’ not just say ’shut up. ’” But publisher Dennis Johnson says another equally important right is at stake here: The right to protest. ”This is not about censoring right wing voices,” he says. ”This is about combating hate speech and its entry into the mainstream.”"
272,"The Environmental Protection Agency said Fiat Chrysler violated the Clean Air Act by allegedly installing and failing to disclose software in some 104, 000 cars and trucks that alters emissions. The automaker was required by law to disclose the software to regulators during the certification process but did not do so, the EPA announced Thursday. While the agency is still investigating the nature of these devices, it said the software results in increased emissions of nitrogen oxides. ”The software is designed such that during the emissions tests, Fiat Chrysler’s diesel cars meet the standards that protect clean air,” EPA Assistant Administrator Cynthia Giles told reporters on a conference call. ”However, under some other kinds of operating conditions, including many that occur frequently during normal driving, the software directs the emissions control system to operate differently, resulting in emissions that can be much higher.” That includes times when vehicles are ”driving at high speeds and for an extended period,” Giles added. The software was found in two models, according to the EPA: ”  model year 2014, 2015 and 2016 Jeep Grand Cherokees and Dodge Ram 1500 trucks with 3. 0 liter diesel engines sold in the United States.” The regulator said it has not yet made a certification decision for model year 2017. The EPA stressed that issuing a notice of violation is a first step as discussions continue with the company. It added that Fiat Chrysler might be liable for civil penalties and injunctive relief. Fiat Chrysler said in a statement that it was ”disappointed” by the notice of violation and ”intends to work with the incoming administration to present its case as resolve this matter fairly and equitable.” The company added that it has provided ”voluminous information” about its technology in response to EPA requests the EPA said the company has thus far failed to explain the devices. The vehicles remain legal to drive and vehicle owners aren’t required to take any action at the moment, the EPA says. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement that his office also plans to investigate the claims against Fiat Chrysler. The allegations appear reminiscent of the major Volkswagen diesel emissions cheating scheme, which has resulted in some $19 billion in penalties and compensation. Fiat Chrysler shares plunged after the EPA announcement and trading was briefly halted."
273,"Among the unusual elements of   Donald Trump’s Wednesday news conference was a   interlude in which an attorney took the podium and described Trump’s plan to address potential conflicts of interest between his businesses and the responsibilities of his office. The attorney, Sheri Dillon, outlined an arrangement by which Trump would turn over ”total control” of his worldwide business interests to his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, with whom he would not communicate about the family business. Dillon said real divestiture  —   selling the business or committing its assets to a blind trust  —   would be forcing him ”to destroy his business.” She said the   ”should not be expected to destroy the company he built.” Dillon went on to say that Trump’s empire ”is massive, not dissimilar to the fortunes of Nelson Rockefeller when he became vice president, but at that time no one was so concerned.” [Emphasis added.] It may have been the first time anyone has compared Trump’s wealth to that of the Rockefellers, but that was not ultimately the point. It was the last eight words of her remark of that moment that raised eyebrows, because Rockefeller’s wealth at the time was very much a concern to quite a number of people. Dillon might not be expected to have any personal recollection of the Rockefeller confirmation process more than 40 years ago, but the record is widely available. Rockefeller was picked to be the new vice president in September 1974, just weeks after President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in to succeed President Richard Nixon, who had resigned. Rockefeller, known as ”Rocky,” had been elected the Republican governor of New York four times and had run for president three times. He was also a grandson of the legendary John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Co, and founder of perhaps the largest and certainly the most famous family fortune in America. The   was a time of hypersensitivity to money issues in national politics, an era when ethics and   reform were front and center in Washington  —   partly because of the Watergate scandals that had driven Nixon from office. Rockefeller’s nomination was, in fact, the subject of extensive hearings that fall, not only in the Senate but in the House of Representatives as well. (The provisions of the 25th Amendment governing the presidential succession required a confirmation vote in both chambers of Congress.) Many conservatives saw Rockefeller as a liberal, especially on social issues, and did not fancy him a heartbeat from the presidency. Many Democrats saw his great wealth as a source of inevitable conflicts of interest. His confirmation was far from assured, especially after it was revealed he had used $2 million in personal or family funds to make gifts to senior aides, including Henry Kissinger (who had moved on to serve both Nixon and Ford in the White House and as secretary of state) as well as to finance the publication of a biography critical of a Democrat who had opposed his   as governor. Additional controversy arose over deductions he took on his federal income tax return, leading to an eventual settlement with the IRS for more than $900, 000. But Rockefeller disclosed his various assets and trust funds and placed all his assets in a blind trust  —   the kind of steps Trump has not been willing to take. And in a   session after that fall’s election, Rockefeller was confirmed by both the House and Senate. He served as Ford’s vice president but was not made part of the ticket when Ford sought a full term in his own right in 1976. Buffeted by opposition within the Republican Party, Ford dumped Rockefeller for Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. The   ticket lost in 1976. Rockefeller retired from politics and died of a heart attack in 1979 at the age of 70."
274,"  Donald Trump took to Twitter again Thursday morning, this time to urge his followers to ”Buy L. L. Bean,” and support one of his campaign backers. ”Thank you to Linda Bean of L. L. Bean for your great support and courage,” he tweeted Thursday. ”People will support you even more now. Buy L. L. Bean.” The tweet came in response to public attention over Linda Bean’s political support for Trump. Bean, a board member and   of the   outdoor retailer and the granddaughter of company founder Leon Leonwood Bean, says she gave money to a PAC supporting Trump. The Associated Press reported that her donations totaled $30, 000  —   exceeding limits on individual contributions in a single year. (The news service says the PAC, Making Maine Great Again, initially reported Bean contributed $60, 000 but amended its filings.) Her political stance drew criticism and spurred calls for a boycott of the company under the hashtag #Grabyourwallet. That prompted the company to respond, noting that Linda Bean’s views did not reflect on the company or the views of other Bean family members. ”I think it’s a case of bullying,” Bean told Fox  Friends on Thursday. Since his electoral victory, Trump has used his Twitter account to criticize U. S. manufacturers considering expansion in Mexico. Responses to his tweets include criticisms that Trump is now advertising for his favored companies."
275,"At a Wednesday press conference,   Donald Trump and his lawyer described the steps the real estate mogul would take to separate from his business empire while in office. It wasn’t nearly enough, according to Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub. ”The president is now entering a world of public service,” Shaub said in a speech at the Brookings Institution. ”He’s going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. He’s going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. So no, I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president of the United States of America.” Trump said on Wednesday that among other moves, he would hand all management of his businesses to his sons, who would make no new foreign deals and would need an ethics review of any new domestic deals. Divestiture would require him to go much further. It would mean the sale of all of the president’s assets, with their value conveyed to a blind trust  —   and an investment portfolio of which he and his family would have no knowledge or control. Of course, no past U. S. president has had business holdings of the scale or complexity of the  ’s. Trump lawyer Sheri Dillon said at the press conference that would make divestiture unworkable, NPR’s Jackie Northam reported. ”The Trump brand is key to the value of the Trump Organization’s assets,” Dillon said. ”If Trump sold his brand, he’d be entitled to the royalties for the use of it.” And if the brand was mothballed entirely, the value of Trump’s holdings would crater, and they would have to be sold off in a fire sale. Nevertheless, that’s what Shaub said needs to happen  —   both to completely safeguard against conflicts of interest, and to set an example. ”The ethics program starts at the top  —   the signals a president sends [set] a tone across the executive branch,” Shaub said, adding that ”officials in any administration need their president to show ethics matters, not only through words but through deeds.” The ethics official pointed to the steps undertaken by Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, whose separation from Exxon Mobil reportedly will cost the former CEO about $7 million. ”Mr. Tillerson’s making a clean break from Exxon,” he said. ”His ethics agreement serves as a sterling model for what we’d like to see with other nominees.” Unlike the president, Shaub said, Tillerson worked closely with the ethics office to create his divestment plan. And it’s not just inside the government that the president’s example matters, Shaub said. The ethics program run by the executive branch, including presidential divestment, has been viewed as a gold standard internationally, he said, with the office frequently consulting with governments in the developing world to set up similar programs."
276,"After years of hints, shots across the bow and a few gentle suggestions, the Chargers have finally done it: Owner Dean Spanos announced that the NFL team will be leaving San Diego for Los Angeles, starting next season. ”San Diego has been our home for 56 years. It will always be part of our identity, and my family and I have nothing but gratitude and appreciation for the support and passion our fans have shared with us over the years,” Spanos said in a letter Thursday. ”But today,” he continued, ”we turn the page and begin an exciting new era as the Los Angeles Chargers.” The move will bring to a close the Chargers’   stay in the city. The team spent its inaugural year in 1960 playing in Los Angeles, as a member of the American Football League (which would merge with the NFL roughly a decade later). The first stop in LA didn’t last long the team moved to San Diego the following year. In the decades that followed, the Chargers made it to just one Super Bowl, which they lost to the San Francisco 49ers in 1995. In recent years, the relationship between Spanos and the city his team called home soured, as Spanos angled for public funds for a new stadium. The Chargers’ current venue, Qualcomm Stadium, opened in 1967 and now stands as one of the NFL’s oldest buildings. The City of San Diego was less than enthused about the prospect of paying for a new one. The standoff led Spanos to cast his gaze elsewhere, notably in a proposal with the Oakland Raiders to share a stadium in Carson, Calif. in Los Angeles County. That plan was rejected by NFL owners in a vote early last year. The ongoing dispute even made a recent appearance on Election Day ballots, when a referendum was put to San Diego voters. They dealt a convincing defeat to a   proposal that would have used hundreds of millions of tax dollars on a new stadium in downtown San Diego. While not necessarily a nail in the coffin, that vote renewed speculation that the Chargers and San Diego would soon part ways. LA, for its part, had suffered a professional football drought for more than two decades, since the Raiders and the Rams both left town in the  . Now, after the Rams returned last year, the city is suddenly flush with football teams  —   especially if you count perennial college powerhouses USC and UCLA. The newly minted LA Chargers will join the Rams in a $2. 66 billion stadium in Inglewood, reports the    . That stadium is scheduled to open in 2019 in the meantime, the Chargers will be playing at the StubHub Center in Carson, which will briefly earn the honor of smallest venue in the NFL. According to the paper, the Chargers will also have to pay the NFL a $550 million relocation fee  —   or, $650 million if they choose to pay in installments. San Diego fans, for their part, expressed disappointment and frustration, though not surprise. ”It hurts, but we will move on without them,” County Supervisor Ron Roberts told the  . ”San Diego is a great community and we are not dependent on the Chargers.” Lastly, by way of postscript, it must be noted: Bystanders on social media have not exactly been kind to the team’s new logo, which displays a white L and A on a blue background, a la the LA Dodgers  —   albeit with a little lightning bolt riff. We present these tweets without comment, merely as a reminder that the Internet might not be the best place to look for a warm welcome."
277,"A poem written by a Chinese surgeon lamenting the medical effects of smog, called ”I Long to Be King,” is going viral on Chinese social media. Told from the perspective of lung cancer, the poem takes an apocalyptic note: Happiness after sorrow, rainbow after rain. I faced surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, But continued to chase my dream, Some would have given up, but I will be the king. An English version of the poem (for full text, see below) ran in the October issue of CHEST Journal, a publication of the American College of Chest Physicians. Published in Chinese this month, the poem is now striking a chord on Chinese social media. ”I hope the government can look at this problem more and then immediately resolve it, otherwise everyone will move. Or we will die of cancer. Is this the final outcome we face?” asked one commenter on Weibo, China’s   social media platform. ”I’m infuriated. .. For the sake of GDP, can we simply ignore the health of our country’s people?” wrote another.   Not all commenters appreciated the poem though. ”Europe and the U. S. always most enjoy when Chinese people write about their own underside. The more coarse, the more backward, the higher the chance it wins attention,” complained one. The author of ”I Long to Be King” is Dr. Zhao Xiaogang, deputy chief of thoracic surgery at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital of Tongji University. Since the poem has taken off, he has been outspoken in the detrimental health effects of air pollution. ”The intense rise in lung cancer . .. is intimately related to smog,” Dr. Zhao told state media. In and around Beijing and Hebei province in China’s northeast last week, the concentration of air pollutant particles was more than 20 times higher than the level deemed safe by the World Health Organization. According to the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, the city saw 168 days of ”polluted” air in 2016. Cancer is the leading cause of death in China, claiming 2. 8 million lives in 2015. Lung cancer is the country’s leading form of cancer. The Chinese government, well aware of the simmering discontent, has resolved to clean up the country’s smog problem. Ambitious goals have been set to substantially reign in air pollution by 2020. And over the past year authorities have fined corporate polluters millions, going as far as detaining several hundred of them. Yet on Chinese message boards, some commenters don’t think the pollution will end any time soon. ”The Hebei countryside is all smog. It is terrible,” wrote one commenter. ”It is another way of showing how useless the government is.” Here’s the full text of I Long To Be King: I am ground glass opacity (GGO) in the lung, A vague figure shrouded in mystery and strangeness, Like looking at the moon through clouds, Like seeing beautiful flowers in the fog. I long to be king, With my fellows swimming in every vessel. My people crawl in your organs and body, Holding the rights for life or death, I tremble with excitement. When young you called me ”atypical adenomatous hyperplasia”, Then when I had matured, you declared me ”adenocarcinoma in situ”, When fully developed, your fearful denomination: ”invasive adenocarcinoma”. You forgot my strenuous journey to become the king. From tiny to strong, From humble to arrogant. None cared when I was young, But all fear me we when full grown. I’ve been nourished on the delicious mist and haze, That sweetly warmed my heart, Always loving when you were heavy drunk and smoking, Creating me a cozy home. When I was less than eight millimeters, I was so fragile, Waiting for a chance to grow up. Now, more than eight millimeters, I am more mature, And considered worthy of notice. My continuous growth gives me a chance to be king, As I break through layers of obstacles, Spanning the mountains and waters. My fellows march to every corner and occupy every region. My quest to become king was full of obstacles, I was cut until almost dead in childhood, Burned once I’d matured, And poisoned when older. Happiness after sorrow, rainbow after rain. I faced surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, But continued to chase my dream, Some would have given up, but I will be the king. I long to be king, with fellows and subordinates, I long to be king, to have people’s fear and respect, I long to be king, to dominate my domain, I long to be king, to direct your fate."
278,"Maracanã Stadium has been a fixture of the Rio de Janeiro skyline for decades. Opened just in time to play host to Brazil’s heartbreak in the 1950 World Cup, it underwent massive renovations to host . .. well, more heartbreak for Brazilians in the 2014 World Cup. Now the iconic soccer stadium, which also hosted Brazilians’ 2016 Olympic redemption, is suffering a heartbreak of a different kind: Rio’s soccer authority says Maracanã has fallen into a state of abandonment and disrepair. ”The worries over the present and the future of the stadium are only increasing,” the Rio de Janeiro Football Federation said in a statement, according to multiple media outlets. Since its last official use late last year, windows have been smashed, copper wiring stolen from the walls, seats torn out of their places entirely. Brazilian newspaper O Globo reports that looters even took off with a bust of journalist Mário Filho, for whom the stadium was given its official name  —   Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho. The playing field itself has been left to the ravages of time and theft, leaving it a     shadow of its Olympic self. Given the billions of dollars the country spent on its preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics  —   and the massive protests that spending elicited  —   the neglect of Maracanã, its jewel, has raised eyebrows among Brazilian soccer officials. But so far, few hands have been raised to fix the situation. Neither Maracanã SA, the firm currently under contract for the stadium’s upkeep, nor the Rio state government accept responsibility for the   cleanup and administration of Maracanã, according to O Globo. Both groups are said to blame the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee for having left the stadium in disrepair after the Summer Games. So the city’s four major soccer clubs that regularly make use of the stadium, such as Flamengo, have begun looking at alternatives to Maracanã for their upcoming games. Reuters reports the teams plan to meet with the football federation on Tuesday. But for federation President Ruben Lopes, the matter might be moot unless something significant changes. ”If there is not an immediate government intervention to stop the looting and the destruction of the Maracanã then it might not even be worth meeting on the 17th,” Ruben Lopes said, according to the wire service."
279,"A U. S. military investigation has cleared the U. S. forces of wrongdoing in fighting that left 33 civilians dead and 27 others wounded last year in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, saying that they acted in  . ”To defend themselves and Afghan forces, U. S. forces returned fire in   at Taliban who were using civilian houses as firing positions,” according to the U. S. military report published Thursday. The November firefight started when Afghan special operations forces and some U. S. military advisers entered the village of Boz in an attempt to capture Taliban leaders there. Taliban forces started firing at the troops from civilian buildings. As the joint forces began to take casualties, they called for U. S. aerial reinforcements. The investigation concluded that the air assets ”used the minimum amount of force required to neutralize the various threats from the civilian buildings and protect friendly forces.” The killed and wounded Afghan civilians are believed to have been inside the buildings as they were hit by airstrikes, though the reports states that ”no civilians were seen or identified in the course of the battle.” A Taliban ammunition cache exploded during the fighting, which may have also caused casualties, the report added. Local Afghan officials say the U. S. military’s count of the civilian toll is low, according to The Associated Press. ”More than 50 people, including women and children, were killed in the Afghan and U. S. forces’ attack in   Kandahari,” Toryalia Kakar, a deputy provincial council member, told the wire service. ”After the raid, Kunduz residents carried over a dozen corpses of the dead, including children and family members of the Taliban fighters, toward a local governor’s office in a show of rage,” the AP added. The U. S. military says two U. S. soldiers and three Afghan army soldiers were killed during the battle. Four U. S. soldiers and 11 Afghan army soldiers were wounded. More than two dozen Taliban members, including three of its leaders, were killed. A year before this battle, Kunduz was the site of a U. S. aerial assault on a Médecins Sans Frontières trauma center that killed dozens of medical staff and patients. The Pentagon disciplined 16 service members for the strike, which is says was caused by human errors, but concluded that it was not a war crime."
280,"Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered government agencies to expand access to contraception, especially for poor women. By 2018, he instructs, all poor households in the country should have ”zero unmet need for modern family planning.” Duterte’s executive order, signed Monday and announced on Wednesday, is the latest development in a long battle over birth control in the   Philippines. It pits the president, who says family planning is critical for reducing poverty, against the country’s Supreme Court and Catholic leadership. Four years ago  —   after more than a decade of debate, negotiations and lobbying in Congress  —   the Philippines passed a law guaranteeing universal access to birth control. But the full implementation of that law has been blocked by court orders and budget cuts. Birth control has long been available in the Philippines for middle class and wealthy women, but it is priced out of reach of the country’s poor. Abortion is illegal, with no express exceptions. More than half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and more than 90 percent of unintended pregnancies occurred in the absence of modern contraceptive methods. Polls show that most Filipinos support the Reproductive Health Law, which calls not just for access to contraception (subsidized or free, for poor couples) but also sexual health education and reproductive health care services. But it has been strongly opposed by the powerful Catholic Church. The law was immediately challenged as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld some of the law, but imposed a restraining order limiting the contraceptive methods the government can distribute. Then Congress slashed the budget that was supposed to pay for free or   contraception in many communities. In November, the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines thanked the high court for showing ”caution and circumspection” on the implementation of the law. Archbishop Socrates B. Villegas urged couples to ”shun the ways of selfishness” and avoid the ”mutual  ” of artificial contraception. Duterte’s order calls on a wide range of government agencies to ”intensify and accelerate” services that promote access to contraception. The order says more than 6 million Filipinas of reproductive age have no access to modern family planning methods, including 2 million women living in poverty. In a nod to the budgetary limitations, the order also calls for government offices to ”engage, collaborate and partner with” nonprofits and the private sector to fully meet demand for family planning resources. Duterte wants agencies to report back in six months on their progress, and factor expanded access to birth control into their future budget proposals. The president has made global headlines with his violent crackdown on the drug trade, which has killed thousands of people. The Catholic Church has joined international human rights watchdogs in criticizing the street killings, while Duterte remains popular among the general public. The famously blunt and frequently profane president has previously indicated his willingness to defy the Catholic Church on the issue of contraception, too. As the mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines, he not only advocated for contraception, but he offered cash rewards for men who underwent vasectomies, The Associated Press reports. And he vowed to bring the same attitude to family planning to the national level, ”I will reinstall the program of family planning.” Duterte said in June, before taking office, the AP writes. ”Three’s enough.”"
281,"A storm system that dumped precipitation on multiple states in the West appears to be easing, but rivers have yet to crest and many communities are still digging out from record snowfall. The Pacific Northwest and Northern California were hit hardest beginning Tuesday, when rain flooded roads and prompted evacuations in multiple communities. The storms were the second major weather system to hit the region this week, as we have reported. But all that water has helped ease the region’s severe drought, according to the weekly U. S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday. The report said a wet week contributed to ”major drought improvements” in California as well as Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. A rainstorm in Southern California led the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood watch for Los Angeles County on Thursday, saying that rain during the evening ”could possibly trigger mud and debris flows in the recent burn areas” where the risk of erosion is high. A day earlier, the Los Angeles Fire Department said a   slab of concrete ”from the foundation and retaining wall of the home detached and [slid down a] hillside,” blocking a road. No one was injured. On Thursday, a winter storm warning also remained in effect for part of the Sierra Nevada, and a coastal flood advisory was issued for the San Francisco Bay Area, where king tides exacerbated flooding. In Sacramento County, Calif. 10 inches of rain fell in the foothills and 6 feet of snow in the mountains, reported Bob Moffitt of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento. Moffitt also reported that 20, 000 people in Placer County had lost power as of Thursday, and he spoke to county Emergency Services Manager John McEldowney, who said people are struggling to keep their driveways and rooftops clear. ”You want to keep huge amounts of snow off your roof because there have been cases where feet and feet and feet of snow on roofs have caused ” McEldowney said. In the mountains of Northern California and Nevada, the National Weather Service also warned there was a high risk of avalanches. Farther north, snow blanketed much of Oregon and more than 37, 000 people in the Portland area lost power. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that ”on average, [Portland] and surrounding communities received   inches of snow” on Tuesday and Wednesday. ”The reports are that there were hundreds of cars abandoned on the highways and dozens, if not hundreds of people stranded in their vehicles,” Portland Police Sgt. Christopher Burley told the member station. The station reported: ”The NWS had a tough time just keeping up with the changing forecast as the snow fell late Tuesday, said . .. meteorologist Clinton Rockey. ” ’What we saw across the region was a nightmare unfolding for the area. Snowfalls in the metro area, boy I tell you, it was really a lot of fun for us to figure out what’s going on,’ he said. ”The metro region saw the unusual phenomenon of what’s known as ’thundersnow,’ which is what it sounds like: a thunderstorm during a snowstorm.” Not even skiers could catch a break. In California and Nevada, so much snow fell on ski resorts that they couldn’t open. Woodward Tahoe ski area in California said it was closed Wednesday due to ”Snowpacalypse2017.” On Thursday, Nevada’s Mount Rose remained closed ”due to complications from the storm.” The snow was a relief for at least one living thing, however. At the Oregon Zoo, a polar bear appeared to be having a pretty great day."
282,"Six years ago, Don Cameron, the general manager of Terranova Ranch, southwest of Fresno, Calif. did something that seemed kind of crazy. He went out to a nearby river, which was running high because of recent rains, and he opened an irrigation gate. Water rushed down a canal and flooded hundreds of acres of vineyards  —   even though it was wintertime. The vineyards were quiet. Nothing was growing. ”We started in February, and we flooded grapes continuously, for the most part, until May,” Cameron says. Cameron was doing this because for years, he and his neighbors have been digging wells and pumping water out of the ground to irrigate their crops. That groundwater supply has been running low. ”I became really concerned about it,” Cameron says. So his idea was pretty simple: Flood his fields and let gravity do the rest. Water would seep into the ground all the way to the aquifer. The idea worked. Over four months, Cameron was able to flood his fields with a large amount of water  —   equivalent to water three feet deep across 1, 000 acres. It all went into the ground, and it didn’t harm his grapes. These days, Cameron’s unconventional idea has become a hot new trend in California’s water management circles  —   especially this week, with rivers flooding all over the state. ”This is going to be the future for California,” Cameron says. ”If we don’t store the water during flood periods, we’re not going to make it through the droughts.” Helen Dahlke, a groundwater hydrologist at the University of California, Davis, is working with a   farmers who are ready to flood their fields this year. ”We have test sites set up on almonds, pistachios and alfalfa, just to test how those crops tolerate water that we put on in the winter,” she says. There are two big reasons for these experiments. The first is simply that California’s aquifers are depleted. It got really bad during the recent drought, when farmers couldn’t get much water from the state’s surface reservoirs. They pumped so much groundwater that many wells ran dry. The water table in some areas dropped by 10, 20, or even 100 feet. Aquifers are especially depleted in the southern part of California’s Central Valley, south of Fresno. Flooding fields could help the aquifers recover. The second reason to put water underground is climate change. California has always counted on snow, piling up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, to act as a giant water reservoir. Water is released gradually as the snow melts. But because of a warming climate, California now is getting less snow in winter, and more rain. The trend is expected to intensify. But heavy rain isn’t as useful because it quickly outstrips the capacity of the state’s reservoirs and just runs into the ocean. Meanwhile, the state gets very little rain during the summer, when crops need water. ”We really have to find new ways of storing and capturing rainfall in the winter, when it’s available,” says Dahlke. There’s no better place to store water than underground. Over the years, California’s farmers have extracted twice as much water from the state’s aquifers as the total storage capacity of the state’s dams and   lakes. In theory, farmers could replace that water. Peter Gleick, a water expert and   of the Pacific Institute, says that after winter storms, there is enough water available to recharge those groundwater aquifers. The hard part, he says, will be getting the state’s farmers and irrigation managers to go along with the plan. Because it will require flooding hundreds of thousands  —   and possibly millions  —   of acres.  ”I’m cautiously optimistic that we can do this,” he says. But it’s going to require a different way of thinking. It’s going to require a lot of farmers and owners of ag land to be willing to flood land when the water’s available.” And Gleick says, even if this   flooding can be accomplished, it won’t be enough, by itself, to protect groundwater supplies. It will have to be accompanied by strict limits on how much water farmers can pump from aquifers. Groundwater  —   which until recently was almost completely unregulated  —   will have to be managed so that water is there when farmers really need it, when the rains don’t fall."
283,"The bustling Paris streets were rutted and caked in thick mud, but there was always a breathtaking sight to behold in the shop windows of Patisserie de la Rue de la Paix. By 1814, people crowded outside the bakery, straining for a glimpse of the latest confection created by the young chef who worked inside. His name was   Carême, and he had appeared, one day, almost out of nowhere. But in his short lifetime, which ended exactly 184 years ago today, he would forever revolutionize French haute cuisine, write bestselling cookbooks and conjure up extravagant, magical feasts for royals and dignitaries. Carême’s childhood was one part tragedy, equal part mystery. Born the 16th child to destitute parents in Paris in either 1783 or 1784, a young Carême was suddenly abandoned at the height of the French Revolution. At 8 years old, he worked as a kitchen boy for a chophouse in Paris in exchange for room and board. By age 15, he had become an apprentice to Sylvain Bailly, a   pâtissier with a prosperous bakery nestled in one of Paris’ most fashionable neighborhoods. Carême was a quick study in the kitchen. Bailly encouraged his young protégé to learn to read and write Carême would often spend his free afternoons at the nearby Bibliotheque Nationale poring over books on art and architecture. In the back room of the little patisserie, Carême’s penchant for design and his baking talent collided, as he shaped delectable masterpieces out of pastry, marzipan and sugar. In his teenage years, Carême fashioned edible replicas of the late 18th century’s most famous buildings  —   crumbled confectionery ruins of ancient Athens and pastry towers of Chinese fortresses with flowing trellises of appetizing greenery. Bailly displayed these opulent creations  —   often as large as 4 feet tall  —   in his bakery window. Carême’s creations soon captured the discriminating eye of a French diplomat, Charles Maurice de  . Around 1804, Talleyrand challenged Carême to produce a full menu for his personal château, instructing the young baker to use local, seasonal fruits and vegetables and to avoid repeating entrees over the course of an entire year. The experiment was a grand success and Talleyrand’s association with French nobility would prove a lucrative connection for Carême. French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was notoriously unimpressed by the decadence of early 18th century cuisine, but under pressure to entertain Paris’ high society, he too summoned Carême to his kitchen at Tuileries Palace. In 1810, he designed the lavish cake for the wedding of Napoleon and his second bride,   of Austria. Carême became one of the first modern chefs to focus on the appearance of his table, not just the flavor of his dishes. ”I want order and taste. A well displayed meal is enhanced one hundred per cent in my eyes,” he later wrote in one of his cookbooks. In 1816, Carême embarked on a culinary journey which would forever mark his place as history’s first celebrity chef. He voyaged to England to cook in the modern Great Kitchen of the prince regent, George IV, and crossed continents to prepare grand feasts for the tables of Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Never afraid to tout his own accomplishments, a boastful Carême made a fortune as wealthy families with social ambitions wooed him to their kitchens. Later, in his cookbooks, he would often include a sketch of himself, so that people on the street would be able to recognize  —   and adore  —   him. Carême’s gastronomic displays became the epitome of fine French dining they were bountiful, beautiful and ostentatious. Guests would fall silent in wonder as servants carried Carême’s elaborate creations into the dining hall. For a feast celebrating the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia’s visit to George IV’s Brighton Pavillion on Jan. 18, 1817, the menu featured 120 different dishes, highlighting eight different soups, 40 entrees (including Glazed veal with chicory and Jellied partridge with mayonnaise) and 32 desserts. As he traveled through the homes of early 19th century nobility, Carême forged the new art of French haute cuisine. Locked in stifling galleys, Carême conceived his four ”mother sauces.” These sauces  —   béchamel, velouté, espagnole and allemande  —   formed the central building blocks for many French entrees. He also perfected the soufflé, became the first chef to pipe his meringue through a pastry bag and introduced the standard chef’s uniform  —   the same   white coat and toque (tall white hat) still worn by chefs today. The white clothing conveyed an image of cleanliness, according to Carême  —   and in his realm, appearance was everything. Between meals, Carême penned cookbooks that would be used in European kitchens for the next century. His manuals, including Le Pâtissier royal parisien and the massive   L’Art de la cuisine française au   siècle (  completed after his death) first systematized many basic principles of gastronomy, complete with drawings and    directions. Long before television cooking shows, Carême walked readers through common kitchen tasks, instructing them to ”try this for yourself, at home” as celebrity American Chef Julia Child might do, many years later. In the end, however, it was the kitchen that did Carême in. Decades of working over coal fires in stagnant, unventilated spaces (to ensure his entrees would not get cold) had fatally damaged his lungs. On January 12, 1833, Carême died just before he turned 50. But in his lifetime, Carême, ever confident, could see beyond his short reign in the kitchen. He wanted to ”set the standard for beauty in classical and modern cookery, and attest to the distant future that the French chefs of the 19th century were the most famous in the world,” as he wrote in his papers. Decades later, Auguste Escoffier would build upon Carême’s concept of French cuisine. But in the very beginning, there was just Carême, the chef célèbre who exalted dining into art."
284,"Mice that kill at the flip of a switch may reveal how hunting behavior evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. The mice became aggressive predators when two sets of neurons in the amygdala were activated with laser light, a team reported Thursday in the journal Cell. ”The animals become very efficient in hunting,” says Ivan de Araujo, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University and an associate fellow at The John B. Pierce Laboratory in New Haven. ”They pursue the prey [a live cricket] faster and they are more capable of capturing and killing it.” Activating the neurons even caused the mice to attack inanimate objects, including sticks, bottle caps and an insectlike toy. ”The animals intensively bite the toy and use their forepaws in an attempt to kill it,” De Araujo says. But the aggressive behavior is reserved for prey. Mice didn’t attack each other, even when both sets of neurons were activated. The results hint at how the brain changed hundreds of millions of years ago when the first animals with jaws began to appear. This new ability to pursue and kill prey ”must have influenced the way the brain is wired up in a major way,” De Araujo says. Specifically, the brain needed to develop hunting circuits that would precisely coordinate the movements of a predator’s jaw and neck. ”This is a very complex and demanding task,” De Araujo says. The researchers expected to find these hunting circuits in mice because many mice kill and eat insects. And one species known as the killer mouse ”basically feeds on live prey, including sometimes even other mice,” De Araujo says. Sure enough, the scientists found one set of neurons in the amygdala, a structure involved in emotion and motivation, that became active when a mouse was pursuing prey. They found a second set of neurons in the amygdala that became active when the animal was biting and killing. Then the team used a technique called optogenetics to create mice in which both sets of neurons could be controlled using light from a laser. That gave the researchers ”an   switch for either or both of the circuits,” De Araujo says. ”When we stimulate [both sets of] neurons it is as if there is a prey in front of the animal,” De Araujo says. ”They assume the body posture and actions usually associated with real hunting.” Researchers have found evidence of similar hunting circuits in rats and other species, including humans, whose survival once depended on their ability to hunt and kill large animals."
285,"Once again this year, President Obama hailed the nation’s high school graduation rate as it reached another record high  —   a whopping 83 percent. ”When I took office almost eight years ago, we knew that our education system was falling short,” he said at a Washington, D. C. high school in October. ”I said, by 2020 I want us to be No. 1 across the board, so we got to work making real changes to improve the chances for all of our young people. . .. And the good news is that we’ve made real progress.” High school graduation rates in the nation’s capital, he noted, have grown faster than anywhere else in the country, from 53 percent to 69 percent. But as we’ve reported over and over again, those numbers are deceiving. While some states are working hard to get kids a diploma, others have lowered their standards or turned to questionable quick fixes. We’ve talked to a lot of experts on this. And from those conversations we’ve pulled seven things they say would improve how the graduation rate is tracked and reported  —   and that would actually measure student success. 1. Be transparent, ”My view is that any calculation of rates should come with an asterisk. They should provide summary tables to the public to account for all the students who have left for each reason. Then the public could better understand where students are going.”  —   Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor, California State University, Sacramento, 2. Go Moneyball, ”I’m struck by how much we know about people in sports and everything they do, and how little we know about kids. Obviously there’s an uncomfortable intersection between our desire for clear data and questions of privacy and whose responsibility this all is.”  —   John Gomperts, president and CEO, America’s Promise Alliance, which publishes the Building a Grad Nation report, 3. Insist on mastery, ”The increased graduation rate is a welcome trend, and appears to be (in part) the result of 20 years of reform, including the testing, accountability and reading instruction reforms of the No Child Left Behind era. But juking the stats is a disgusting abdication of responsibility, and laughably easy credit recovery programs can be just as pernicious. If credit recovery and second chances are going to mean anything, they have to be about students actually learning the material required for a high school diploma.”  —   Michael J. Petrilli, president, Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 4. Follow students longer, ”No. 1, there needs to be greater collaboration between data systems at the   level and at the postsecondary level. In Baltimore, yes, we looked at our grad rate, but for our young people who stayed in the state of Maryland, we looked at how long it took them to graduate from college.”  —   Sonja Santelises, CEO of the Baltimore City Public Schools and a former senior vice president of   policy and practice at The Education Trust, ”For higher ed, we look at a   graduation rate, but for high school it’s four. Massachusetts is among the leaders in looking at   and   rates as well. Young people sometimes have to stop out to work or for other issues.”  —   Gomperts, 5. Look at more than just the grad rate, ”I don’t know how a district can move graduation rates in authentic ways and have that be the only data point.”  —   Santelises, ”Less obsession with just one number would probably be good.”  —   Gomperts, ”Emphasis on this one statistic masks variations that are quite important.”  —   Russell Rumberger, professor of education, University of California, Santa Barbara, 6. Coordinate with colleges to create a meaningful standard, ”How do you make sure the grad rate is reflecting what increased opportunities kids should have as a result of graduating?”  —   Santelises, ”What if what counted in a diploma in a state is what an institution of higher education in that state would recognize for admission?”  —   Gomperts, 7. Personalize the problem, In Baltimore, ”We had the heads of student support, school safety, school counselors  —   30 people in a room with the numbers flashed on a screen every two weeks. There are faces that match each one of those data points. We’re responsible for every single kid in the system.”  —   Santelises, A version of this story was published on NPR Ed in June 2015."
286,"Where the first day of Jeff Sessions’ attorney general confirmation hearing focused on what the Alabama senator’s relationship would be with the president if confirmed, the second day focused on his own past. Sessions, a former Alabama attorney general, has a reputation for being tough on crime, but civil rights advocates testified that his reputation was made on the backs of vulnerable groups. Lawmakers who have worked with him, on the other hand, said they knew a just and fair man. ”We must bend” the arc of the moral universe, The most impassioned pleas against Sessions came at the very end of the day, during a third and final panel that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said was the result of a special request from Sen. Dianne Feinstein. All six men on the panel were  . Three came to defend Sessions, and three to denounce him. ”His record indicates that we cannot count on him to support state and national efforts toward bringing justice to the justice system,” Sen. Cory Booker said. Booker, the first sitting senator to testify against a fellow senator during a confirmation hearing, said Sessions’ record shows he won’t protect people of color, women, LGBT communities, immigrants or voting rights. Booker ended his speech with a call to rally against injustice: ”The arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve toward justice. We must bend it.” John Lewis, the Georgia representative and civil rights leader, also gave a passionate speech against Sessions, but he took a more personal approach. ”Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions’ calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then,” said Lewis, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. in 1965 and suffered a skull fracture at the hands of state troopers. Lewis cautioned against Sessions’ polite demeanor. ”It doesn’t matter how Sen. Sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you,” he said. ”We need someone who’s going to stand up, speak up and speak out for the people that need help.” Rep. Cedric Richmond, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, decried Sessions’ record. ”Simply put, Sen. Sessions has advanced an agenda that will do great harm to   citizens and communities,” Richmond said. He also added that having to testify at the very end of the panels ”is the equivalent of being made to go to the back of the bus.” The other three witnesses on the panel defended Sessions. All had worked with him at some point in his career: Two did legal work with him in Alabama and the other, William Smith, served as the first   general counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. ”After 20 years of knowing Sen. Sessions, I have not seen the slightest evidence of racism, because it does not exist,” Smith said. ”I know a racist when I see one, and I’ve seen more than one, and Jeff Sessions is not one.” Civil rights and the ”rights to be safe and secure” The NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union were both mentioned on Day 1 of the hearing, specifically because Sessions had called both organizations ” ” and ”” as NPR’s Nina Totenberg has reported. On Day 2, leaders from the two organizations got a chance to respond. NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks said his organization sees Sessions as ”unfit to serve as attorney general.” ”Sen. Sessions’ record reveals a consistent disregard to civil and human rights of vulnerable populations, including the   Latinos, women, Muslims, immigrants, the disabled, the LGBT community and others,” Brooks said. He focused mainly on Sessions’ voting record in the Senate, highlighting Sessions’ votes against the 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, among others. He ended by calling on the room to imagine an Attorney General Sessions presiding over ”Michael Brown’s Ferguson” or ”Freddie Gray’s Baltimore.” David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU, asked senators to ”painstakingly probe the many serious questions that [Sessions’] actions, words and deeds raise about his commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.” Cole also highlighted Sessions’ move to charge three black activists with voter fraud when he was a U. S. attorney in Alabama in 1985. The case, which argued that the defendants had tampered with absentee ballots, was a factor behind Sessions’ rejection from a federal judgeship in 1986. At one point, Cole specifically brought up Sessions’ defense of Trump’s infamous comments about grabbing women’s genitals, caught on a hot microphone. At the time, Sessions said he wasn’t sure that action could be characterized as sexual assault. (In Tuesday’s hearing, Sessions said ”clearly it would be” sexual assault.) A survivor of sexual assault who testified on Wednesday said Sessions had minimized Trump’s comments and that made her concerned that victims may not want to come forward in the future. But, like the three who defended Sessions during the final panel, others stepped forward throughout the day to vouch for Sessions’ moral character. Former U. S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said he has ”no hesitation” that Sessions is prepared for the job before him: upholding the law and protecting Americans. Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson agreed. ”Of all our important civil rights, the rights to be safe and secure in one’s own home and neighborhood is perhaps the most important,” Thompson said."
287,"The incoming Trump administration has found a job for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Trump team announced Thursday that Giuliani will ”be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend” on   matters. Giuliani was a surrogate and adviser to Trump during the campaign. He had reportedly been under consideration for a variety of   posts in the new Trump administration, including Secretary of State, a job he expressed interest in. But no such   post was offered. Now, Giuliani will be leading a team of experts from the corporate world because of his ”long and very successful government career in law enforcement, and his now 16 years of work providing security solutions in the private sector,” according to a statement issued by the Trump transition office. Giuliani himself, in a phone call with reporters, compared the issues with cyber security to cancer, saying if all the people doing cancer research were brought together, ”you might be able to cure it.” Giuliani said there’s an ”awful lot of research going on both here, in Israel, in Germany on cyber defense.” His job he said, will be to bring those experts to the   so they can share with him their solutions. Cyber security has become emerged as a key issue for the Trump team. U. S. intelligence agencies have fingered Russia for hacking email servers at the Democratic National Committee with the aim of helping the Trump campaign. Trump on Wednesday conceded Russia was behind the hacks (although it ”could have been others,” he said) but he denied they helped win him the election. He said he would create a panel that would recommend within 90 days steps to take to end what he called the new hacking ”phenomenon.” Giuliani said he will focus on bringing ”things the private sector (is) doing” regarding cyber defenses to the  ’s attention. Of course, corporations have not been immune from hacking either, as customers of Target and Home Depot who had their credit accounts stolen can attest, or employees of the Sony Corporation whose   were hacked. It’s not clear exactly what Giuliani’s title will be, and whether he will be paid for his advice. Giuliani is chairman of the   practice at the Greenberg Traurig law firm and has his own   company."
288,"The incoming Trump administration will look to tap private investment funds to help rebuild and expand the nation’s highways, railways, seaports and airports. That’s what Elaine Chao,   Donald Trump’s choice to be transportation secretary, told a panel of senators in a rather friendly confirmation hearing Wednesday. Chao, who served as labor secretary under President George W. Bush, and in top transportation posts during the first Bush and Reagan administrations, says the nation’s economic growth ”is jeopardized by infrastructure in need of repair, the specter of rising highway fatalities, growing congestion and by a failure to keep pace with emerging technologies.” She also acknowledged that the federal Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by gasoline taxes, is running out of money and may soon become insolvent. So Chao told senators on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee the country needs ”to unleash the potential for private investment in our nation’s infrastructure,” and look to innovative financing tools such as   partnerships. ”In order to take full advantage of the estimated trillions in capital that equity firms, pension funds and endowments can invest, these partnerships must be incentivized with a bold, new vision,” Chao says. ”This president has a bold vision,” which Chao says will be announced soon after Trump takes office Jan. 20. During the campaign, Trump often criticized the state of the nation’s transportation and urban infrastructure, and he promised to spend a trillion dollars repairing and expanding roads, bridges, railways, airports and other infrastructure. But experts question how much private financing many infrastructure projects can attract. Investors will only fund those projects that can generate a good return on that investment, such as roads and bridges that charge tolls. And Chao acknowledged as much during the hearing, saying ”for [  partnerships] to be truly effective, there needs to be revenue streams that need to be assured.” But she added that when it comes to funding the nation’s critical infrastructure repairs and upgrades, ”we all know that the government doesn’t have the resources to do it all.” Chao, 63, is among Trump’s     appointments. Senators of both parties praised the longtime Washington insider’s experience and expertise, and noted her friendship with them and their spouses. She was introduced at the hearing by her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who borrowed a quote from former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole when Dole introduced his wife Elizabeth at a confirmation hearing for the same job. Dole paraphrased Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale by quipping, ”I regret I have but one wife to give for my country’s infrastructure.” Chao thanked senators for their support, joking, ”I will be working to lock in the majority leader’s support tonight over dinner.” Though Chao has been criticized for her environmental record and by organized labor groups who say she too often sided with industry in enforcing labor and safety regulations, she is expected to easily win confirmation by the Senate. A wide range of transportation industry groups has praised her nomination."
289,"Menopause is a mystery to evolutionary biologists, but new insights could come from a   study of killer whales. In these whales, the explanation may lie in a combination of conflict and cooperation between older and younger females, according to a report published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Killer whales are one of only three species known to have menopause  ” the others are pilot whales and humans. Researchers have long wondered why it was that these few species evolved to have females that spend so much of their lives unable to have babies. Killer whales start reproducing around age 15, but stop having calves in their 30s or 40s, even though they can live for around a century. A team led by behavioral ecologist Darren Croft of the University of Exeter decided to search for answers with the help of an unusual   study of killer whales in the Pacific Northwest. There, since the 1970s, researchers have carefully collected information on the births and deaths of individual whales that live in family groups. Contained within the data is an intriguing clue about why female whales may stop reproducing later in life. When older females reproduce at the same time as their daughters, who live alongside them, the calves of the older mothers are nearly twice as likely to die in the first 15 years of life. But when older mothers had calves in the absence of a reproducing daughter, their calves did just fine. ”It’s not that older mothers are bad mothers, that they’re not able to raise their calves as younger mothers,” says Croft. ”It’s that when they enter into this competition with their daughters, they lose out and their calves are more likely to die.” The competition may center on access to food, says Croft, because there’s good reason to believe older females feel more pressure to share their precious fish with the others around them. That’s because, in killer whales, females mate with males from other groups but then rejoin their families. That means when a new calf is born, its father is not around, and females start their lives in a situation where their relatedness to the group is rather low. As a female grows older and starts having calves that stay with her, however, she develops more kinship ties to those around her. ”It may be that older females are more likely to share, and younger females are less likely to share food,” says Croft. That would mean younger females would have more resources to lavish on their own calves. It’s clear that in these whales, older females play an important role in the survival of not just their own calves, but all of the family members they live with. ”If an old female dies, her son’s risk of dying in the year following her death is over eight times higher than if his mother was still alive,” says Croft, ”and these are adult sons, these are not juveniles, these are    fully grown males.” The idea that older females safeguard and enhance their genetic legacy by protecting and providing for their children and grandchildren has been an influential explanation for why menopause evolved. It’s known as the Grandmother hypothesis, and was developed by anthropologists who studied   cultures. But Croft thinks that alone isn’t enough to account for menopause, because other   social species, like elephants, have older females that help their group but continue to bear young until the end of life. ”Just the fact that these old females can store information and share that with the group and increase their survival doesn’t explain why they stop reproducing,” says Croft. Proponents of the Grandmother hypothesis, however, may not be so convinced that intrafamilial conflict plays an important role. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, at the University of Utah, says the killer whales are fascinating, but that they’re hard to study. ”They’re doing all kinds of stuff where you can’t see it, and even to get demographic data is just so tricky, because they’re all underwater and they’re ” she says. She points to one recent study on   in killer whales that found older females share fish with their older adult sons, perhaps to maximize the males’ ability to sire more babies. If that’s the case, she says, ”it’s not the older females and younger females in competition, it’s the older females contributing to the enormous success of their sons, and then those baby whales are all born somewhere else. They’re not competing, because their moms are elsewhere.”"
290,"If reading more in 2017 was one of your new year’s resolutions, Nancy Pearl is here to help. Every once in a while, the   librarian sends host Steve Inskeep a big stack of books. They’re generally ”  ” reads  —   titles she thinks deserve more attention than they’ve been getting. This year, the stack includes breathtaking thrillers, a   crime story, an unforgettable family tale, and more. Pearl tells Inskeep why she loves these novels, and why she thinks you will, too. These recommendations have been edited for clarity and length."
291,"Dogs are celebrated everywhere these days for the clever things they and their brains can do, and the science of dog cognition continues to soar in popularity. As a cat person, I can’t help but add that cats, too, show off their savviness for science. Now, some cognitive scientists are asking about another domesticated animal companion that’s been comparatively neglected: horses. Japanese scientists Monamie Ringhofer and Shinya Yamamoto of Kobe University have published online in the journal Animal Cognition the results of the first research to investigate how horses respond to the state of knowledge or ignorance of their human companions. The results are impressive. Ringhofer and Yamamoto designed research to test eight thoroughbred horses in a paddock at Kobe University’s equestrian club. The horses watched as a research assistant put a carrot in a food bucket. The bucket wasn’t accessible to the horses, only to a human caretaker. In one experimental condition, the human caretaker witnessed the food going into the bucket (knowledge state). In a second condition, the caretaker did not watch as the carrot was placed into the bucket (uninformed state). The horses’ responses were videotaped and compared between the two conditions. The horses used more visual and tactile signals with the uninformed than the informed caretaker. The horses increased how much they looked at, touched   lightly pushed the ignorant caretaker (compared to the caretaker in the know) to get them to realize where food was hidden. The authors acknowledge that   studies are needed. It’s an important result, though, because it points not only to advanced cognition but also to flexible cognition, with the horses adjusting their communicative behavior to the humans’ knowledge state. ”This study is the first to show that horses possess some cognitive basis for this ability of understanding others’ knowledge state in social communication with humans,” Ringhofer and Yamamoto write. Some   primates do this but, of course, horses are evolutionarily far more distant relatives of ours than chimpanzees. So what about dogs: How do they respond? Ringhofer and Yamomoto write that in a similar experiment carried out by other researchers, dogs didn’t do what the horses did  —   they didn’t look at, touch or push their caretakers. Instead, the dogs alternated their gaze between the uninformed human experimenter and the hidden food’s location. In other words, the dogs directed the humans’ attention also  —   just in a different way. It could be that it’s, perhaps, in keeping with their different evolutionary history as herding, hunting, service and rescue animals. Each species has in its own way   a skill leading to effective communication with humans. Science journalist and equestrian Wendy Williams, author of The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion, told me via email that: ”This   study has been a long time coming.” ”For most of the history of horse domestication, we’ve assumed that communications between humans and horses was unidirectional. Humans order. Horses obey. But in this study, we see that communication could be a   street. Horses do try to communicate with humans. Most of us just don’t try to learn their language.” Williams pointed out that social signaling is important among horses in a herd: ”Horses are highly social animals. In a natural state, they depend on each other for information that provides for the survival of the whole band. If a predator, for example, appears on the horizon, one horse immediately alerts the others through a wide variety of signals. Snorting, pricked ears and stamping are only a few of these signals. There’s no reason why they wouldn’t try to communicate with humans as well.” Lead researcher Ringhofer said, via email, that not all the horses responded during the experiment in the same way. This is interesting and also expected: Animals’ behavioral tendencies and personalities vary. ”Most horses used visual and tactile signals to request the [attention of the] caretakers. However, two horses seemed to use extra behavior. They stood near the caretaker and located their face in front of the caretaker (very close to the caretaker’s face). Then, both of them finally hit the caretakers’ face with their face,” Ringhofer said. Ringhofer couldn’t determine if the   was accidental or purposeful on the horses’ part, and so didn’t include it in her analyses. But she does wonder if those two horses might have come up with quite a startling way of social signaling! Direct comparison of intelligence across species doesn’t work well, because there is no single standard of what ”smart” means across differently evolved animals. Asking if horses and dogs are equally smart, then, doesn’t really make much sense. The bottom line here is all about the horses themselves. Together with other recent research showing that horses can use symbols to communicate with humans, this new study tells us that horses think carefully about what’s going on around them. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape"
292,"UPDATE: Trump Team: Adviser Spoke To Russia Official The Day U. S. Sanctions Were Announced, The man tapped to be national security adviser to   Donald Trump, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, exchanged text messages and spoke with Russia’s ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak, in December  ” around the time of the Obama administration’s response to Russian interference during the presidential campaign, a spokesman for Trump acknowledged Friday. But Sean Spicer, the spokesman and incoming White House press secretary, insisted all of this contact happened before President Obama announced the retaliation, and, as a result, Obama’s move to expel 35 Russian diplomats wasn’t a topic of conversation. This came in response to a Washington Post column from David Ignatius that raised serious questions about contact between Flynn and the ambassador. In the column, Ignatius writes he was told by a ”senior U. S. government official” that Flynn had called the ambassador several times on the day of Obama’s action. Ignatius then asks: ”What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U. S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U. S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about ’disputes’ with the United States. Was its spirit violated?” And it comes in a week in which the focus on Russia and Trump’s relationship with the country has been front and center. Spicer was asked about the column in a call with reporters, and that’s when he confirmed that contact had happened, but he said it wasn’t as described in the column. Here’s the timeline as described by Spicer:  —   ”Christmas Day, Gen. Flynn reached out to the ambassador, sent him a text and it said, ’I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I look forward to touching base with you and working with you, and I wish you all the best.’ The ambassador texted him back wishing him a Merry Christmas as well,” Spicer said.  —   ”And then subsequently on the 28th of December [the ambassador] texted [Flynn] and said, ’I’d like to give you a call, may I?’ ”  —   ”[Flynn] then took that call on the 28th and the call centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the   after he was sworn in. And they exchanged logistical information on how to initiate and schedule that call. That was it, plain and simple.” President Obama ordered two Russian diplomatic compounds closed and 35 Russian diplomats expelled from the United States the next day, Dec. 29. Ignatius has updated his column to reflect what he was told by Trump’s team, which initially hadn’t responded to his request for comment. Here is what Ignatius wrote in the update: ”UPDATE: The Trump transition team did not respond Thursday night to a request for comment. But two team members called with information Friday morning. A first Trump official confirmed that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak by phone, but said the calls were before sanctions were announced and didn’t cover that topic. This official later added that Flynn’s initial call was to express condolences to Kislyak after the terrorist killing of the Russian ambassador to Ankara Dec. 19, and that Flynn made a second call Dec. 28 to express condolences for the   of a Russian plane carrying a choir to Syria. In that second call, Flynn also discussed plans for a   conversation sometime after the inauguration. In addition, a second Trump official said that Kislyak had initiated a call to Flynn to invite a representative of the Trump administration to a conference that would be taking place in Kazakhstan at the end of January the official didn’t provide a date for the   call.” A transition official confirmed to NPR that in addition to talking about logistics for a   phone call, the Russian ambassador also extended an invitation to the conference related to the conflict in Syria, which is set to take place in Kazakhstan. The transition official says no commitments about attending were made during the call. Additionally, the official couldn’t say whether there had been any contact between Flynn and the ambassador since Dec. 28. This could all be a whole lot of nothing, or it could be something more serious. It isn’t uncommon for ambassadors to try to reach out to incoming administrations. But critics have long raised concerns about Flynn’s relationship with Russia and in particular RT, the Russian     network (considered by the U. S. intelligence community to be a propaganda tool). Flynn made appearances on the network and even sat next to Putin at an event celebrating its 10th anniversary. It’s been a week of intense focus on Russia, First, there was the release of the unverified document claiming Russia has compromising material on the   and that there had been contact between Trump’s team and Russian officials during the campaign. Trump’s team has strongly disputed these unverified (and in some cases verified to be false) claims calling the document and those who reported on it ”fake news.” It came to dominate Trump’s first news conference since winning the election. In that same news conference, Trump said he did think Russia was behind the   hacking and document releases, but he also said, ”If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what folks? That’s called an asset, not a liability. Now I don’t know that I am going to get along with Vladimir Putin. I hope I do, but there is a good chance I won’t.” Then there were the confirmation hearings for Trump’s picks for national security positions. All expressed a harder line toward Russia and its leader than Trump has. And finally, there were two totally bizarre occurrences on Capitol Hill. Just as the man who hopes to become CIA chief was testifying and a senator was in the middle of asking him about Russian interference, the power went out in the building, cutting the feed to   which was televising the hearing. And, on the same day, as a congresswoman was making a speech on the House floor, again about Russia, the   live stream online switched to a feed of RT. ”This afternoon the online feed for   was briefly interrupted by RT programming,” a   spokesman said in a statement to NPR’s Susan Davis. ”We are currently investigating and troubleshooting this occurrence. As RT is one of the networks we regularly monitor, we are operating under the assumption that it was an internal routing issue. If that changes we will certainly let you know.”"
293,"Fleeing, unarmed people shot in the back. Mentally ill men and women, not suspected of any crime, stunned by a Taser while they lay on the ground. People already detained or incapacitated who were beaten, with police accounts falsely describing the force as necessary. A   report from the Justice Department details harrowing accounts of excessive force by the Chicago Police Department and highlights systemic failures that allow the violence to continue even as members of the public attempt to protest or report the brutality. The investigation was launched after the death of Laquan McDonald in 2014 put Chicago’s policing practices in the spotlight. Video released by court order showed a police officer shooting the black teenager in the back. The report found an ongoing ”pattern or practice” of unreasonable and excessive force  —   not a series of isolated events. And the violations are rarely punished, the DOJ says, as officers’ descriptions of encounters are taken ”at face value” even when there’s contradictory evidence. What does that mean for Chicago residents? The DOJ included a number of ”illustrative examples” of the police department’s systemic failings. Here’s what that pattern of excessive force looks like on the ground: Shooting at fleeing suspects, In ”numerous incidents,” Chicago officers chased and shot fleeing people who posed no threat to officers or the public, the DOJ says. In some cases, there was no basis even to suspect the person of committing a serious crime. ”The act of fleeing alone was sufficient to trigger a pursuit ending in gunfire, sometimes fatal,” the DOJ writes. In one case, the report says, police officers fired 45 rounds at a man who was running away, killing him. They claimed he had fired a gun at them while they were chasing him  —   even though they noted there was no gun found on the man. And there were these examples: ”In another case, a CPD officer chased a man who ran when an officer told him to stop, and then shot the man in the back of the leg. The officer claimed the man had turned to point a gun. After a thorough search of the scene, no gun was recovered. The man, who denied ever turning to face the officer, was found only with a cell phone. . .. ”In another case, a CPD officer fatally shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect in the back. The officer told investigators the suspect had turned around to point a black object. This account did not square with the location of the shooting victim’s gunshot wounds and appeared contrary to video footage that showed the suspect running away from the officer.” The department doesn’t have a foot pursuit policy for officers to follow. In all three of these cases, the department accepted the officers’ accounts and found the shootings justified. The DOJ also notes that the shooting of McDonald was a foot pursuit of a person who did not pose a threat, and it, like many other such chases, came to a ”tragic end.” Using Tasers against people who pose no threat, The report found a pattern of officers using Tasers in unreasonable situations, with the department generally not investigating the incidents at all. The DOJ said it was difficult to track this practice, because the department kept such poor records on it  —   but still, the report found numerous examples. Chicago police chose to use Tasers on: There’s no department policy on using Tasers on children, the DOJ found. Use of force as retaliation and against children, Officers sometimes hurt people as retaliation, the DOJ found  —   including retaliation against citizens who claimed a police stop was unlawful. They once used pain compliance techniques on a man who ”stiffened and locked his arms while they were arresting him for walking his dog without a leash and refusing to present identification.” The DOJ also highlighted an example of a    Latino boy who was riding his bike under his father’s supervision. A plainclothes officer, ”responding to a report of ’two male Hispanics running from’ the area,” pulled the child off his bike, handcuffed him and pushed him up against a fence, without explanation to father or son. ”The officer’s only apparent basis for this detention was the boy’s race, which is constitutionally unreasonable,” the DOJ found. Acceptance of officers’ accounts, in face of contradicting evidence, Time and again, the DOJ found, officers claimed their use of force was reasonable and the police department took their word for it  —   even in the face of video evidence showing obvious excessive brutality. Here’s just one example. Police officers falsely claimed that a woman had attacked them, the DOJ writes: ”In the video, officers can be seen aggressively grabbing the woman, who was being arrested for a prostitution offense, throwing her to the ground, and surrounding her. After she is handcuffed, one officer tells another to ’tase her ten             times.’ Officers call her an animal, threaten to kill her and her family, and scream, ’I’ll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the       you came from’ while hitting the woman  —   who was handcuffed and on her knees. Officers can then be seen discovering a recording device and discussing whether they can take it. Supervisors approved this use of force and the officers were not disciplined until after the woman complained to [the Independent Police Review Authority] and produced surveillance video of the event.” Putting youths in danger as coercion, One section of the report is dedicated to dangerous and potentially unlawful tactics the CPD apparently uses to gain information about locations of weapons, gang activity or drug activity. The DOJ says its investigation indicates that officers will sometimes arrest someone for a   offense or on false pretense and refuse to let the person go until he or she gives up information about where police can find guns stashed illegally. If the person can’t or won’t give a location, the officers reportedly will ”take a young person to a rival gang neighborhood and either leave the person there or display the youth to rival members, immediately putting the life of that young person in jeopardy by suggesting he has provided information to the police.” One teenager reported his brother was dropped off in rival territory and told ”better get to running.” There’s video footage of officers standing around a car with a ”cowering teenager” detained in the backseat, as they allow other young men to crowd around the car and make gang signs. ”In addition to the likely illegality of this conduct, its impact on community trust cannot be overstated,” the DOJ writes. ”The fear and anger created by these practices was obvious when we talked with individuals who reported these experiences.” A disproportionate impact on people of color, The use of unreasonable force mostly burdens minority communities in Chicago, the DOJ found. Black and Latino communities in the city suffer from higher crime and have more contact with police  —   and thus experience more incidents of excessive force. The CPD was found to use force 10 times more often against black residents than against whites. The disparity is especially vivid when it comes to use of force against minors  —   83 percent involved black children and 14 percent involved Latino children. Many of the Justice Department findings will come as no surprise to communities of color. Echoing the words of residents and activists over the decades, the DOJ says that starting from a young age, Chicago’s minorities ”have a vastly different experience with police than do white people,” marked by negative and ”often tragic” interactions. There’s also ”routinely abusive behavior” toward minority residents of Chicago, the report found: ”Black youth told us that they are routinely called ’      ’ ’animal,’ or ’pieces of [s***]’ by CPD officers. A    black male reported that CPD officers called him a ’monkey.’ Such statements were confirmed by CPD officers. One officer we interviewed told us that he personally has heard coworkers and supervisors refer to black individuals as monkeys, animals, savages, and ’pieces of [s***].’ ” The DOJ found 354 complaints of Chicago officers using the  . Only four were sustained by police investigators  —   two because there were audio recordings, one because the officer admitted to it, and the last because the woman being berated was married to a police officer who took ”extraordinary measures to document the incident.” Some officers, including supervisors, have made discriminatory posts  —   like ”the only good Muslim is a             dead one”  —   on social media, often without repercussions. Meanwhile, white residents who file a complaint about police misconduct are far more likely to see a result  —   their complaints are 2   times more likely to be sustained than complaints from black or Latino people, the DOJ says. When it’s an allegation of excessive force, whites are three times more likely to find that the police department accepts their side of the story. In general, nonwhite residents reported persistent dehumanizing and demeaning treatment at the hands of the police, the DOJ says. One black teenager, asked what change he’d want to see in the CPD, said, ”Act like you care.” True scope of problem ”nearly impossible” to uncover, There are multiple reasons why the DOJ thinks the Chicago Police Department has an even bigger problem than this report describes. For one thing, there’s all those videos that call into question officers’ accounts. The DOJ expresses concern that many more officer accounts, in incidents where there isn’t video, might be similarly inaccurate. For instance, one officer wrote that a man had been struggling and kicking, requiring the use of force to control him. That kind of language frequently appears in    reports, the DOJ says. But video evidence showed the man had actually been handcuffed when the officer punched him multiple times. The officer’s partner didn’t report the incident, and his supervisors deemed the force justified. The DOJ implies it’s impossible to know how many similar incidents are never caught on camera. Police also use ”boilerplate” language to justify the use of force, with no details to allow investigators to evaluate the appropriateness of the force, and supervisors rarely review or investigate   incidents. Consider the officer who performed ”an emergency   maneuver to regain control” when an    woman was flailing her arms after a fight. The fact that the incident chipped her tooth suggests the true extent of force used, the DOJ says. The young woman  —   5 feet 4 inches and 120 pounds  —   complained to the department that the      officer said he ”didn’t give a      ” about her injury. He was exonerated without an interview. That case had an indicative injury. In many other files, the DOJ says it is ”nearly impossible for us to understand how much force officers used or whether the level of resistance justified the force used.” Missteps stretching from training through punishment, The failures of the Chicago Police Department start with the training of recruits and proceed all the way through to the punishment when incidents do occur, the DOJ says. Training is inadequate, the report states. For instance, the DOJ observed a training in deadly force that started 10 minutes late, ended 20 minutes early and was based on a    video  —   with information that was legally inaccurate and ”clearly out of date.” One recruit appeared to be sleeping through the class. When investigators interviewed recent graduates of the police academy, only 1 in 6 ”came close to properly articulating the legal standard for use of force,” the DOJ writes. Protocols to prevent excessive use of force are inadequate and often unenforced, the DOJ says. Violations are often not investigated. When the police department does open investigations, they are  —   with ”rare exceptions”  —   incomplete and unfair, the report says. Officers appear to collude with one another, not only following a ”code of silence” but actively falsifying reports and lying in testimony, the report alleges. Meanwhile, investigators ask leading questions, union representatives coach officers on what to say, and contradictory evidence is ignored or never pursued, the DOJ reports. Even when serious misconduct is uncovered, officers can frequently avoid significant punishment. The result, the DOJ says, is a system of policing that is less effective and more dangerous for police officers  —   and regularly violates the constitutional rights of citizens."
294,"The Justice Department says an investigation has found Chicago police are systematically violating the civil rights of people in the city through excessive use of force, poor oversight and inadequate training of officers. U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the investigation’s findings on Friday, saying the DOJ had concluded there was ample evidence the Chicago Police Department ”engages in a pattern or practice of the use of excessive force,” in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The abuse is most prevalent in the predominantly black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. The report cited numerous examples of unreasonable force, such as kicking a subject who ”balled his fists” and using a Taser against a suspect fleeing the scene of a ”minor property crime.” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the investigation had found that officers shot people who presented no clear threat and ”tased” people who did not follow orders. Lynch said the city and the DOJ had agreed to enter negotiations about a   consent decree to guide reform within the police department. A federal judge also would need to sign off on any final agreement before it would go into effect. The Justice Department’s ”pattern or practice” investigation was launched more than a year ago, after a white police officer shot a black teenager named Laquan McDonald 16 times in October 2014, killing the    youth. Under court order in November 2015, the city released police dashcam video of the killing, prompting protests by activists who said the city had tried to cover up the shooting. The police officer, Jason Van Dyke, has been charged with murder and is facing trial. The department has moved to fire Van Dyke, as well as four other police officers for allegedly lying about the shooting. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel apologized for the killing and the handling of the video. ”That happened on my watch,” Emanuel said in December 2015, and he promised a ”complete and total reform of the system,” as The   reported. While the state court system is handling Van Dyke’s individual case, the purpose of the Justice Department review was to investigate how such incidents reflected the larger culture and practices within the entire department. Federal investigators said Friday that they had interviewed hundreds of people and combed through data about use of force and how the police department held those officers who used excessive force accountable. In September, U. S. Attorney Zachary Fardon said the investigation had grown into the largest such probe ever undertaken by federal authorities, according to The Chicago Tribune. It was unclear what immediate effect, if any, Friday’s announcement would have on the    practices of the Chicago Police Department. As the Tribune noted, ”It will be months before a consent decree would be worked out and filed in federal court.” Police departments have operated under consent decrees in cities ranging from Ferguson, Mo. to Newark, N. J. and just this week, Baltimore announced the details of a consent decree with its police department. Under President Obama, the Justice Department has increased the number of civil rights investigations into law enforcement practices, as Bloomberg has reported. But   Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next U. S attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has indicated he does not support consent decrees. At a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Sessions said DOJ investigations into police departments ”can undermine respect for police officers.” He added, ”I think there’s concern that good police officers and good departments can be sued by the Department of Justice when you just have individuals within a department who have done wrong, and those individuals need to be prosecuted.” In a 2008 policy paper on consent decrees, Sessions described the agreements as ”one of the most dangerous, and rarely discussed, exercises of raw power” and said that ”in practice, a decree can last for many years  —   longer than the remedy that was needed.”"
295,"Next week, white nationalists like Jared Taylor will celebrate a moment they’ve been waiting decades to see, when Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Members of the white nationalist movement were among the first to embrace Trump’s candidacy, and they celebrated after his election. ”Jan. 20 reflects a significant defeat for egalitarian orthodoxy,” Taylor says. Taylor promotes a very different orthodoxy, one in which race is central to innate abilities and national success. He is working to build a United States explicitly for white people. Trump arguably helps this by telling supporters that they’re the victims of a system rigged against them. ”I see Donald Trump as a kind of steppingstone. He is a step in the right direction in terms of understanding America and history and the world in essentially racial terms,” Taylor says. But white nationalist enthusiasm for Trump has fallen off substantially. Since the election, the     has splintered, and the movement now looks a lot less potent than it once appeared. To understand that, it helps to go back to the heady days just after the election. ”It’s too much winning! Could someone please just stop winning, I don’t want to win anymore,” Richard Spencer, who coined the term   told a room full of fellow radicals in November. Spencer said that Trump’s victory had just slingshot white nationalism into the mainstream. ”And even if we’re not quite in power yet we should act like it,” he said. But later that day, Spencer gave another speech, a fiery one that ended with some of the audience casting off any pretense of being mainstream. ”Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Spencer shouted, raising his glass in a   toast to the audience. Some in the crowd responded with enthusiastic Nazi salutes, which captured media attention. ”Right after the election, I think it was euphoria,” says Kevin MacDonald, a retired evolutionary psychology professor at California State, Long Beach and another white nationalist mainstay. ”But as we get into it now, there’s more trepidation.” MacDonald says Trump’s appointments also have rattled the movement, especially his propensity for tapping rich Wall Street bankers. ”These are globalists in general. They love free trade, they love immigration  ” big red flags for us,” he says. And MacDonald says he is concerned about the reliance on generals and hawkish policy leading America into another Middle East war. ”Lot of trepidation, but the big silver lining is Jeff Sessions,” he says. MacDonald hopes Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, will clamp down on immigration. White nationalists also like the nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who is seen as being close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, a darling of the  . But despite its high hopes for the Trump administration, the radical right has largely gone to war with itself. Mark Potok, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, says much of what was once called the   has peeled away. ”I mean look, we are talking about a movement which spends literally more time attacking one another than they do attacking their enemies,” Potok says. No one has taken more fire from his ideological kinsmen than Spencer.   radicals have disavowed the   even called Spencer an operative bent on the movement’s destruction. In the media, he is always tied to those Nazi salutes. ”I think it’s good to be the person talked about, even when it’s negative,” Spencer tells NPR. ”Our ideas are entering the discourse.” But Marilyn Mayo with the   League argues that the   is watching its illusion of real world influence whither. ”At some point, they may have felt that they could influence policy in some way, but I think that was really a pipe dream for them because they really are a fringe movement, and they’re still a fringe movement,” Mayo says. A movement that sprang from obscurity with Trump’s election seems to be dropping back into the shadows even before Trump takes power."
296,"The website at the Office of Government Ethics went down Friday afternoon, apparently overwhelmed with traffic, as the agency and its director found themselves at the heart of a growing political fight. OGE website administrator Michael Hanson told NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben the site failure came as a result of the usually sleepy office’s website receiving 1 million visitors in just the last three days. Normally, it gets about 300, 000  —   in an entire year. There’s a reason the website’s traffic has spiked. The office’s director, Walter Shaub Jr. has been conducting an unusually public discussion about ethics with the   and the people he has chosen for his Cabinet. Just Friday afternoon, OGE sent out a tweet that seemed aimed directly at the  . Although the office didn’t respond to a question about why the tweet was sent out when it was, it came a day after Trump tweeted praise of a business and encouraged people to shop there. That makes the OGE tweet Friday read suspiciously like a subtweet of Trump. On Wednesday, the same day as Trump’s   news conference where he addressed his potential business conflicts, Shaub gave a speech at the Brookings Institution. Shaub  —   a political appointee of President Obama in his fourth of a   term and a career civil servant  —   described Trump’s announced plans to turn over management of his businesses to his sons as ”meaningless” as it relates to conflicts of interest. ”I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be president of the United States of America,” Shaub said. But that was far from his first   with the   and his prospective Cabinet. Over the weekend, Senate Democrats released a letter Shaub sent raising alarms about nominees who hadn’t completed their ethics reviews being scheduled for confirmation hearings. The ethics agency director ended the letter, ”For as long as I remain Director, OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore conflicts of interest.” The Trump transition team responded, saying this was a disservice, and charged, ”It is disappointing some have chosen to politicize the process in order to distract from important issues facing our country.” Late last year, the official OGE Twitter account went on a tweetstorm, written in a style meant to mimic Trump’s own Twitter voice, encouraging the   to divest completely. It turns out, as NPR first reported, Shaub personally directed those tweets. Divestiture is something ethics experts from both sides of the aisle have encouraged, but it isn’t required.    laws that apply to executive branch employees don’t apply to the president. Trump has made it clear he believes he is going above and beyond what is required by law, but Shaub and others have been quite critical of those steps, saying they are insufficient. This has caused something of a backlash from Republicans, including the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Jason Chaffetz. In a letter to Shaub dated Jan. 12, Chaffetz wrote, ”Your agency’s mission is to provide clear ethics guidance, not engage in public relations.” The letter goes on to issue what some perceived as a threat, mentioning that the Oversight Committee has jurisdiction to reauthorize the office and asking Shaub to come in for a transcribed interview with committee staff by the end of the month. The top Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, says rather than a   session, he wants Shaub to testify in a public hearing and that Chaffetz was publicly attacking the ethics watchdog. ”The Oversight Committee has not held one hearing, conducted one interview, or obtained one document about   Donald Trump’s massive global entanglements,” Cummings said in a statement, ”yet it is now apparently rushing to launch an investigation of the key government official for warning against the risks caused by   Donald Trump’s current plans.” This also comes after House Republicans pushed to reduce the influence of the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Facing a backlash of criticism, they dropped that plan."
297,"When President Obama took office in January 2009, the country was on edge, the economy in  . The federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind, was also in need of an update after earning the ire of teachers, parents and politicians alike. In short, there was much to do. In time, that update would come, but President Obama’s education legacy begins, oddly enough, with his plan to bolster the faltering economy. Race To The Top, In the summer of 2009, Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that a small piece of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka The Stimulus, would be used to create a competitive, $4. 35 billion grant program for states. They would call it Race To The Top. The administration used the money to encourage  —   Obama’s critics would say coerce  —   states to embrace its education policies, including charter schools, college and   standards and evaluations of teachers using student test scores. The money arrived as many states had been brought to their knees by the Great Recession. Governors and state education agencies didn’t just want the extra money  —   they needed it, and agreed to big changes in hopes of winning it. While the grant program was voluntary, 46 states and the District of Columbia applied. Common Core, Race To The Top was a boon for the common standards movement and, specifically, for the controversial Common Core State Standards. While the learning standards in English and math were not developed by the Obama administration, the Education Department made the adoption of new college and   standards a key component of applying for the grant money. States didn’t have to adopt, but they knew that doing so would help their cause. Obama didn’t create the Core he   adoption. His administration also used $350 million to bankroll two testing consortia, PARCC and Smarter Balanced, that would develop standardized tests aligned to these new standards. Initially, most states signed on to one or the other, but, after years of blowback from Common Core critics, the consortia have hemorrhaged members, with many states keeping the Core but choosing their own tests. Today, the Common Core standards, or something very like them, are still used by the vast majority of states, though   Donald Trump has made clear he’ll do all he can to   the standards once and for all. Teacher evaluations, By 2011, it was clear that the key requirement of the No Child Left Behind law, that all children be proficient in reading and math by 2014, wasn’t just unrealistic but impossible. So the Obama administration began offering states a way out  —   a reprieve from the law in the form of a waiver. In return, though, states were required to do several things, none more controversial than this: Evaluate teachers using student test scores. The move infuriated many teachers and their union leaders and no doubt contributed to what would later become the ” ” movement. It also angered lawmakers on Capitol Hill who considered waivers an   around them. When Congress finally reworked No Child Left Behind in late 2015, renaming it the Every Student Succeeds Act, lawmakers notably decided not to require that states evaluate teachers using student test scores. Preschool, President Obama talked early and often about the importance of   preschool for all. He said this in his 2013 State of the Union Address: ”Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10    are enrolled in a   preschool program. Most   parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. So tonight, I propose working with states to make   preschool available to every single child in America. That’s something we should be able to do.” Obama even proposed a $75 billion plan to provide universal preschool to the nation’s    but congressional Republicans balked at his pitch to pay for it: a   tax increase on cigarettes. Ultimately, as he did with Race To The Top, Obama used the promise of federal dollars to entice states to create or expand their   offerings. In 2014, the administration’s Preschool Development Grants spread more than $200 million across 18 states, expanding access to   preschool to 33, 000 children, according to the department. 83. 2 percent, The high school graduation rate hit an   high under President Obama, reaching 83. 2 percent in  . In October 2016, when Obama announced this latest uptick, he used the moment to reflect: ”When I took office almost eight years ago, we knew that our education system was falling short. I said, by 2020 I want us to be No. 1 across the board, so we got to work making real changes to improve the chances for all of our young people. . .. And the good news is that we’ve made real progress.” Now, it’s difficult to say how much credit Obama deserves for that progress. Some, to be sure. But the NPR Ed Team has also reported extensively on state and district strategies to artificially boost their graduation rates, including this recent ”black eye” for Alabama’s department of education. The    pipeline, Obama drew national attention to the issue of ”zero tolerance” discipline and argued that such policies disproportionately target black and Latino students for minor infractions like truancy, dress code violations and profanity. He vowed to have his administration  —   the Education and Justice departments  —   crack down on states and districts that had gone too far. It’s unclear how much of an impact this had on school disciplinary policies across the country, but some advocates who’ve spent years calling for an overhaul of these policies at the state level credit the Obama administration for bringing lots of attention to the issue. ESSA, As we mentioned, by the time Obama took office, the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind had alienated just about everyone with a stake in America’s schools. But few could agree on a fix and, even with Democrats in control of Congress early in his first term, Obama did not prioritize a rewrite. So the law stayed on the books until midway through his second term. By then, a consensus had formed around a few big fixes: 1. Annual testing and breaking those results down into specific groups of students is important and should continue, 2. But the federal government should no longer be the grand arbiter of how to measure school success or remedy failure, 3. Because that job, along with the adoption of standards and evaluation of teachers belongs to states, period. The ESSA is in many ways a repudiation of NCLB’s unrealistic expectations and   tactics. Though some civil rights groups worry that the new law devolves too much responsibility back to states who, in the past, have sometimes failed to protect the interests of their most vulnerable students. Higher ed, Soaring college costs and student debt were two major concerns for President Obama when he took office. During his tenure, the total amount of outstanding student loan debt for the first time exceeded a trillion dollars, prompting the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys to issue a warning: A ”student debt bomb” was on the horizon. Student debt  The administration moved quickly to bring relief. In 2009, the Education Department launched an ” ” repayment plan using students’ discretionary income after graduation. Students saw their monthly payments drop considerably. The administration also reduced the interest rate on Stafford Loans, the biggest   loan program, and put an additional $50 billion into Pell Grants for   college students, raising the award to its current maximum of $5, 775. These will be remembered as some of the most sweeping changes in the federal government’s oversight of higher education, in particular Obama’s decision to end the federal government’s partnership with banks and private lenders who for decades had issued   loans to college students. Instead of having to deal with private lenders and banks, borrowers and schools now deal with only one  —   Uncle Sam. The administration argued that by removing private lenders, the program would save over $60 billion that could be put back into more loans and grants. College scorecard, In 2013 Obama floated another controversial proposal, a federal ”rating” system designed to help students and parents compare colleges based on cost, financial aid and academic quality. Colleges would be required to disclose in a more   way things like student default rates, dropout rates, graduation rates. For the first time, institutions would also have to disclose their students’ earnings after graduation. Despite the pressure to hold higher ed more accountable for the hundreds of billions of dollars colleges get in federal funds, private and public institutions lobbied successfully to kill the rating system idea, saying that it was based on the wrong metrics and therefore would result in ”unfair comparisons.” While the rating idea didn’t fly, the administration compromised by creating a ”scorecard” that provides a wealth of data on colleges and costs, leaving students and parents to make their own comparisons.   crackdown, Obama came into office at a time of mounting concern over some   colleges and whether they were giving students their money’s worth. The administration worked with Democrats in Congress to create a plan that for the first time tied federal aid to something called ”gainful employment.” The idea is, if you’re going to pay an arm and a leg for a college degree, it should at least guarantee you a job with a living wage. Eventually this led to a crackdown on   colleges that were taking federal aid but too often saddling students with enormous debt and worthless degrees. In the end, President Obama’s efforts to expand access, lower college costs and introduce   reforms to higher education were overshadowed by a growing perception among many Americans that, for all its promise of upward mobility and opportunity, higher education is becoming too expensive and detached from the real world of work and good jobs. "
298,"The six faith leaders   Donald Trump has invited to pray at his inauguration come from diverse backgrounds, but they have something in common: All have personal ties to Trump or his family or have in some way signaled their approval of him, his politics or his wealth. The group includes an   megachurch leader from Detroit, a Florida woman known for her lavish lifestyle and preaching on ”abundancy,” a rabbi from Los Angeles, and a Hispanic evangelical  —   as well as Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) and Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York. Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, who leads Great Faith Ministries in Detroit, played a key role during the presidential campaign by inviting candidate Trump to visit his church. For Trump, it was a rare appearance before a black congregation. Presenting Trump with a Jewish prayer shawl during his visit, Jackson said, ”There are going to be times in your life that you are going to feel forsaken . .. but the anointing is going to lift you up.” With his invitation to Jackson to pray at his inauguration, Trump returned a favor. Jackson lives in a   mansion in Detroit and drives luxury cars. He preaches that being rich is not bad and that Trump’s wealth shows he is ”blessed by God.” Such teachings exemplify the ”prosperity gospel,” which holds that God rewards faithful Christians with financial success. It is a faith tradition with which Trump long has been associated. His ”spiritual adviser” is Paula White, who as the leader of New Destiny Christian Center near Orlando, Fla. is perhaps the best known prosperity preacher in the country. ”Every day you’re [living] your destiny, designed by God and discovered by you,” White said in a recent sermon. ”You’re either in a position of abundance, you’re in a position of prosperity, or you’re in a position of poverty. Now that’s in every area of your life. . .. You’re living abundant in your affairs of life  —   and that includes your financial conditions  —   or you’re living in poverty.” Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is drawn to those preachers who say that one’s wealth is a sign of God’s approval. Paula White has her critics in the evangelical world, some of whom consider her a heretic, but she endorsed Trump’s candidacy, and he reciprocated by inviting White to pray at his   ceremony. Another   evangelist who will be praying at the inauguration is Franklin Graham. During a recent interview with Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network, Graham said ”the hand of God” was evident in Trump’s election. ”I think God intervened and put his hand on Donald Trump for some reason,” Graham told Dobbs. ”It’s obvious that there was something behind this, and it was more than people understand. I just think it was God.” By appearing at Trump’s   Franklin Graham will be following family tradition: His    father, Billy, prayed at the inauguration of several presidents, from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, and Franklin prayed at the inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001. His inclusion as a prayer leader may also signal Trump’s comfort with Graham’s political positions. During his campaign, Trump focused a lot of attention on the threat from ”radical Islam,” a theme Franklin Graham also has emphasized. Shared political views may also explain Trump’s invitation to Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founding president of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. In a recent television interview, Hier said it was ”outrageous” that the Obama administration chose not to veto a recent United Nations resolution condemning Israel’s settlement policy, echoing Trump’s own criticism. Hier, the first rabbi asked to pray at a presidential inauguration since 1985, says he will hit ”modern themes” during his inauguration appearance. ”It will be a short prayer, but it will reflect on the 21st century,” he says. Hier also has ties to the Trump world through Jared Kushner, Trump’s    and close adviser. Kushner’s parents are old friends with Hier and his wife. One indication of Trump’s unorthodox approach in choosing inauguration prayer leaders is the absence of any representative of mainline Protestantism, the dominant faith tradition of U. S. presidents throughout the country’s history. On the other hand, Trump is the first to invite a Hispanic evangelical leader, the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and senior pastor at New Season Christian Worship Center, an Assemblies of God congregation in Sacramento, Calif. Rodriguez accepted the invitation despite some misgivings about Trump’s   immigration views. ”There was a bit of angst due to the fact that throughout the course of this campaign, the rhetoric and tone, as it pertained particularly to the immigrant community, did not line up with the ethos or the values of the NHCLC,” Rodriguez told NPR. He agreed to come to Washington for the inauguration after ”prayerful deliberation and discussion” and a conclusion that he could not pass up an opportunity to pray on ”the quintessential political platform on the planet.” Among Hispanic evangelicals, Rodriguez is one of the more conservative leaders. While he did not endorse Trump, he told NPR that he has heard a ”change of tone” from Trump in the past few weeks, and now has high hopes for better relations between Hispanics and the Trump administration. ”Thirty percent of Latinos voted for Donald Trump,” Rodriguez points out. ”There’s a great possibility that the   and his team have come to the realization that this constituency could be engaged successfully.” Generally, Trump’s selection of inauguration prayer leaders reflects his tendency to break with mainstream thinking  —   and the importance he places on loyalty. With his invitations, he has rewarded clergy members who support him politically, endorse his views, or even offer a religious approval of his great wealth. The least surprising prayer leader choice is Cardinal Dolan. Most U. S. presidents in recent years have asked a prominent Catholic bishop or theologian to pray at their inaugurations, and as fellow New Yorkers, Dolan and Trump have known each other for a long time."
299,"How much criticism can a single   episode of television sustain before it gets the ax? On Friday, we may have gotten our answer: An episode of the British comedy series Urban Myths  —   which drew widespread complaints for featuring the white actor Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson  —   has been canceled by Sky TV before it could air. ”We have taken the decision not to broadcast ’Elizabeth, Michael and Marlon,’ a   episode from the Sky Arts ’Urban Myths’ series, in light of the concerns expressed by Michael Jackson’s immediate family,” the European   company said in a statement. ”We set out to take a   look at reportedly true events and never intended to cause any offence. Joseph Fiennes fully supports our decision.” Those ”concerns” had been expressed quite bluntly by the late singer’s family on Twitter. For instance: The proposed show ”honestly makes me want to vomit,” Jackson’s daugher, Paris, wrote. ”No words could express the blatant disrespect,” tweeted his nephew, Taj. The episode was to depict Jackson on a  . 11 road trip across the U. S. in 2001, with Elizabeth Taylor, played by Stockard Channing, and Marlon Brando, played by Brian Cox. Intended to be a ”  look” at an event rumored to have actually taken place, the episode had been positioned as a satire by its creators. ”It’s a sketch about a story that could have been a legend or could have been true,” Fiennes told AFPTV in Rome early last year, though he, too, admitted he ”was shocked” that he was cast in the role of Jackson: ”You have to ask them as to why they would want to cast me.” The director of the episode, Ben Palmer, told The Guardian this week that the casting was based partly on the challenge of matching physical resemblance, partly on the basis of Fiennes’ performance. ”We were really looking for the performance that could unlock the spirit, and we really think Joe Fiennes has done that,” Palmer said. ”He’s given a really sweet, nuanced, characterful performance.” To be sure, though, the questions came fast and furious  —   especially since the announcement was made smack in the middle of last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy over a lack of diversity in the entertainment industry. And the release of the trailer for the upcoming season, which as you can see above features footage from the Jackson episode and others, did nothing to stem the criticism. It appears that trailer is the only glimpse we’ll get of the   episode."
300,"Lila Downs has spent her career exploring the furthest reaches of Mexican folk music. With a voice that borrows heavily from opera, Downs performs the kind of   mariachi singing that would fit right in at Mexico City’s Garibaldi Square  —   ground zero for mariachi. She can also coax the most tender moments from romantic boleros. But Downs is at her best when she and her band gather all of those influences to create   expression that breaks down musical barriers. Entertaining and inspiring, she’s as much a storyteller as a singer, and her   banter lays bare the Mexican soul, only to have it punctuated in song. Balas y Chocolate is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) (Spotify) (Google Play) Lila Downs (vocals, jarana) Paul Cohen (sax) George Saenz, Jr. (trombone) Hugo Moreno (trumpet) Marcos Lopez (seated percussion) Yayo Serka (seated drums) Rafael Gomez (electric guitar) Leo Soqui (jarana) Luis Guzman (bass). Producers: Felix Contreras, Morgan Walker, Maggie Starbard Audio Engineer: Brian Jarboe Videographers: Morgan Walker, Maggie Starbard, Morgan McCloy Production Assistant: Carlos Water Photo: NPR. For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
301,"After   Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state made strong statements about China’s actions in the South China Sea, Chinese officials have responded with muted, measured statements  —   while   media have warned of the potential for conflict and retaliation. Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO nominated to lead the U. S. State Department, had a confirmation hearing Wednesday. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China’s actions in the South China Sea were ”extremely worrisome” and compared them to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Beijing has claimed most of the South China Sea as its territory, a stance rejected by an international tribunal. China has also built artificial islands with military capabilities in the disputed territory. The U. S. has declined to take an official position on the competing claims, but periodically patrols the waters and emphasizes the need for international freedom of movement. Tillerson said the situation was a potential ”threat to the entire global economy.” Asked Wednesday whether he supports a more aggressive U. S. posture in the South China Sea, Tillerson said, ”You’re going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the   stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.” Tillerson also sharply criticized China for failing to dissuade North Korea over its nuclear program. He said the U. S. ”cannot continue to accept empty promises like the ones China has made to pressure North Korea to reform.” ”Such rhetoric from Washington isn’t surprising,” The Associated Press notes. ”Past U. S. administrations have entered office seeking to get tougher on China, and failed.” China’s official response has been to play down the significance of Tillerson’s remarks, the AP reports: ”Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said tensions in [the South China Sea] had lessened and countries from outside the region should support efforts toward stability. ” . S. relations are based on ’    mutual benefit and   cooperation,’ Lu said at a daily briefing. ”If you take a look at [Chinese] President Xi Jinping’s call with Donald Trump after he won the election, you can see that the two countries do respect each other, and we agree with him that we should develop our relations based on mutual respect,’ he said.” But opinion pieces in   media have been blunt. An   in China Daily said Tillerson displayed ”undisguised animosity toward China”: ”Such remarks are not worth taking seriously because they are a   of naivety, shortsightedness,   prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies. Should he act on them in the real world, it would be disastrous. ”As many have observed, it would set a course for devastating confrontation between China and the US. After all, how can the US deny China access to its own territories without inviting the latter’s legitimate, defensive responses?” A piece in The Global Times, meanwhile, said that ”unless Washington plans to wage a   war in the South China Sea, any other approaches to prevent Chinese access to the islands will be foolish. . .. Tillerson had better bone up on nuclear power strategies if he wants to force a big nuclear power to withdraw from its own territories.” The Global Times is ”known for its hawkish and   editorials,” CNN notes, ”but analysts say it doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese policy.”"
302,"The first of   Donald Trump’s nominees headed to Capitol Hill this week to begin their Senate confirmations. And while there were some tense moments and stumbles, overall his Cabinet picks were   and most should get quick confirmations as soon as Trump is sworn in next week. But the major theme that emerged in committee hearings was that some of the  ’s top   advisers revealed some major policy breaks with the future president on issues Trump championed and views he expressed on the campaign trail  —   from Russian hacking, torture, a Muslim ban and registry, mosque surveillance, NATO, the Iran nuclear deal, even infrastructure, deportations and that border wall. It demonstrates the potential constraints the   could run into if he seeks to implement some of the more provocative aspects of what he campaigned on. But it also raises questions of just how much Trump actually meant what he said when he campaigned and about the breadth of discussions he has had with his Cabinet picks on critical policy points. That lack of cohesion could lead to friction in the near future and potential difficulty governing  —   if the nominees carry their beliefs forward in their roles in the administration. The views, tempered or opposite of Trump’s, could also be a reflection of just how difficult it would be otherwise for a nominee to be confirmed by the U. S. Senate, espousing the kinds of boastful campaign opinions the   has expressed. Because there were so many, here’s a quick recap, all in one place, of this past week’s hearings: Attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, The Alabama senator had the most exhaustive confirmation hearing of the week, stretching into two days. NPR’s Meg Anderson had a recap: ”Democrats don’t have the votes to stop Sessions’ appointment. Perhaps as a result, they focused primarily on fleshing out what Sessions’ relationship would be with the president as attorney general and reminded him of the importance of an independent Justice Department. Sessions spent a lot of the day reassuring his colleagues that he would follow the law, first and foremost, and expressing his disagreements with some of the  ’s more extreme proposals.” Sessions said he opposed bringing back waterboarding as an extreme interrogation technique, and he also said that he opposed other Trump campaign proposals of banning Muslims from coming into the U. S. amid terrorism concerns and also said he opposed any type of registry of Muslims either. ”And I think we should avoid surveillance of religious institutions unless there’s a basis to believe that dangerous or threatening illegal activity could be carried on there,” he added. Sessions’ record on race was a key focus, 30 years after his hopes of a federal judgeship were scuttled by the same committee over allegations he had used racist language as a U. S. Attorney. Sessions denied those allegations, reiterating that, ”I did not harbor the kind of animosities and   discrimination ideas I was accused of. I did not.” But that didn’t stop some of Sessions’ colleagues from taking an unprecedented step in testifying against his confirmation. Sen. Cory Booker,  . J. the first sitting senator to testify against a fellow senator during a confirmation hearing, said Sessions’ record ”indicates that we cannot count on him to support state and national efforts toward bringing justice to the justice system.” And Rep. John Lewis,  . a venerated   leader who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. told the Judiciary Committee that ”Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions’ calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then.” Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, The former Exxon Mobil CEO’s confirmation hearing was the roughest of the week. He faced grilling from members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over his close ties with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, along with questions about lobbying and   during his four decades with the oil giant. Tillerson faced particularly aggressive questioning from Sen. Marco Rubio,  . a former Trump primary opponent. Rubio pushed the   chief diplomat on whether he would label Putin as a war criminal, while Tillerson dodged. He also pressed Tillerson on his views on   violations in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia, and Rubio was flabbergasted when Tillerson said he’d need more information to make such pronouncements despite widely available documentation of atrocities in both countries. Rubio hasn’t said yet whether he will support Tillerson’s nomination, which could be a major complication for his confirmation. Tillerson was also tripped up over his tenure at Exxon Mobil and whether the country had lobbied against Russian sanctions. He initially said he had no knowledge that the company had ever ”directly lobbied,” to which even a supportive Chairman Bob Corker,  . interjected that Tillerson had even called him about the sanctions at the time. Tillerson also claimed he didn’t recall whether Exxon Mobil had done business with Iran, Syria and Sudan during his tenure. But Tillerson did express some differences with Trump on key issues. He began by sounding a more hawkish tone toward Russia, and said he believes intelligence reports that the country was involved in cyberattacks designed to influence the U. S. elections. He also said he opposed a potential ban on Muslims coming into the U. S. and any type of Muslim registry, either. Tillerson also said he supported the   Partnership trade deal, which Trump has loudly opposed and pledged to abandon. Defense Secretary nominee James Mattis, Trump’s choice to lead the Pentagon also struck a very different tone from the   on foreign policy, testifying Thursday that Russia was a major threat to the U. S. ”I’m all for engagement,” Mattis said, ”but we also have to recognize reality in terms of what Russia is up to.” And the retired   Marine Corps general also reiterated his strong support for NATO, an alliance Trump openly questioned and doubted on the campaign trail. Mattis said he believed Trump was ”open” on the issue and understood his steadfast position. ”My view is that nations with allies thrive, and nations without allies don’t,” Mattis said, calling it ”the most successful military alliance probably in modern world history, maybe ever.” Mattis also expressed acceptance of the Iran nuclear deal and said he believed it was likely workable. Trump has been hotly critical of the deal and has threatened to pull out of it. Senate and House committees, along with the full Senate, also approved a waiver to allow Mattis to serve as defense secretary. He only retired in 2013, while current law requires a wait of seven years to serve in that position. Homeland Security Secretary nominee John Kelly, Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, also broke with Trump on several key points during his Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. On Trump’s seminal campaign promise, to build a wall along the Mexican border, Kelly acknowledged that ”a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job. It has to be a layered defense” of human patrols, drones and other sensors. On the administration’s deportation policies, Kelly also broke with Trump, saying that undocumented children who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would ”probably not be at the top of the list” and that he would ”keep an open mind.” The former head of the U. S. Southern Command also repeatedly stressed working with other Latin American countries to better curtail drug and human trafficking. Kelly also said he opposed reinstating waterboarding and also said he had ”high confidence” in U. S. intelligence findings on Russian attacks on the elections. And Kelly said he opposed any kind of surveillance on mosques or any creation of a Muslim database, testifying that, ”I don’t think it’s ever appropriate to focus on something like religion as the only factor” when looking to prevent terrorism. CIA Director nominee Mike Pompeo, The Kansas GOP congressman Trump has chosen to lead the intelligence department also broke with the   opposing waterboarding as a form of torture. In this hearing, in which the power was lost and the   camera feed went down (just as they were talking about Russia) Pompeo also said he had confidence in the current U. S. intelligence program and said he agreed with their findings that Russia had tried to meddle in the elections, again putting him at odds with the man he would serve, NBC News reported: ”In his opening remarks, Pompeo took aim at Russia, saying that Moscow has ’reasserted itself aggressively, invading and occupying Ukraine, threatening Europe and doing nothing to aid in the defeat of ISIS.’ ”He later said, ’It’s pretty clear about what took place here about Russia involvement in efforts to hack information and to have an impact on American democracy. ’” Housing and Urban Development Secretary nominee Ben Carson, In the former famed neurosurgeon’s confirmation, it was a question of whether Carson had enough experience dealing with housing issues to lead the agency. He got a warm reception though before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Thursday. He told them that he wanted to oversee HUD because it’s not just ”putting roofs over the heads of poor people, it has the ability to be so much more than that.” Carson said he wants to use his role to to take ”a holistic approach” to help ”develop our fellow human beings.” NPR’s Brian Naylor reports Carson also ”would not say that housing properties owned by Trump won’t benefit from HUD programs” in a tense exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  .: ”Carson responded it would not be his intention ’to do anything to benefit any American,’ quickly adding that anything the department does ’is for all Americans.’ Carson said, ’If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that’s working for millions of people, and it turns out that someone that you’re targeting is going to gain, you know, $10 from it, am I going to say ’no’?’ Carson asked. ’Logic and common sense probably would be the best way.’ ”Trump’s family made its fortune in real estate, and it still owns some rental properties in New York. Trump has refused to divest his assets, and Warren, who tangled with Trump during the campaign, charged the   is ’hiding his family’s business interests from you, from me, from the rest of America.’ ”In a later exchange, Carson said he would report to lawmakers on any dealings HUD has with properties owned by Trump or his family.” Transportation Secretary nominee Elaine Chao, The AP described Chao’s confirmation hearing as a ”lovefest,” which was a pretty accurate characterization. Yes, the former labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration had already been confirmed before and has a long resume that makes her qualified for the position, but the fact that she’s the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t hurt, either. NPR’s David Schaper reported that Chao talked about the ”bold vision” Trump has to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, but acknowledged that ”the government doesn’t have the resources to do it all.” What’s next? Two planned confirmation hearings for this past week were postponed. Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos will now testify Tuesday amid concerns over an incomplete ethics review and financial disclosures. The Senate Committee on Health Education Labor and Pensions said the delay was ”at the request of Senate leadership to accommodate Senate schedule.” Rep. Ryan Zinke,  . Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, will also have his confirmation hearing Tuesday. On Wednesday, a key hearing sure to garner lots of attention  —   Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, will have his confirmation hearing. Commerce Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross also saw his confirmation hearing delayed, pushed to Wednesday, also amid a paperwork delay. And on Thursday, Rick Perry testifies to convince senators why he should lead one of the three agencies he said he wanted to eliminate during his 2012 presidential run, the Energy Department."
303,"On Thursday’s Top Chef, the remaining nine chefs were divided into three teams. Each team was responsible for collecting a bunch of ingredients in a sort of scavenger hunt around Charleston, S. C. and then making them into a set of three dishes, one created by each chef. But earlier, chef Jamie Lynch had earned immunity in this big challenge by winning the smaller ”Quickfire” challenge. That meant that he was immune from being sent home if his team blew it on the   dishes. The way Top Chef works, the judges choose the worst team overall, and then the worst person from that team is sent home. That meant in this case that it might not be the worst individual dish of all nine, but it’s the weakest dish from the three that had the lowest average quality. But of course, if Jamie’s team were the weakest, it would have to be one of the other two who went home, since he was immune. The obvious problem with this setup was much more starkly presented a couple of seasons back, when there were only six chefs left. Similarly, they were divided into teams of three. And when chef Nick  —   who had immunity, just like Jamie did Thursday night  —   made a terrible dish that   dragged down his team and made it the weaker of the two, it meant that one of two people on his team who had made good food had to be sent home. What was worse was that the chefs on his team had tried to tell Nick that his ideas for his dish were bad, and he ignored them. And when they turned out to be right, he still stayed, and one of them, a chef named Stephanie who’d been strong all season, still left. When Nick eventually won, it was so profoundly unsatisfying that I wrote these words: ”It stinks. Fully, royally, pungently, and to high heaven.” It has a kind of procedural fairness (after all, everybody knew what the rules were!) but absolutely no sense of fairness. Jamie had a much shakier situation, ethically speaking. He had been assigned the worst ingredients to work with, specifically because he had immunity. It made a certain kind of sense: you can’t be eliminated, so you take the bullet and make something out of chicken breasts and peanut butter. Furthermore, according to the judges, his food was lousy, but so was his teammate Emily’s, meaning for her to go home wouldn’t have stung the way it did when it happened to Stephanie. (A confession: I still miss watching Stephanie. I always thought we’d be pals if we met. She was one of my favorites. I may still be angry about this. Can you tell?)   there were three teams and not two, making it less likely that one chef could drag an otherwise strong team all the way to the bottom the way Nick could by simply tipping the balance of badness toward his team away from one other. Are you with me? Still, despite having a much better claim to making use of his immunity and staying, Jamie gave up his immunity voluntarily  —   and he was sent home. He called it pride I call it that, plus a side of ”knowing how Nick wound up looking.” In a way, it seemed like a bad example of when a person should take this step, because Jamie wouldn’t have been using those lousy ingredients in the first place but for the fact that he was safe. That, again, makes him very different from Nick, who seemed to be simply too arrogant to listen to anyone except himself. Jamie was trying to take one for the team to begin with he wound up taking two. You could even argue his immunity win led directly to his elimination. Still, in effect, his argument was, ”I made bad food. I should get cut.” In reality television as in life, you’re always allowed to do more than what’s required of you. You’re always allowed to adopt a code beyond the one that’s imposed externally, or even the one everyone else has agreed to. In reality television, as in life, you can decide not to use advantages that you have, according to the rules of the game, ”earned.” You can decide how you want to play. You can decide the rules are a floor, not a ceiling. You can even decide you are there to make friends. And in fact, Jamie’s not quite done yet. There’s an   sideshow to Top Chef, called Last Chance Kitchen, where eliminated chefs battle each other until only one is left standing, and at some point later in the season, the one who emerges victorious  . So you could see Jamie again  —   that’s how Kristen Kish won, in fact. Kish was the frontrunner through most of season 10 until the ”Restaurant Wars” challenge that happens every season, when she was the leader of the team that failed. And despite having a pretty good argument that she wasn’t to blame for that failure, she took responsibility and was eliminated  —   but she came back through Last Chance Kitchen and won the whole thing. (The whole thing could have been avoided if Josie had just roasted the bones sooner! Okay, I might still be angry about this as well.) Give your neck tattoos a hug for me, Jamie. As a Stephanie fan, I appreciate you."
304,"This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. The election of Donald Trump has many LGBT people worried that recent civil rights strides will be erased. In Phoenix, three people  —   two   gay men and a young genderqueer woman  —   meet for the first as part of NPR’s Kitchen Table Conversation series, brought together by their fears for the future. While Donald Trump has called himself a supporter of the LGBT community, many of his Cabinet picks  —   and his vice president  —   oppose LGBT rights. Moya  —   who is 52, gay, Latino and married  —   thinks Trump’s opinions can turn on a dime. So even though the   has said he’s ”fine” with the U. S. Supreme Court legalizing   marriage, Moya says he doesn’t believe it. ”I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says. That uncertainty has Moya, Brendan Mahoney and Jenni Vega worried. They believe Trump has invigorated people who don’t want to understand them  —   and might even hate them. Mahoney is a    gay white man who’s been out since he was 19, while Vega is a genderqueer Hispanic woman. And their worry isn’t only for themselves, but for other people who are even more vulnerable: trans people, Muslims, those who are in the country illegally. Use the audio link above to hear the full story."
305,"This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. In some ways, Desiree Armas is your typical high school senior. She’s getting ready to take the test for her driver’s license. And she’s applying to colleges. But Armas has a big secret. She rides the bus an hour each way to a magnet school miles away from her family’s apartment. And her friends don’t know that Armas and her parents are living in the country illegally. ”Only my best friend knows. No one else in school, besides my counselors,” Armas says. ”That’s something I don’t tell anyone. Because you never know.”   Donald Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. And that’s creating even more uncertainty for thousands of families. Many of those families  —   including the Armases  —   will travel to Washington, D. C. this weekend for a rally focusing on the rights of immigrants. Desiree Armas left Peru with her parents when she was 3. Today the family lives in a small, tidy apartment in   Elizabeth, N. J. Desiree’s mother, Olga Armas, says the family first arrived in the U. S. in 2002 and stayed to seek a better future for their daughter. ”The beginning was very hard,” Olga Armas says through a translator. ”It was difficult to come. We arrived here with nothing to a lot of uncertainty. No pans or pots or even a spoon.” In Peru, Olga’s   husband, Carlos, had a   job with an airline. In New Jersey, he gets up at 4 a. m. to load pallets at a paper warehouse. When his parents died, Carlos Armas couldn’t go back for their funerals. ”I withstood that because I wanted my daughters to stay in school,” he says through a translator. ”And my family to stay together here, that they continue to study.” Desiree is a   student. So the family was thrilled when President Obama introduced a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, allowing immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as kids to work and attend college. As soon as Desiree was old enough to apply, Olga Armas says, the whole family went to the lawyer’s office together to fill out the paperwork. ”My daughter was so happy, she cried,” says Armas. ”We cried, because my daughter can come out of the dark.” Desiree Armas says getting DACA made a huge difference. Her younger sister Kimberly, who was born in Florida, is a citizen. And Desiree admits, she’s a little jealous. ”I see my sister’s passport. And like, I don’t know, something about it just gets me all like sappy for some reason, that I can’t have one,” she says. ”But when I got my Social Security [card] it felt, like, so official. Like I was way more positive. I was more hopeful.” But Armas’ hopes may have suffered a setback on election night.   Trump has pledged to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, although he has also said he doesn’t want to break up families. And Trump has committed to rolling back President Obama’s immigration policies, including DACA. ”The truth is, people are in limbo,” says Olga Armas. ”We don’t know what will come [from] Trump’s words. But everybody is talking about it, there is lots of fear.” For Olga Armas, the fear is that what her family has gained could all go away. She’s volunteering with Make the Road New Jersey, an activist group that works for immigrants’ rights. She’s helping to bring protesters to Washington for this weekend’s rally. Without DACA, her daughter could still be accepted to college. But losing her legal status would make it harder for Desiree Armas to find the money for school, or to work at a job or internship once she gets there. She says kids with DACA want the same thing immigrants to this country have always wanted. ”What you have now, your parents had to fight for it,” Armas says. ”And that’s what our parents are doing. That’s what we are doing. Not just me, just so many other students that are    —   and deserve a chance to show what we got. And if you take that away from us, you will yank the dreams of future doctors and engineers and lawyers.” So Desiree Armas is anxiously watching her mailbox for two reasons. Acceptance letters from the colleges she’s applied to, and news about her future in this country."
306,"Many transgender people in the U. S. are rushing to change their designated gender on government documents before   Donald Trump takes office. They worry the next administration may take that ability away. There’s no indication so far that this is a priority for Trump. Mara Keisling with the National Center for Transgender Equality says Trump’s positions on trans issues are not clear. But she’s concerned about people he’s nominated for key positions in his administration. ”Virtually every  —   if not every  —   appointment he has announced so far has been an extremely   person,” says Keisling. She says trans advocacy groups around the country have been fielding calls from concerned people ever since the election. And they are not alone. ”The calls to our office have increased a lot,” says Benjamin Jerner, managing partner of the Philadelphia law firm Jerner  Palmer, which specializes in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal issues. States control many government documents, such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses, Jerner reassures his clients. A new president won’t affect those. Of more concern, he says, are gender designations on federal documents such as passports, immigration papers and Social Security accounts. Jerner says passports are the biggest concern because State Department rules could be changed relatively easily under a new administration. Deciding whether to change gender designations on documents can be an especially tricky question for parents of transgender children. Jerner recently held a legal clinic for such parents in Philadelphia and says 18 families showed up. ”I think that just tells you the level of fear and anxiety that’s out there,” he says. Among those attending were the parents of    Dylan, who was born a boy but  —   with her parents’ encouragement  —   has long hair, wears pink and lives as a girl. That fits with guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the leading U. S. group of doctors serving children. The general idea is that parents should support their child and not make any big decisions that could limit the child’s options in the future. That’s because some children who appear to be transgender early on are not when they grow up. NPR agreed to use only first names for Dylan and her family. Some groups consider it a form of abuse to allow a child to transition to the opposite gender  —   even though it’s in line with the AAP. Dylan’s parents  —   Marla and Jennifer  —   say other families have had child abuse reports filed against them after they were identified in news stories. Marla says Dylan has identified herself as a girl for as long as she could talk. ”It took us about three years to really sort out with Dylan what that meant,” Marla says. ”We kept telling her, ’Oh, there’s lots of ways to be a boy  —   you can be a fancy boy, you can be a sparkly boy.’ ” But Marla says Dylan steadfastly insisted she’s a girl. Marla says they plan to administer puberty blockers when Dylan reaches that stage. That will make it easier for Dylan to physically transition to female later if she chooses. Dr. David Levine, a professor of pediatrics at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, says this is a good approach. ”I predict this    is going to do great, because the parents are so on board and so supportive of their child,” he says. Levine says he’s not too worried that a Trump administration will make big changes that will affect transgender people. But he also is not opposed to parents who want to change their child’s gender designations now because, technically, that’s something that could be reversed in the future if it became necessary. Dylan’s parents had planned to change her gender on government documents when she got a driver’s license. Because of their concerns over the political climate, they are doing that now instead. So, on a recent evening  —   just as Dylan and her siblings were finishing up homework  —   a notary came to their home to witness Marla and Jennifer signing a short stack of papers. Once filed, they will change the gender listed on Dylan’s birth certificate, Social Security account and passport  —   when she gets one  —   to female."
307,"A Hungarian camerawoman who was caught on film kicking migrants running from police near the border with Serbia was sentenced to three years of probation. A judge said Petra Laszlo’s behavior ”ran counter to societal norms” and rejected Laszlo’s claim that she acted in  . Laszlo was not charged with a racially motivated hate crime instead, she was charged with ”breach of peace.” Her conviction carried a maximum   jail sentence, The Independent reports, but Laszlo will not serve time unless she violates the terms of her probation. Laszlo, who did not appear in court in person because she had received death threats, plans to appeal her conviction, The Associated Press reports. The wire service has more: ”The incident occurred near the border town of Roszke on Sept. 8, 2015, where Laszlo had gone to film migrants from the Middle East who were trying to pass through Hungary on their way west. While she was filming, several migrants broke through a police cordon and jostled her as they shot by. ”Laszlo responded by delivering a   kick to two people as they fled, including a young girl. Later, she appeared to trip a migrant carrying a child. ” ’It was all over within two seconds,’ Laszlo said. ’Everybody was shouting. It was very frightening.’ ” The court convicted her after a ”   examination of Laszlo’s actions,” the AP writes. Laszlo was fired after the video went public. She apologized but also vowed to sue Facebook as well as Abdul Mohsen, the migrant who was carrying his son and fell after Laszlo tried to trip him. NPR’s Lauren Frayer caught up with Mohsen last year in Spain, where he and his son moved after a Spanish man saw the video and offered him a job. ”Abdul Mohsen says he rarely thinks about Petra Laszlo,” Lauren reported. ” ’I don’t know, but I think she just doesn’t like refugees,’ Mohsen says, shrugging. ”He says he feels lucky to have escaped war in his hometown of Deir   Syria  —   now under siege by ISIS militants  —   and to have found work and asylum in Europe. So many other Syrians have not. . .. ”Mohsen is desperate to reunite with his wife and two other children, a son, 18, and a daughter, 13.”"
308,"The Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata has reached a $1 billion settlement with the U. S. Justice Department over a deadly defect in its air bags that led to a massive recall. At least 16 deaths, 11 of them in the U. S. have been linked to the defect. As part of the deal, which still needs to be approved by a judge, Takata agreed to plead guilty to the felony offense of wire fraud. Of the $1 billion total, $25 million will be paid as a fine to the U. S. government and $125 million will be used for restitution to people who are physically injured by the air bags. The remaining money will go to automakers that were defrauded by Takata, to cover the cost of replacing recalled parts. Three   executives at the company were also indicted on wire fraud and conspiracy charges, U. S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said at a news conference Friday in Detroit to announce the settlement. The three Japanese executives, Shinichi Tanaka, Hideo Nakajima and Tsuneo Chikaraishi, allegedly concealed deadly defects in the inflator inside the company’s air bags. In emails, they allegedly referred to submitting false reports of test data to automakers that were using their products, even after initial news reports that the inflators were failing and injuring people. The inflator contains ammonium nitrate, which can degrade  —   either over time or because of temperature fluctuations  —   putting the metal canister at risk for rupturing and sending shrapnel into the vehicle, McQuade explained. ”Corporations and individuals who cheat will be held accountable,” McQuade said. ”Cheaters will not be allowed to gain an advantage over those who play by the rules.” A total of nearly 70 million Takata air bag inflators have been or will be affected in a massive U. S. recall that began in 2008 and is scheduled to continue through 2018. As NPR’s Sonari Glinton has reported, ”automakers are allowed to sell the vehicles with the inflators under an existing order by NHTSA. But all of the vehicles using the air bags must be recalled by the end of 2018.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has called it ”the largest and most complex auto safety recall in U. S. history.” A congressional report released last summer found that despite the recall, at least four automakers  —   Fiat Chrysler, Mitsubishi, Toyota and Volkswagen  —   were still using the type of Takata air bags responsible for the injuries and fatalities. In addition, NHTSA says the following vehicles have inflators at the highest risk of rupturing dangerously: The Department of Transportation has asked drivers to check the website SaferCar. gov to determine whether their vehicles are affected."
309,"Little white chips fly off in every direction with each blow of master ivory carver Li Chunke’s chisel. Gradually, the folds of a robe, tassels and hands of an ancient Chinese woman begin to emerge from a rough piece of ivory in front of him in his Beijing workshop. Li says nothing looks as smooth, nothing can be carved as intricately or expressively as ivory. Wood and jade are too brittle. ”Whether I’m carving animal or human figures, I try to express their feelings,” he says. ”That’s what Chinese consider most important.” He shows me a small piece made by one of his apprentices from a piece of scrap ivory. It shows a high mountain swathed in clouds, beneath which two elderly gentlemen sit under a pine tree playing a game of Go. One of the gentlemen strokes his beard, as if to say, ”Hmm, what’s my next move here?” For years, China’s government has argued that banning ivory would destroy   cultural traditions that carvers like Li and his apprentices preserve. But in December, Beijing announced it would phase out its ivory trade by the end of 2017. Environmentalists hailed the move as offering hope for the world’s dwindling number of elephants, as well as a fundamental shift in the way China’s government and people view the use of wildlife products. China is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s biggest ivory markets, if not the biggest, though the total value is hard to gauge. The country’s total consumption, according to one estimate, is about 13. 5 tons annually in recent years, most of it illegal. The existence of a legal ivory market in China has provided cover for black marketeers, who often pass off their wares as legitimately sourced. For the past 53 years, Li has worked at the   Beijing Ivory Carving factory. Li says every piece of ivory there is registered by the government, and comes from elephants who died naturally. None, he says, comes from poachers or smugglers, who have supplied a black market and driven elephants toward extinction. ”We ivory carvers hate elephant poachers,” Li says. ”I would never touch a piece of ivory from a poached elephant.” Li says that when he started his job at the factory in 1964, there was no smuggling. Then again, China’s economy had no private sector in those days. Nor was there an Internet, where a lot of ivory is now bought and sold. Li and others saw the Chinese ban coming. President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed in 2015 that both countries would do it. Environmental groups and celebrities have campaigned for years for a ban. ”When the buying stops, the killing can too,” former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming says in an ad for the group WildAid. The group has also enlisted British royal Prince William in its campaign. Steve Blake, WildAid’s acting chief representative in China, says his group does annual surveys in China, asking questions such as whether people know where ivory comes from and whether they would support a government ban on ivory. He says over 95 percent of his Chinese respondents back the ban. Last week, China’s national carrier, Air China, banned the transport of sharks’ fins as cargo. In a swipe at corruption, China had already decided to ban shark fin soup at official banquets in 2012, and Blake says imports and prices have since plummeted drastically. Last September, China also supported an international ban on trade in critically endangered pangolins. And, Blake notes, it is working to stop poaching of the totoaba fish, a food on which the endangered vaquita porpoise feeds in the Gulf of California. ”There have just been a lot of really encouraging signs in the past couple of months of China’s will to change this worrying trend of consuming endangered wildlife,” Blake says. ”And so they should be given a lot of credit.” Details about the ivory ban still need to be ironed out. It’s unclear what the government is going to do with existing ivory stockpiles  —   buy them or burn them. Meanwhile, the government has promised to find other work for the carvers, restoring ivory to be collected by museums. Carver Li Chunke says he’s not worried about his own survival. ”We’ve been prepared for this for a long time,” he explains. Plus, there’s another source of material he can rely on: ”We also carve mammoth ivory.” That’s right: The tusks of elephants’ woolly ancestors are still legal to buy and sell in China  —   if you care to go to Siberia and dig them up."
310,"Nuclear power plants are typically hulking structures made using billions of dollars of concrete and steel. But one company thinks that by going smaller, they could actually make nuclear power more affordable. NuScale Power based in Portland, Ore. has submitted a design for what it describes as a ”modular” nuclear power plant. Each module is a     nuclear reactor loaded with standard uranium reactor fuel. Modules would be assembled at a   facility and then delivered to power utilities and other clients. ”Miniature” in nuclear terms is still pretty big. The modules are small enough to fit on   trucks, but they would stand nearly nine stories tall. Moreover, a power plant would probably require several modules hooked together like giant batteries. Of course, they’d need to be operated by professional nuclear engineers. But the design  —   a radical departure from other nuclear plants  —   would also have advantages. Each module uses less uranium fuel, making a   meltdown far less likely. The fuel would be housed in a special containment vessel that would be submerged in a pool of water, an added safety feature. And rather than using pumps of the sort that failed during the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the reactor would circulate the water using natural convection. The company maintains the design is simpler and safer than existing reactors. NuScale formally completed its design submission to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Thursday. The   application will now undergo a lengthy review by the NRC, which must approve the design before construction can begin. NuScale says its   reactor modules will be simpler and more affordable to build than a big plant. Placing several modules in a single location will provide the same power output as a commercial reactor, says Mike McGough, the company’s chief commercial officer. NuScale is already partnering with a consortium of Utah utilities to build a   power plant on land in Idaho owned by the U. S. Department of Energy. (The DOE is a partner in the NuScale project.) The company believes that   project can be completed for less than $3 billion. By comparison, a new   reactor at Watts Bar in Tennessee cost around $4. 7 billion and began operation in 2016 after years of delays. McGough says the company envisions the modules also could be used in other ways. For example, he says, they could be installed near wind turbines as backup when the wind isn’t blowing. Or they could be used by the military to power bases that need electricity even if the grid goes down. About a dozen clients in the U. S. and abroad are looking at the technology, he says. But not everyone is convinced smaller is better. Ed Lyman, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the electricity generated by a smaller reactor is more expensive than that generated by a larger one. Companies such as NuScale hope to offset the higher costs by saving on the cost of construction, but Lyman isn’t convinced. He worries savings will come at the cost of safety. He says NuScale wants to do things like reduce the size and strength of the reactor containment building and the number of personnel needed to operate the plant. ”NuScale is proposing major reductions in all of these areas relative to current NRC requirements for large reactors, based on the assertion that the reactor will be safer,” he says. ”We’ve eliminated a number of systems that are not required to protect the core of our plant,” McGough acknowledges. But he says that’s because the small, modular designs are inherently safer than large reactors. He believes the NRC review will clearly show that the modular designs can meet or exceed existing safety standards. The NRC will take its time to make sure the design meets its safety standard. McGough says the review will take over three years. If it wins approval, NuScale hopes to switch on its first plant by 2026."
311,"Vernon Dahmer was a black civil rights leader in the   when Mississippians were still required to pay a poll tax in order to register to vote. In January 1966, the successful farmer and businessman publicly offered to pay that tax for black people who couldn’t afford it. That night his house was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan. His wife and three of his children were at home. ”We didn’t think anybody would bother the children, but we were wrong, they intended to get all of us January the 10th, 1966,” Vernon’s widow, Ellie Dahmer, told their daughter Bettie during a recent visit to StoryCorps. ”That night, when I waked up, the house was on fire, and it was so bright and so hot. You was screaming to the top of your voice, ’Lord have mercy. We’re going to get burned up in this house alive.’ I raised the windows up, and then your father was handing you out the window to me.” They escaped to the barn to hide, sitting on bales of hay. ”I had burns over a good portion of my body, and I was screaming and crying because I was in pain,” recalled Bettie, who was 10 at the time. ”Daddy was burned so much worse than I was  —   when he held up his arm the skin just hung down  —   but Daddy never did complain, he was just concerned about me. I remember us going to the hospital.” Vernon and Bettie shared a hospital room, with Ellie sitting between the two beds. ”And he yelled my name real loud, and then he was gone,” she said. ”He knew that he might get killed, and he was willing to take the risk, but it was not worth it to me. I miss him so much.” Bettie, who is now 61, looks at the situation differently. ”Daddy wasn’t a man that wore a suit, he wore overalls. In Daddy’s world everybody had a job to do,” she said. ”Black people couldn’t vote, so I do understand why he did what he did. It meant a lot to him.” And that commitment he had to the cause is reflected on his resting place. ”Some of the last words he said was, ’If you don’t vote, you don’t count.’ That’s on his tombstone,” Ellie said. ”We made a tremendous sacrifice Bettie. I try to go on and live my life without thinking about it, but it’s a night I can never forget. It’s been over 50 years, and seems like it were yesterday.” Ellie Dahmer would go on to serve as an election commissioner in Hattiesburg, Miss. and the governor of Mississippi declared Jan. 10, 2016, ”Vernon Dahmer Day,” to honor the civil rights leader. Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud   and Liyna Anwar.  StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps. org."
312,"The Syrian government says Israel has attacked a military airport west of Damascus, and warns of ”repercussions” without promising any specific retaliation. The Syrian state news agency SANA reports that rockets fired by the Israeli air force caused a fire at the   airport just after midnight local time on Friday morning. The report did not identify if there were any casualties. Syria also accuses Israel of attacking the same airport with    missiles on Dec. 7, also causing a fire to break out, with no casualties. Syria accused Israel of supporting ”terrorist organizations” through the strike. Israel has not responded to the claims. Over the last few years, Israel has repeatedly been charged with bombing military facilities in Syria, including sites that reportedly contained   and   missiles.. It’s ”standard Israeli practice to not comment when such attacks happen,” NPR’s Emily Harris noted after one such reported strike in 2013. The strikes were reportedly prompted by concerns that heavy weapons are being transferred from Syria to Hezbollah  —   the   militant Islamist group on Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah, a Shiite group, has supported President Bashar   in Syria’s complex,   civil war. The Associated Press has more on the reported attack: ”Residents of Damascus reported hearing several explosions that shook the city. The Mezzeh airport compound, located on the southwestern edge of the capital, had been used to launch attacks on   areas near Damascus and has come previously under rebel fire. . .. ”Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently reiterated his government’s position to not get involved in the Syrian war.”"
313,"For the first time in Japanese history three women of different political persuasions are in positions that could be stepping stones to the prime minister’s office. It’s especially notable in Japan, where women’s labor force participation remains among the lowest among developed nations, and gender roles are  . ”Women have not really been coached or mentored or encouraged to take on leadership roles,” Kyoto University diplomacy professor Nancy Snow explains. ”Also, women aren’t allowed [culturally] to often show ambition, to sort of telegraph that.” Lack of childcare options in Japan  —   and the cultural pressure for women to take on household duties  —   means it’s the moms here who drop out of work. In official registries, married women to this day are listed, along with children, as part of a man’s household. If they’re single, part of their parents’ household. ”I think it really goes back to the social hierarchy, the way that [Japan has] been for decades,” Snow says. Women make up 43 percent of the labor force in Japan  —   with more than half of them in   jobs. That’s far below the 57 percent of working women in the U. S. Their roles in leadership are scant. But in the political realm, signs point to change. Tokyo is now led by its   female governor  —   Yuriko Koike. Japan’s new defense minister, Tomomi Inada, is only the second woman to ever hold the role. And the opposition Democratic Party in Tokyo is for the first time led by a woman. She’s a former journalist named Renho Murata. ”  years ago when I was a newscaster,” Renho tells NPR, ”I interviewed an important member of the ruling party. He said to me, frankly, that he doesn’t think wives should even speak about politics.” More than two decades have passed since that conversation, but today women still represent fewer than 15 percent of all seats in Japan’s parliament, lower than the U. S. where women make up 20 percent of Congress. Renho says she’s hoping to use her position to help get more women elected. ”We don’t have enough women to raise their hands,” she says. When asked what led her to raise her hand, she said she wanted to make change. ”It all began for me when I was raising two children. In a society that complains about not having enough children, the government wasn’t offering any support. That made me want to become a politician,” Renho says. She made it and was a longtime member of parliament before her party elected her its leader last summer. But cultural biases persist. Renho’s bra size was listed on her Wikipedia page. Mayor Koike was criticized during her race for wearing too much makeup. And   efforts to increase participation of women in higher levels of power have fallen short. The government conceded last year that it wouldn’t reach its goal of getting women in 30 percent of management roles by 2020. Women are so outnumbered in business that the fact they’re working at all is a story. It’s dismaying, says Nancy Snow. ”I look forward in this century, and it may take awhile, for it to be just the case that a woman is in power in government here or in industry and she just happens to be a woman,” Snow says. For now the few women in power are proving to be rather fearless. In a notable exchange with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last month, Renho stood up against casino legislation that was rushed through Japan’s parliament. Facing the prime minister on the floor, Renho said, ”You appear to lie as easily as you breathe.” Abe seemed to chuckle, but didn’t respond. Mari Yamamoto and Jake Adelstein contributed to this story."
314,"If you are interested in food stories accompanied by overhead videos showcasing recipes involving just three ingredients, you would be better off reading something else. This is because when preparing dishes to accompany the new Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which premieres Jan. 13, the more complex the recipe, the more you’ll identify with the many trials and tribulations of the orphaned Baudelaire children as they try to unravel the mysteries surrounding them. Food is often a supporting character throughout the 13 books written by Lemony Snicket, the nom de plume  —   a fancy word that means ”pen name”  —   of Daniel Handler, starting with the bland boiled chicken, boiled potatoes and blanched string beans the children are fed at the home of Mr. Poe after the tragic demise of their parents in the first book, The Bad Beginning. No one really wants to eat boiled chicken, but luckily there are many other culinary inspirations to be found sprinkled across the series, including pesto lo mein, chocolate pudding and salmon puffs. Pasta puttanesca is perhaps the most   dish among Lemony Snicket fans  —   inspiring my own daughter when she was 8 years old to join me in the kitchen to discover capers and Kalamata olives this time around, she’ll be making the dish with friends while   the show at college. It’s the dish that Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire choose to make for the evil Count Olaf when he demands that they provide dinner for his theatrical troupe, allowing the children a cozy afternoon of cooking together before Olaf complains that they should’ve made roast beef. When cooking instructor Lynley Jones’ son began reading the series, she discovered an unexpected springboard, leading her to create ”A Series of Unfortunate Cooking Lessons” for children that she taught in 2015 in Montclair, N. J. ”I noticed that a lot of the stories he would share with me included some interesting food,” says Jones. ”In some books, the food was a    part of the narrative, like when the Baudelaires make pasta puttanesca in some cases, the food in the book is horrible, and adds to the Baudelaires’ misery.” The chilled cucumber soup found in the third book in the series, The Wide Window, exemplifies a truly bad meal, served by the children’s Aunt Josephine, who makes only cold food because she’s afraid of turning on the stove. As Snicket writes, ”On a cold day, in a drafty room, chilled cucumber soup is about as welcome as a swarm of wasps at a bat mitzvah.” Jones’ goal with her version of the cooking lesson, which was geared toward kids, was to show how not to make bad cucumber soup, no matter what time of year, calling her version ”Not Aunt Josephine’s Chilled Cucumber Soup.” ”I always want kids in my classes to learn to appreciate the difference between badly prepared food and bad food,” she says. ”The chilled cucumber soup in the book was horrible because it was badly made, not because chilled cucumber soup is inherently horrible.” Because the first season of A Series Of Unfortunate Events on Netflix encompasses books one through four, you could choose to focus on food that’s featured only in those books. But there are many dishes that you may want to throw in to foreshadow what’s ahead in Season 2  —   a favorite literary device of Lemony Snicket that’s well worth emulating. If you’re planning on hosting an ”ASOUE” watch party, channel your inner steampunk for appropriately     clothing and decor, being sure to sprinkle the dining table with teething rings, ribbons for tying up your hair and magnifying glasses. And, as for food, the inspirations are multitudinous  —   which, as you know, is a very long word that means ”endless.” Here are some    recipes to provide you with sustenance for the adventures ahead: Pasta Puttanesca   In The Bad Beginning, the Baudelaire children roast garlic, wash and chop anchovies, and pit olives to make a tangy, salty puttanesca sauce. Because they are fascinated by the many shapes of pasta that they find at the grocery store, you may want to cook up a variety of different pastas to create visual interest. Jones’ recipe is based on the one in the book if you can’t abide anchovies, try substituting chopped dried seaweed to impart a slightly fishy flavor. Coconut Cream Cake,  Things seem to be looking up in the second installment, The Reptile Room, when the children land on the doorstep of the utterly charming Uncle Monty, a herpetologist who welcomes them with a freshly baked coconut cake. Of course, this creamy bliss doesn’t last long, but the memory of the cake lingers. This coconut cake recipe from Ina Garten, host of the Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa, does the trick here, but I like to use a pillowy   Italian meringue frosting instead of the cream cheese frosting to lighten up a dreary world  —   just add a tablespoon of lemon juice to the sugar syrup while cooking. Chilled Cucumber Soup,  Poor Aunt Josephine. She’s so afraid of, well, everything, that she never seems to enjoy anything and is forever mourning her dear departed husband, Ike, in book three, The Wide Window. Sadly, Josephine’s cucumber soup is both watery and tasteless, which only adds insult to injury. Even in the depths of winter, a chilled cucumber soup can remind us of summer warmth, like this recipe from chef Andrew Zimmern of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods  —   even though cucumbers are fairly tame. Aqueous Martini,  Skipping ahead to book six, The Ersatz Elevator, the children are sent to live with the   Esmé Squalor and her downtrodden husband, Jerome. Always concerned, as so many fashionistas are, with what’s in and what’s out, Esmé favors the Aqueous Martini  —   water served in a fancy glass and garnished with an olive  —   until Parsley Soda becomes all the rage. Your guests may appreciate the former more than the latter. Enchiladas with Red Tomato Sauce,  Now deemed criminals and on the run, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny land in The Vile Village, also the name of book seven, where they dodge a murder of crows and try to escape in a   mobile home operated by the kindly handyman Hector  —   who also introduces them to his homemade enchiladas. I’ve turned to Mexican chef Pati Jinich, of the PBS series Pati’s Mexican Table, for authentic inspiration here, with an enchilada recipe that has just enough bite to even please the toothy infant Sunny. I would tell you to enjoy this delicious repast while Count Olaf wreaks havoc on the charming Baudelaire children  —   but what would be the point? Prepare to be miserable, no matter how tasty the food."
315,"When President Obama gave his goodbye speech this week, one of  ’s most politically active stars was watching. Killer Mike is a rapper who actively campaigned for Bernie Sanders. So when he and fellow rapper   joined Morning Edition to talk about their new album from their group Run the Jewels, we had to get their take on the president’s farewell. Killer Mike says he did like when President Obama urged Americans to get more involved. ”When he started talking about activism, lacing up your boots, hitting the streets, I was actually live tweeting during it,” Killer Mike says. ”It sounds like someone has been listening to the OG: the old guy Bernie.” Clearly, neither artist is a Trump supporter. But they also say they aren’t dreading the transition. ”I don’t have a sense of dread, to be honest,” Killer Mike explains. ”And older black people I talk to don’t have sense of dread, who’ve lived under Nixon and who’ve lived under duplicitous presidents and governors before. So, no: What I have is a sense of what’s next. And what can we do to take care of ourselves.” At this point,   who happens to be white, chimes in. ”I think that it’s a mistake to let our history off the hook so much so to say the Trump is introducing the idea of dread into American culture,” he says. Social commentary is a big part of Run the Jewels, which takes its inspiration from   rap acts the two men grew up hearing in the 1980s and ’90s, a time when the war on drugs and crack cocaine were ravaging American cities. Killer Mike had had a   seat from his neighborhood in Atlanta. ”I saw the world change. I saw it go upside down, and the irony of it is the only people who were telling the truth about what was happening at that time was rappers,” he says. Today, they hope to carry the mantle. 2016 provided a lot of material  —   not least the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by several   shooting deaths of   by police.   notes that   racial tension set the tone for a song called ”Thieves! (Screamed The Ghost).” ”We unfolded a narrative in this one that we knew was important to get right,” he says. ”We wanted to make it an anatomy of a riot.” ”I think there is a pound of flesh owed in terms of this country making sure all of its citizens enjoy the constitutional rights that are promised,” Killer Mike adds. ”And because we don’t, we keep resetting to the same place of anger and fear and angst and explosions of that. The dead don’t rest. The soul’s gonna speak, based on the fact that this country is still not offering full justice.”"
316,"Philosophy isn’t natural science, that much is certain. But its relation to the sciences has been fraught  —   at least since science broke off from philosophy and became its own family of disciplines back in the 17th century. The very features of natural science that are markers of its success  —   specialization, experiment, mathematical tools, progress  —   are absent, or take a very different form, in philosophy. My own view is that philosophical problems are not empirical or scientific ones, but that they live cheek by jowl with them. Philosophy and empirical science are in constant dialog and a laboratory is as good a place as a seminar room to engage philosophy. Peter   whose new book is my topic today, is not the first philosopher to go even farther afield than the laboratory in pursuit of nature’s secrets. Daniel Dennett, to name one of  ’s avowed heroes, went to Kenya to study the vervet monkey in its natural habitat. Still, I think it’s worth pausing and taking delight in the stunning image of a philosopher descending the ocean blue in his quest to find other minds and to understand how they work! Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness is not travelogue or tale of adventure in the great outdoors. It is a work of philosophy. There is no story, but there is an argument: Animal life is  . Many hundreds of million years ago, ”cells that were once organisms in their own right began to work as parts of larger units.” But this required coordination. The means of exchange or mutual influence that had once enabled distinct unicellular individuals to communicate, or at least interact, were now deployed within the boundaries of the more complex   beast. ”Sensing and signaling between organisms gave rise to sensing and signaling within them,” as the book notes. This, in turn, over evolutionary time, becomes the basis of the nervous system and, eventually, intelligence  —   and even consciousness itself.   has a lot to say about the evolutionary history of animals and even about how, from humble beginnings, we get human beings, along one lineage, and the octopus, along another. But I wish he had said something more about the mystery  —   for that’s what it is, at the heart of his story  —   of understanding how a clump of individuals gets put together in such a way as to become not just a collection of coordinated individuals but a genuinely new unity. Animal unity is something special. And, if he is right, it may be the key to understanding why there are nervous systems and, so, why there are animals like the octopus and like us. Later on in the book,   remarks that trees and other plants seem to exhibit a kind of unity different from, and intermediate between, that of mere collections and that which is displayed by animals. The tree is an agglomeration, in the sense that if you cut a part away and plant it, you get a new tree. An animal, in contrast, is some kind of an essential unity. The language of Other Minds is calm, spare and exact. It serves as a useful primer on more than one topic  —   the history of animals, the cognitive powers of cephalopods, the theory of consciousness, the environmental dangers posed by overfishing and the degradation of the waters. It gives us a remarkable description of the octopus settlement or compound  —   community?  —   that he and his colleagues studied closely over a long period in waters off Australia. He speculates that some piece of human detritus, something metal, fell to the sea floor and it provided an artificial shelter or den for an octopus the shell remains of scallops cast aside by the octopus then provided a ground better suited for octopus dens than the sandy bottom of the sea floor. This attracted other octopus, he continues, who, in turn, in the normal course of events, laid down more shell flooring  —   thus further enhancing the habitat and drawing more animals to the spot.   wonders whether Octopolis, as they dubbed the small piece of ocean ground, doesn’t give a glimpse of a possible octopus future in which otherwise fairly solitary creatures develop something like real social groups. Octopus sociality is made out to be something of a puzzle in this book. Like cuttle fish, the octopus are capable of fabulous and   changes of skin color. How they do this is a mystery. Not because the mechanisms of pigment change are poorly understood, but because these animals are (widely believed) to be color blind. Of what use to a   potential mate is a display of color? Actually, the puzzle is deeper even than this. The octopus also changes its color to camouflage itself. But how can it adjust its own color to the surrounding scene if it can’t perceive the colors of things around it?   has an ingenious and plausible answer to this question. But surely the most surprising, indeed, the truly shocking fact about the octopus that comes up in these pages is that most species of octopus only live 2 to 4 years.   frames this as a problem for evolution. Why would evolution go to the expense of giving   animals such magnificent smarts? The octopus, as   explains, is a curious, clever and inventive creature it has good eyesight (aside from the color vision) and is capable, in captivity, of recognizing and keeping track of individual people. Moreover, the octopus, and to some degree also the cuttlefish, are the only examples of big brains in the whole universe of invertebrate species. What’s the point, if the animals have such a short lifespan? Drawing on   evolutionary ideas,   offers a brilliant answer. I won’t give the details here, but the basic idea is pretty straight forward. Animals who live to an old age are less likely to carry mutations of the sort that are likely to kill them when they are young. Indeed, animals who suffer mutations whose harmful effects strike early on are unlikely to have offspring or are unlikely to have as many children as animals who live longer. It follows that there will be a tendency for whatever destructive effects of mutations there may be to manifest themselves, over evolutionary time, later and later in life. Of course, just how long a species will tend to live will reflect environmental conditions as well. Vulnerability to predators, for example, will cull parents who wait too long to have kids. Lifespan is thus likely to be tuned evolutionarily by this kind of environmental risk factor. Back to the octopus.   explains: ”They have ended up with their unusual combination: a very large nervous system and a very short life. They have the large nervous system because of what those unbounded bodies make possible and the need to hunt while being hunted their lives are short because their vulnerability tunes their lifespan. The initially paradoxical combination makes sense.” This is an ingenious and plausible account both of why animals don’t live forever, even though their cells are continuously made anew, and also of why, in particular, the octopus has such a short life span. But it is not quite the answer I was looking for. Or, rather, it is the right answer to the wrong question. What makes the fact that octopus die so young so very shocking is not the evolutionary puzzle of it, I think, but rather the fact that there is something in itself   and incomprehensible about the very idea that so much intelligence and understanding could be achieved in such a short life. For us, it seems, thought, understanding, wits, are tied up with experience and, so, with time. Octopus nous is freakish, like something out of science fiction. Which ties up with another theme of Other Minds.   remarks at the outset that contact with an octopus is the closest most of us will ever come to an intelligent alien. For the most part, reading this book, I had the feeling that this was not so. It isn’t that the octopus isn’t different from us. Long gangly arms, eight of them a boneless body that shifts shape and changes color. All this is strange. And there is no disputing the evolutionary facts. You have to go back 600 million years to meet the bilateral,   worm who is the common ancestor of both humans and cephalopods. This is a being whose cleverness took shape as a result of a very different history than that of ourselves. And yet, the octopus doesn’t come across as all that exotic or even all that wild. And this shouldn’t be that surprising when you stop to think that intelligence, wit, rationality, these are, as Dennett has stressed, interpretive notions. To see someone or something as intelligent is to view it as conforming to a certain way of acting. Rational beings are the ones that do what they should in light of what they need given what they know. The octopus, however playful or curious, is a smarty pants and for that reason doesn’t seem that remote at all. Until we come up against the startling fact of the brevity of octopus life, that is. It is here that I had the vivid sense that in encountering the octopus we are brought into contact not merely with an intelligent alien, but a truly alien intelligence. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe"
317,"Updated at 8 p. m. ET, Donald Trump lashed out at civil rights hero John Lewis on Twitter Saturday morning, a day after the Georgia Democratic congressman said in an interview he didn’t view the   as ”legitimate” amid questions of Russia’s interference in the U. S. elections. While Trump has a   tendency to take to social media to push back against any slight against him, such a   rebuke of Lewis and the criticism of his   district was jarring on the holiday weekend celebrating the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders and a top lieutenant of King’s, helping organize the March on Washington in 1963 and marching with King across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. in 1965, where his skull was fractured. Lewis said during an NBC interview on Friday that he didn’t view Trump as a ”legitimate president” after reports that Russia had worked to influence the election in Trump’s favor and to discredit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Trump has largely dismissed those reports and questioned the validity of U. S. intelligence findings, frequently praising Russia and its president Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign and the election. Lewis also said he wouldn’t be attending Trump’s inauguration on Friday, making it the first he’s missed since he was elected to Congress in 1986. ”You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right,” Lewis told Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd. (Editor’s note on Jan. 17: Lewis’ communications director, Brenda Jones, has since corrected the record, noting that the congressman chose not to attend President George W. Bush’s first inauguration. That ”was also a form of dissent,” she told CBS News.)  Lewis used Trump’s attack as part of a fundraising plea from the Democratic National Committee and his own congressional campaign later on Saturday, writing in an email that, ”I’ve been beaten bloody,   fighting for what’s right for America. I’ve marched at Selma with Dr. King. Sometimes that’s what it takes to move our country in the right direction. We refuse to stop now. We’re not done fighting for progress. We’re ready for the next four years.” Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent critic of Trump during the campaign, defended Lewis on Twitter. On Friday, he’d tweeted a message to Lewis asking him to reconsider attending the inauguration. Trump also claimed that Lewis’s   district was ”in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested).” As the Atlanta Journal Constitution notes, the district is about 58 percent black, 33 percent white and has a growing Hispanic population. It includes the   Atlanta International Airport, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the headquarters of Coca Cola and Delta Air Lines. It also includes several top colleges such as the historically black Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, along with Emory University and Georgia Tech. And while the district does have an 8. 2 percent unemployment rate, higher than the national average of just below 5 percent, more than 40 percent in the district have a bachelor’s degree or higher, higher than the national average. Even amid criticism, Trump doubled down on his remarks about Lewis later Saturday evening: Michigan Rep. Justin Amash had a curt response to that later tweet from Trump:"
318,"Just one day after Jennifer Holliday told the media she planned to sing at a welcome concert for   Donald Trump, the Tony   singer says she has reconsidered. Holliday will not be performing at the   event. She announced the turnabout in a letter provided to The Wrap. She wrote, in part: ”Regretfully, I did not take into consideration that my performing for the concert would actually instead be taken as a political act against my own personal beliefs and be mistaken for support of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. ”In light of the information pointed out to me via the Daily Beast article on yesterday, my only choice must now be to stand with the LGBT Community and to state unequivocally that I WILL NOT PERFORM FOR THE WELCOME CONCERT OR FOR ANY OF THE INAUGURATION FESTIVITIES!” Holliday, a Broadway actress best known for her   turn in Dreamgirls, in the early 1980s has sung for U. S. presidents on both sides of the aisle  —   including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and both presidents Bush. She says it was this role as a ”  songbird” that ultimately persuaded her to accept an invitation to sing at a Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. ”I’m singing on the mall for the people. I don’t have a dog in this fight  —   I’m just a singer, and it’s a welcome concert for the people on the mall,” she told The New York Times on Friday, adding that she had voted for Hillary Clinton in the election. But ”if someone wants me to sing a national anthem or something,” Holliday told the Times, ”we think about America, and we go.” The announcement Friday drew a swift backlash on social media that astonished Holliday. ”I’m not singing for Donald Trump I’m singing to welcome the people of America,” she told Billboard, in an interview Friday defending the decision. ”He cannot be the only face that’s gonna represent us. And just to have all white people up there singing is not going to be a fair representation either. So you’re just saying don’t go? Really? I’m just very disheartened by it that it would be so much hate.” In her letter, which was addressed to ”MY BELOVED LGBT COMMUNITY,” Holliday says that calculus changed for her after reading a Daily Beast article that called attention to her lofty status as an icon in the LGBT community. The decision to perform in support of the incoming Trump administration represented ”an act that seems to defy everything her most passionate supporters stand for, and even issues she herself has supported throughout her career,” the Daily Beast argued. So, Holliday says, she reexamined her choice. And Saturday, she made that change of heart official. In her letter, she apologized for what she called a ”lapse of judgement,” and ”for being uneducated on the issues that affect every American at this crucial time in history and for causing such dismay and heartbreak to my fans.”"
319,"For the past 17 years, Sam Barsky has knit sweaters that depict places he’s seen around the world, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Stonehenge, Jerusalem’s Western Wall  —   even a field of electrical pylons. But what’s made Barsky an internet phenomenon, with well over a million hits on various websites, are photos of the knitter himself posing in front of a scene, wearing his matching sweater. With more than 100 handmade sweaters under his belt, the    says the only limitation he has is the  ’ time it takes to make one. ”This is what I enjoy doing, I like creating. I like replicating what I see in life, and what I anticipate seeing.” And that’s just where he finds his artistic inspiration. ”Pretty much any kind of iconic landmark or natural scene  —   anything, possibly  —   it could be in my dreams,” Barsky says. As for the electrical pylon sweater, ”I see them all the time, in all my routine travels around the local area,” he says. ”They’re everywhere, so pretty much anything that crosses my eyes is a potential sweater and the pylons are no exception.” For his next project, he’s setting his sights on a Groundhog Day sweater  —   featuring a groundhog on it, of course. Another ambitious knitting feat of his? Faces  —   he’s working on a Martin Luther King sweater, just in time for the civil rights leader’s birthday. Now that his art’s virality has garnered him new fame, Barsky says, ”I’m flooded with requests  —   so many I can’t even see all of them.” But he’s not quite up to fulfilling those requests, sticking to his own artistic direction that got him the attention in the first place. ”I’ve thought about it before, but I’ve realized early on, a long time ago, that it’s not practical for me to be a human sweater mill.”"
320,"Small classes. High standards. More money. These popular remedies for school ills aren’t as effective as they’re sometimes thought to be. That’s the somewhat controversial conclusion of education researcher John Hattie. Over his career, Hattie has scrutinized more than 1, 000 ”” looking at all types of interventions to improve learning. The studies he’s examined cover a combined 250 million students around the world. Out of that, he’s identified five common ideas in education policy that he says should be looked at with a critical eye. NPR Ed spoke with Hattie, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, about each of these five ideas following the publication of his 2015 paper ”What Doesn’t Work In Education: The Politics of Distraction.” 1. Achievement standards. ”It seems very sensible. You set up minimum standards you want students to reach. You judge schools by how many reach them,” Hattie says. ”But it has a very nasty effect. All those schools who take kids in difficult circumstances are seen as failures, while those who take privileged students and do nothing are seen as successful.” By the same token, it seems to make sense to set achievement standards by grade level, but the further along students get in school, Hattie points out, the more of them are performing either behind or ahead of the schedule that’s been set. The alternative: a focus on growth and progress for each student, no matter where he or she starts. 2. Achievement tests.    schools, and countries, don’t necessarily give more standardized tests than low performers. They often give fewer. The alternative: testing that emphasizes giving teachers immediate, actionable feedback to improve teaching. 3. School choice. Many education reformers tout school choice as a tool for parent empowerment and school improvement through competitive pressure. But Hattie says his research shows that once the economic background of students is accounted for, private schools offer no significant advantages over public schools, on average. The same goes for charter schools. But there is one kind of choice that Hattie does believe makes a difference: teacher choice. Being able to select the best teacher for your child, Hattie suggests, could be truly empowering for parents  —   albeit a challenging strategy for a school to adopt. 4. Small class size. In the U. S. groups such as Class Size Matters are dedicated to the proposition that fewer students per teacher is a recipe for success. This, Hattie argues, would come as a surprise to Japan and Korea, which have two of the   education systems in the world  —   and average class sizes of 33. Hattie says reducing class size can have a positive impact. But that small class size needs to be paired with training and support for teachers to collaborate more closely with students, offer more personalized feedback and measure student improvement on a more granular level. 5. More money. Korea and Finland far outscore the U. S. on the international PISA exam, which tests learning in math, science and reading. And those two countries spend $60, 000 and $75, 000 respectively per student, for schooling from first grade through high school graduation. That compares with $105, 000 spent per student for the same block of time in the U. S. Hattie believes $40, 000 per student for these years of education is necessary for reasonable school performance. But above that, he sees almost no relationship between money spent and results earned. In his book Visible Learning Into Action, Hattie looks at the flip side  —   the ideas that do work in schools around the world. Boiled down, he says, the most effective ideas are those that empower teachers to collaborate closely with students and support them in continuously improving. A version of this story was published on NPR Ed in August 2015."
321,"Shelly Fields is a    white woman living in Richton Park, a racially diverse Chicago suburb. She says she’s raised her four daughters, who are biracial, to see people of all races as equal, just as her parents raised her. Fields doesn’t think that racism will ever disappear completely, but she’s hopeful that it lessens with each passing generation. ”The more biracial children there are, the more equality we see,” Fields said. ”The more people of color we see in positions of power  —   it will help to change the way people see race.” Her oldest daughter, Summer, is a    graduate of the University of Chicago. When she was in high school, Summer probably would have agreed that race relations were looking up. The ’90s and early 2000s were ”a   fantasy time” in Richton Park, Summer said. ”Being firmly in the middle of the Obama era  —   it [was] a moment of progress. It was validating.” Now, as the Obama era ends, she is of the mind that racism isn’t going anywhere. ”Racism always evolves, and will find a way,” Summer said. The question that Shelly and Summer are tackling has been posed in many forms for many generations. Will racism just die off with old bigots? Does the fate of race relations lie with the children? That idea has been milling about the public psyche for generations. It lives in that famous (if  ) line: ”I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr. said it eloquently in his ”I Have a Dream” speech, but we’ve heard that sentiment through the ages, from Thomas Jefferson to Oprah Winfrey. The belief that our children’s generation will be less racist gets repeated by teachers, parents, politicians and activists. And understandably so. Much of American culture is predicated on the idea that we can create a better future for our progeny, instilling in them values that we as a nation have often failed to uphold. In our small, very unscientific survey last month, Code Switch heard that conviction. We also heard just the opposite. We wanted to know if beliefs about the future of racism were held consistently in families from generation to generation. Here’s what we asked in our December callout: Will racism fade away when old bigots die?  Of the 120 or so people who responded, more than   said they did not think the next generation would usher out racism. And nearly the same number thought their answer would differ from their parents or grandparents. (There’s reason to think, given some more scientific national research, that there’s not really much difference between generations when it comes to racial beliefs.) But let’s get back to the Fields family. Summer Fields responded to our survey. She had no qualms saying that racism would be with us for the long run. She didn’t know exactly what her mom would say, but she was pretty sure it wouldn’t be that. Here’s what Shelly said: ”The further we get away from the idea that one skin color or race is better than the other, the better. Past generations had these ideas, and they were spread to the next generation and the next.” Shelly learned about race from her parents. When she was growing up, she said, they taught her never to judge other people based on skin color. That didn’t stop them from being cautious when she began dating outside her race and eventually decided to start a family with a black man. ”Once [my mother] found out I was pregnant, when it hit close to home, it was a different story,” Shelly said. ”She was afraid . .. She said, ’You’re gonna have a baby with dark skin and kinky hair.’ ”’She was afraid because she didn’t know [what to expect]. And I really didn’t know either.” But Shelly said that once her daughters were born, her parents were able to see firsthand that there was nothing to worry about. (She lives right behind her parents, and they’ve been heavily involved in each other’s lives.) She said that her neighborhood has always been racially mixed, and that her family has never really experienced racism there. That, she said, helped her parents move past some of their fears and double down on their belief that people of all races should be treated equally. ”They taught that to my daughters,” Shelly said. ”They and I showed my daughters, and I’m hoping that they’ll show their daughters and sons.” Summer isn’t quite as hopeful. As a high schooler, being surrounded by a mix of black, white, and multiracial classmates, it was possible for her to believe in a more uplifting future. After arriving at the University of Chicago, where less than five percent of the student body was black, her perspective changed. She started learning about things like race theory in her classes. The overwhelmingly white environment also affected how she thought of herself her identity suddenly felt more political. She found herself engaging and disagreeing more with her mom’s ideas about race. They’ve argued over things like trigger warnings and safe spaces (her mom says that’s not how the real world works) and about how to  . Summer thought of herself as biracial until she went to college. When she started referring to herself as a black woman, that became another point of contention. ”My mom doesn’t understand,” she said. ”She feels like that’s an affront to her.” While Shelly knows racism won’t disappear (”We still have families that teach the same things they were taught about judging people based on race,” she said,) she holds onto some optimism. Summer’s prognosis is a little bleaker. ”Our country’s whole identity is founded on the pillaging and murder of Native people and chattel slavery,” she said. It would help to acknowledge that, she said. She’s just not sure democracy could handle it. ”For us to call that out and admit it would be the first step,” Summer said. ”But it would destroy the whole project.” That generational dissonance seemed to be a common thread among the people we surveyed. We heard from a South Asian college student in Florida who said that because her parents chose to come to the United States, they’re more invested in the notion that America is a land of opportunity for all people. So they don’t get why so many people of color in this country fear police or don’t work their way out of poverty. ”My mom isn’t racist . .. but she doesn’t understand institutional racism,” she said. ”I have an understanding of [American] history that my parents don’t.” We also heard from a white elementary school teacher in New Jersey who’s hopeful because his white students idolize musicians and athletes of color. But he said his parents think the culture gaps between races are too large to ever overcome. At one point, he spoke to them about moving from his largely white neighborhood into one that was racially mixed. He thought he’d be comfortable there. Their response? ”No, you wouldn’t.” Much of the available public polling data suggests that millennials like the schoolteacher are not as different from Generation Xers or Baby Boomers as they might think. Kathleen Weldon, communications director at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, said millennials tend to say they are more optimistic about race relations than their parents, and more broadly accepting of things like interracial friendships and marriage. But when questioned about specific policy issues tied to race, she said, millennials sound a lot like their elders. They don’t ”have different views on the [George] Zimmerman case, aren’t more aware of the disproportionate effect of HIV on the black community, are not more likely to think government should play a major role in the social and economic position of blacks, and are no more [or less] likely to think the [Voting Rights Act] is still necessary,” Weldon said. ”In other words, when it comes to perceptions and policy around race in the U. S. young Americans don’t look much different from older ones.” Jocelyn Wilks and her father, Elijah, expected their views to diverge significantly when it came to race and racism. But though they come from different generations, were born in different parts of the country, and even have different ideas of what they’ll call racism, their outlook is pretty similar. As a black man born in Mississippi in the early 1960s, Elijah lived with   racism. He was in fourth grade when his school integrated. When he was in high school, there was a black homecoming court and a white homecoming court, a black ”Mr. and Miss High School” and a white ”Mr. and Miss High School.” Those experiences inform his thinking about race. His daughter, he said, formed her opinions another way. ”I’ve never taught [Jocelyn] about racism,” Elijah said. ”I never had those conversations with her. I let her grow up and develop her own opinion of things. That was never taught in the home when I was growing up and I didn’t teach her that way.” Another difference between father and daughter, he said, is geographic. He was raised in Mississippi Jocelyn was born and raised in San Antonio. ”Where I grew up, you were either black or white,” Elijah said. ”In San Antonio, it’s predominantly Hispanic, and whites and blacks are minorities . .. It makes a huge difference.” Jocelyn is a    accounting student who lives just north of San Antonio. Her experience teaching   helped convince her that racism was going nowhere fast. During that time, Jocelyn heard a lot of nonsense from her students, like one boy who, after losing a basketball game, said his opponent’s ”genes were made to jump.” Jocelyn knew the children were getting those ideas from somewhere. ”When you’re 9 or 10 you can’t call bullshit on your parents,” she said. ”You take those racist statements as facts. . .. ”Kids pick up things that you don’t teach them. So if Mom treats a person of color poorly, the kid sees that and picks it up, because that’s their model.” Jocelyn said she and her dad have different ideas of what’s worth labeling racism. Born in a harsher time, his threshold, she said, is higher. ”It won’t be the small slights that people in my generation find to be racist,” she said. ”He thinks things are getting better, and they are better from when he was growing up. But it’s not the better that we’re looking for. He wouldn’t look at gentrification or housing segregation and say, ’They’re doing that on purpose, this is racist.’ It would be a church shooting, and he’d [say] ’That’s a hate crime.’ ”Dad says, ’It’s not fair that these people are getting killed and no one’s going to jail for it.’ And I say, ’It’s not fair, if your name is Shaniqua, that you have to work 15 times harder to get a job than anybody else. ’” But when they come back to that question that has been passed down through the generations  —   Will racism fade away when old bigots die?  —   Elijah and Jocelyn sound almost identical. Father: ”As new generations come into existence, it will be lesser and lesser, but I don’t know if it will ever end.” Daughter: ”As long as there’s racism in this generation, there’s going to be racism in the next generation. It might dwindle, but it won’t disappear.”"
322,"As their first major act of the new Congress, Republicans rushed approval of a budget resolution this week that sets up a framework for repealing Obamacare, but what exactly to replace it with is still a puzzle Republicans are piecing together. And it could take a while. ”We’re not holding hard deadlines, only because we want to get it right,” House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . told reporters this week. The budget resolution does include a Jan. 27 deadline for committees to report back with repeal legislation, but lawmakers have made abundantly clear they’re going to blow past that date. Ryan says Republicans will use their annual GOP retreat for a ”full, exhausting” conversation on how exactly to repeal and replace the law. The   approach is at odds with the increasing urgency of the rhetoric on the state of the Affordable Care Act. ”We are on a rescue mission to prevent Obamacare from making things even worse,” Ryan pledged. What do we know? Congressional leaders and   Donald Trump have pledged that repeal legislation and the GOP alternative to replace will occur at roughly the same time. Trump this week pledged it will happen ”essentially simultaneously.” The incoming president said they will not offer a plan until his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price,  . is confirmed. Republicans expect a significant amount of the repeal effort to come through executive action by HHS since much of the implementation of Obamacare was done through the same agency. In Congress, lawmakers say they want to use piecemeal legislation to address specific issues. There is stiff political resistance among Republicans to voting on one, sweeping legislative package. The Affordable Care Act was 2, 700 pages, and Republicans these days are generally distrustful of behemoth bills. They are too hard to explain to the public their constituents hate them and it’s too easy to tuck in provisions they might regret voting for down the road. Republicans have promised to keep intact some of the more popular provisions of the law. They say people with   conditions will still have access to health insurance, and that parents can keep their adult children on their health plans until age 26. House Republicans offered a broad outline for reform in 2016 that provides the foundation for what they will try and do this year. That plan repeals the individual mandate, which is a pillar of Obamacare. Instead, it would create new tax credits to incentivize individuals to buy insurance, but it wouldn’t penalize them if they don’t. Ryan discussed this at a CNN town hall on Thursday. ”We want to instead have tax credits, so that everybody can . .. take their tax credit and go buy a health care plan of their choosing,” he said. ”And that’s the other thing  —   we don’t want to make people buy something that they don’t want to buy. We don’t want to force them to buy all these different benefits.” There is also loose consensus in the House and Senate to remove mandates on essential health benefits that insurance plans must cover and let states decide minimum coverage. Republicans also plan to use the repeal legislation to cut off funds for Planned Parenthood, which received federal funds through Medicaid reimbursements for services. Planned Parenthood is a political target for Republicans, who oppose the health care provider, because they provide abortion services. Instead, Republicans want to redirect those federal funds to health clinics that do not offer abortion services. What Don’t We know? A lot. Broadly, there is a philosophical debate here about whether the federal government has an obligation to insure all Americans, or whether Americans should decide whether or not to have insurance. Republicans have pledged that no one who has insurance through the ACA will lose it, but without a mandate the number of insured Americans could drop. The other major challenge facing Republicans is cost. The party, at its core, is resistant to expanding federal entitlements and spending, but they have pledged to create better health care coverage options at lower costs. Those two promises are hard to reconcile, particularly for a legislative product that will have to be assessed by the Congressional Budget Office for its impact on the federal budget. Lawmakers say the most ambitious timetable to see a legislative product take shape is late February, although others caution that this debate could consume most of 2017. For all the Republicans’ ambitions on health care, there are still certain legislative realities they have to face. The most significant is in the Senate, where replacement legislation will likely need to pass a   hurdle, and that means bringing some combination of Democrats on board. That’s why GOP senators are taking a more measured approach. For instance, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman, Lamar Alexander,  . a key negotiator, has already taken Medicare off the table as part of any health care negotiations, because it would repel any Democrat from engaging in talks. What are the political calculations? Democrats advanced Obamacare after winning an election that delivered control of Congress and the White House. In hindsight, many top Democrats have reflected that the party tackled health care when the country was really aching for economic relief. ”Americans were crying out for an end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs not for changes in their healthcare,” Sen. Chuck Schumer,  . Y. reflected in 2014. Arguably, Republicans could be making the same mistake. The party is fresh off an election victory that delivered unified GOP control for the first time in a decade. But their dire warnings about Obamacare don’t always line up with the public’s view of the law. A recent   poll showed 38% of Americans support strengthening or expanding Obamacare 31% want it repealed and replaced 14% want it repealed and not replaced 6% want it left as is. Democrats think Republicans have   their hand. ”When you put pen to paper, all hell is going to break lose on your side,” Rep. Peter Welch,  . said during floor debate this week on the budget resolution, ”because you have to move beyond the rhetoric to figuring out how you’re going to pay to keep our kids on our health care plan, figuring out how to have to pay if we’re going to let folks with   conditions have health care. Those (problems) don’t solve themselves, and you don’t have a plan.” But doing nothing is also not an option, particularly for lawmakers in states where premiums are rising and insurer options are now down to a single provider. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky argued that Democrats face their own political risks by defending the current system. ”I would caution our Democratic friends to become the spokesmen for the status quo,” he said. ”It associates them with the fact that, after Obamacare, there’s still 25 million Americans who are uninsured,   are going up, deductibles are going up and premiums are going up. I would also remind them that (Obamacare) is the reason we had a great year in 2010, 2014 and again in 2016.”"
323,"President Obama and Vice   Mike Pence were both on Capitol Hill Wednesday, making competing cases for and against Obama’s signature health care law. Republicans have promised to make repeal of the Affordable Care Act their first order of business, once they control both Congress and the White House. Obama is urging his fellow Democrats to do what they can to preserve the law. If that fails, Democrats plan to hold Republicans accountable for any disruption the repeal may trigger. Both sides are trying to position themselves as the protectors of Americans’ health care, while branding the other party as a dangerous threat. As usual, the truth may be somewhere in between. Here we take a closer look at some of the claims being floated by both parties:   Trump got the ball rolling with a   tweet, cautioning that ”Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases. .... .” Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Trump. ”This law has failed,” Ryan told reporters. ”We know that things are only getting worse under Obamacare. This is about people paying higher premiums every year and feeling powerless to stop it. It’s about families paying deductibles that are so high it doesn’t even feel like you have health insurance in the first place. And in so many parts of the country, as you’ve always heard, even if you want to look for better coverage, you’re stuck with one option. One choice is not a choice. It is a monopoly. The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare.” CLAIM: Obamacare suffers from ”massive premium increases”  FACT CHECK: True in some cases, but it’s also relative. Obamacare is also actually cheaper on average than the typical   plan. Many people shopping for health insurance on the   exchanges set up by Obamacare have seen   premium increases this year. The average cost of a benchmark plan rose 25 percent nationwide, but there was considerable variation from state to state. Premiums in Arizona jumped an average of 116 percent, while premiums in Indiana and Massachusetts actually went down. Most people buying insurance on the exchanges receive a government subsidy, which helps defray the cost. A study by the Urban Institute last year found that even without the subsidy, insurance policies sold on the exchanges cost about 10 percent less than the typical   plan. Exchange policies might seem more expensive, because part of the cost of workplace plans is typically paid by employers, and thus largely invisible to the employee. CLAIM: ”You’re stuck with one option” under Obamacare, FACT CHECK: Not true for the majority, but it has increasingly become the case. Obamacare insurance exchanges have grown less competitive, as some insurance companies have lost money and left the market. One in five customers on the exchanges had just one insurance company to choose from this year (up from 2 percent in 2016). Nearly 6 in 10 customers have a choice of three or more companies. The lack of competition, which can lead to higher prices, tends to be worse in rural areas and the South. Insurance companies have struggled, in part, because fewer young, healthy people have signed up for coverage than forecast. Backers of the Affordable Care Act say that could be remedied with more generous subsidies to encourage   or bigger penalties for those who fail to enroll. Obama also renewed the idea of a public insurance option to supplement private offerings. CLAIM: ”The health care system has been ruined, dismantled under Obamacare” FACT CHECK: Prices were going up at faster rates before Obamacare. Most Americans under age 65 still get health insurance through an employer, although the percentage has been slowly dropping. The cost of   coverage has gone up since passage of the ACA. But the annual price hikes were considerably larger in the decade before the law was passed. Some of the savings from slower premium growth have been offset by higher deductibles. While Republicans highlight the shortcomings of the Affordable Care Act, Democrats warn that repeal would be much worse. ”Instead of working to further ensure affordable care for all Americans, [Republicans] seek to rip health care away from millions of Americans, creating chaos in our entire economy,” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday. He and his fellow Democrats offered a mocking slogan for the GOP: ”Make America Sick Again.” Schumer also suggested that repealing Obamacare would hurt rural hospitals, ”right in their heartlands. The minute they enact this repeal, [hospitals] are going to suffer dramatically,” he said. CLAIM: ACA repeal would ”rip health care away from millions” FACT CHECK: True, if Republicans don’t protect them or replace ACA with something that provides coverage. The Affordable Care Act has expanded health care coverage to some 20 million Americans through a combination of subsidized individual policies, expanded Medicaid, and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plans. The uninsured rate has fallen to an   low of around 10 percent. Coverage would be higher still if 19 states had not refused to expand Medicaid. If the   Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act, many of those newly insured Americans would be at risk of losing coverage. In addition, millions more who buy individual insurance policies off the exchanges could be at risk, if that market is disrupted. The Urban Institute estimates as many as 30 million people in all could lose their health care coverage, doubling the uninsured rate. Republicans have promised an orderly transition as they work toward a replacement for Obamacare, and it’s possible the effective date for any repeal could be delayed for a number of years. Insurance companies, however, may be reluctant to participate once it’s clear Obamacare’s individual market is being phased out. CLAIM: Rural hospitals are going to suffer, FACT CHECK: True, if repealed outright, but it’s also because of the way the ACA was structured in the first place. The concern for hospitals reflects a   when the ACA was passed seven years ago. The government scaled back what it pays hospitals for treating Medicare patients and the indigent, with the expectation that would be offset by payments from millions of newly insured. Hospitals worry that if repeal of the law cuts insurance coverage, but doesn’t restore other payments, they could be left with a mountain of unpaid bills. The American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals urged Congress and the incoming Trump administration to either protect insurance coverage or replace the hospital payments."
324,"So now we know: This is how it’s going to be after Inauguration Day, too. When coverage falls afoul of Donald Trump, the     will feed the media itself into the news grinder. As Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon, the new administration is going on permanent offense Trump will invert the usual equation to subject individual journalists and their employers to scrutiny and slashing attacks of the kind usually reserved for public officials. Trump started Wednesday’s cyclone of a press conference with a warning sheathed in seeming compliments: Thanks for the restraint in holding off on all those salacious and unproven allegations about my personal behavior, and the claims of collusion between my associates and the Russians! And don’t tick me off if you want any more of these press conferences. It had, after all, been a   since Trump last held one  —   a hiatus which he ascribed to his displeasure with reporting about him. Standing at a lectern in the atrium of the Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, Trump went on to denounce CNN (”Your organization is terrible. . .. You are fake news! ”) for editorial decisions made by BuzzFeed (which he called ”a failing pile of garbage”). CNN had reported that senior U. S. intelligence officials took the allegations seriously enough to brief President Obama and the    —   a story that sparked a firestorm but proved uncontroversial among most journalists to publish. It was unquestionably newsworthy. BuzzFeed, by contrast, had sparked industrywide debate in deciding to post the full file of unsubstantiated claim  —   compiled, apparently, by a former British intelligence officer working on behalf of Trump’s political foes in both parties. The site’s rationale was that posting allowed readers to make up their own minds, even as reporters raced to determine which allegations, if any, held up to scrutiny. Trump shouted down CNN’s Jim Acosta as the reporter repeatedly sought to ask Trump a question in response to his pointed critique. Afterward Sean Spicer, Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, strode briskly up to Acosta and admonished him. Spicer later told me Acosta had been ”disgraceful, rude and inappropriate” in pressing Trump. Spicer also said that he had told Acosta ”if he did it again, I’d have him thrown out.” Trump’s rhetorical jujitsu and verbal attacks at times overshadowed the meat of the stories that drew his ire, including his camp’s alleged ties to the Russians and his business entanglements. Some of Trump’s aides ginned up some hollow stagecraft for the event: Trump stood near a table loaded with unmarked manila folders filled with sheets of paper as his lawyer explained why he would give control of his companies to his sons rather than sell his enterprises. Reporters never saw what the folders contained or learned what information they purportedly held. Even so, the question of conflicts of interest surfaced unexpectedly in the Trump Tower atrium, effectively a   mall. ”The blue curtain behind Trump didn’t quite obscure the booth where Ivanka Trump sells her fine jewelry,” the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi noted minutes after the event wrapped up. ”You could see the mannequins where they normally have these diamond necklaces that Ivanka Trump is selling in Trump Tower. ”Even in their staging, they couldn’t quite get rid of the idea that Ivanka and all of the children  —   and Donald Trump  —   will have a massive conflict of interest,” Nuzzi said afterward. On Thursday morning, Trump picked up on Twitter where he left off: ”CNN is in a total meltdown with their FAKE NEWS because their ratings are tanking since election and their credibility will soon be gone!” Actually, CNN’s ratings are flying high right now  —   thanks in no small part to the controversy and conflict engendered by the   in the past year. And as for fake news, Trump himself has been a leading purveyor of false claims, from hoaxes over Obama’s birth to unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud. Some press critics have publicly wrestled with the need for new strategies and rules on how to cover this administration. I don’t think Trump’s arrival requires new strategies, but perhaps new tactics. Yes, reporters might benefit from standing by one another more, as some commentators have advised. They could reiterate questions posed by competitors who are frozen out, or, in the case of Acosta, who never did get to ask the question he sought, yielding time back to him. At minimum they could call out Trump and his aides on the practice  —   as Jake Tapper, then with ABC News, publicly did in sticking up for Fox News reporters and Washington bureau chiefs did in private exchanges with Obama aides. The media could benefit from adhering to first principles that probably should have been observed more attentively all along: Access matters less than   reporting away from the camera. And the press must recognize it can’t rely on other institutions to raise the right questions. (One congressional committee chairman, instead of serving as a check on the   suggested he would investigate a federal ethics official who said Trump’s moves to manage possible business conflicts were insufficient.) Away from the event, reporters joked nervously about what retribution their news organizations might experience in the future. The Trump campaign created blacklists of reporters and news organizations barred from interviews. (BuzzFeed figured prominently.) And yet Trump wants the media’s attention and craves its respect. Trump’s favorite media outlets depend on the vagaries of his mood. Among them one will likely find Breitbart News, the   conservative site which heavily favored Trump during the GOP primaries. The site’s former chairman, Steve Bannon, will be a top White House adviser to Trump. And Trump called on a Breitbart reporter during the news conference. Other likely Trump favorites include the New York Post (to which he has given myriad scraps about his personal life over the years) Fox News (which has named Trump fan Tucker Carlson to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly) the National Enquirer (its parent company is run by a close Trump friend who authorized a $150, 000 payment to a former Playboy model to quash the story of an affair, according to the Wall Street Journal) the New York Observer (owned by his    Jared Kushner until this month) perhaps even   RT, the Russian propagandist network which had a correspondent cheerfully bellowing its initials a few feet from me on Wednesday in hopes of being called on. As it happens, Trump did not call on him. Yet Trump wants the established media’s attention and craves its respect. He gives interviews to The New York Times, even when rejecting the premises of their questions. And he monitors cable coverage more than any TV news agent. On Fox News Thursday evening, former New York City mayor, Fox News commentator and Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani hailed a new media age ushered in by Trump: ”It is refreshing and it is very good for our democracy that we have a president that is trying to get us back to a free press.” Free to do what, one wonders."
325,"Once again, NPR finds itself in the uncomfortable position of reporting on unverified information, just as it did last year when WikiLeaks dumped troves of what it said were hacked emails taken from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, and from top officials of the Democratic National Committee. In this case, the unsubstantiated information is contained in a   dossier about   Donald Trump, compiled last year at the behest of Trump foes —  first   Republicans, and then the Democrats. The dossier has been circulating in official Washington circles and among the press corps for some time. CNN reported on its existence earlier this week, with BuzzFeed quickly posting it in full after. Other news organizations followed with their own   reports that left out the specifics being alleged. NPR is among those that have not detailed the contents of the document. As Phil Ewing wrote for npr. org, ”it remains unverified, but it describes a concerted effort by Russian President Vladimir Putin to cultivate a relationship with Trump and his camp. The document, which describes information provided by Russian government and other sources, details behavior by Trump that could leave him open to blackmail, as well as alleged secret meetings between Trump aides and Russian officials called to discuss the campaign against Clinton and potential new business relationships.” Other   and online characterizations have been similar, but even that broad description has provoked polarized listener reaction. My office and NPR have heard from those who think NPR is biased against Trump by reporting on even the existence of the dossier and the basic outlines of the information. Listener Scot Lee of Laporte, Colo. was particularly succinct: ”I am most disappointed that NPR leadership allowed the organization to fall into the trap of reporting unsubstantiated information.” Bruce Heida from Frederick, Md. raised the very good question of why NPR, in one report, ”failed to include the information that the memo was generated by operatives wishing to destroy Trump’s candidacy.” In the opposite camp are those who think NPR is treating the   too delicately by tiptoeing around the unverified information in the report, unlike when it reported much more extensively on the WikiLeaks material. Listener Michelle Wilson of Wyoming, Mich. wrote to my office, concerned about what she felt was a   noting that the WikiLeaks information, which was ”stolen and never authenticated,” was covered in detail, and yet NPR is not reporting specifics in the Trump dossier ”because NPR has not independently confirmed the allegations.” She continued: ”What conclusion should I draw from the difference in coverage? The options seem to be: 1. NPR learned something from the way it handled the WikiLeaks docs and is now trying to do better. 2. Mary Louise Kelly   her editor is more careful than [the NPR reporters covering WikiLeaks]. 3. NPR simply has a double standard in covering anything Clinton related versus Trump related. 4. NPR, like many other individuals and entities, fears crossing Trump by reporting unflattering information. Please educate me on the reasons for the difference.” I asked NPR’s standards editor, Mark Memmott, for his thoughts. Not surprisingly  —   since these are thorny issues  —   his response was similar to that when I asked him about the WikiLeaks reporting last fall. The word he used to describe both situations was ”awkward.” As he told me, the current story is still in its ”very early stages” and the audience is still getting familiar with it, so ”taking care to remind them about the questions regarding the authenticity of the information is important. That doesn’t mean we can dispense with such reminders as stories go on and on and the news becomes familiar. There were times in the WikiLeaks coverage where we probably should have remembered to include that information.” (NPR did indeed eventually stop including disclaimers on the WikiLeaks material and it should not have done that so quickly.) But, addressing the concerns of Wilson and others, Memmott rightly made a distinction between the two leaks. He said, ”The authenticity of the WikiLeaks wasn’t being disputed.” (As NPR reported at the time, ”The Clinton campaign has not confirmed that the hacked emails are real and NPR has not been able to confirm their authenticity, but the campaign has linked the hack to Russia and says Moscow is interfering with the election to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy.” Later, government officials implicitly confirmed that the material was real when they asserted the Russian government’s role in stealing it.) Memmott continued: ”Yes, the absence of an objection isn’t proof on its own of authenticity. But it is an important sign. Meanwhile, the content of the latest information is of a different nature than what was in the WikiLeaks. You’ve seen words such as ’scurrilous’ and ’compromising.’ Before a credible news outlet goes into detail about such allegations, it had better be confident in the information.” He continued, ”There’s no question, however, that there is news to report about the latest information. Intelligence officials felt its existence was important enough to tell the president and   about it. The   and his aides reacted very strongly to the posting of the information. As I say, it’s awkward.” My take: NPR’s reporting in this case has been careful so far. When a Cabinet nominee is being asked about a document in a public hearing the president and   have both been presented with it and the  ’s communications team makes a statement about it at a press conference, NPR needs to report on it, even while dancing around the details. The fact that Trump opponents compiled the dossier should be noted repeatedly, however. Yes, radio time limitations will mean that’s not always possible, but it’s not a detail that should be left by the wayside or always assumed. As for a  : I thought NPR   the WikiLeaks material, as the story took on a life of its own. So far, NPR has handled this latest disclosure cautiously  —   and appropriately."
326,"Donald Trump’s election early Wednesday as president  —   utterly unprecedented, utterly unexpected  —   caught the media  . The distance between the nation’s political press corps and its people has never seemed so stark. The pundits swung and missed. The polls failed. The predictive surveys of polls, the Upshots and FiveThirtyEights, et al. with their percentage certainties, jerked violently in the precise opposite direction of their predictions as election night progressed. And now journalists are confronted by the prospect of a president who avidly campaigned against them and has promised retribution at a time when many of the nation’s most important news organizations can least afford it. Let’s catalog just a few of the questions facing the nation’s news organizations: How will the media cover Trump? The nation’s journalists like to think of themselves as people who hold the powerful accountable, who are skeptical rather than cynical, constructive rather than carping, institutionally adversarial but not personally opposed. I don’t think that’s how the public thinks about the media. Not at all. The media have come off as petty, grasping and out of touch, all part of the great establishment party from which many Trump voters felt excluded. What’s even more problematic for the media is that Tuesday’s vote involves a repudiation of the idea that the nation’s top leader should care about the facts. On the trail, and throughout his public statements, Trump contradicted the record, the facts, and even himself without the blowback one would expect for a more experienced politician. Indeed, Trump has proved impervious to shame when presented with convincing evidence he is wrong. There’s no reason to believe he’ll care now. The press will have to consider how it can hold accountable someone who rarely if ever is willing to accept fault. During the general election season this fall, CNN’s   captions were often written to be puckish correctives of Candidate Trump’s frequent false claims. Will it continue to do so for President Trump? For many news organizations, journalism is commerce as well as public service. TV networks pushed for more primary debates because they could make money off those evenings. CNN made great riches by airing Trump at great unedited length on the campaign trail during the primaries: It booked an extra $100 million above what it would expect for an election year, attributed to the obsessive focus on Trump. CNN chief Jeff Zucker even boasted that the network’s ad inventory for election night was sold out in record time. Along the way, CNN, Fox News, NBC and other outlets yielded to all kinds of demands by Trump. As one example, Trump’s   on doing interviews by phone ensured he could control the tempo of the exchanges. As a man who prizes negotiation, Trump knew such demands would cement his   status. The transition and the start to the Trump presidency should be great for ratings in the same way the invasion of Iraq was: A strong contingent of the country will cheer it on. Another segment will look on with grave misgivings. And the stakes are enormous. Yet that’s just ratings and clicks. If Trump holds to campaign form  —   which is not certain, but there’s no reason to expect otherwise  —   news organizations will have to choose whether to lurch from outrage to outrage rather than identifying what’s actually occurring in the new Trump administration. Will news organizations acquiesce to a new day without acknowledging the distinctive and dislocating nature of the Trump administration? Will they take an adversarial but conventional approach to covering his White House? Or will they take on an almost oppositional stance? I don’t know  —   and I don’t think they do, either. How will Trump address the media? For the moment, put aside questions of partisan bias (not that Trump intends to). Think instead about the degree to which Trump rejects key values fundamental to journalism, undergirding a deeply held worldview. Trump barely gives lip service to transparency. It’s hard to foresee what kind of information the White House  —   or various federal agencies and departments  —   will give out under his watch. As a candidate Trump showed indifference or hostility to many civil liberties, which incorporate the freedom of speech, expression and assembly embedded in the media’s sense of self. Reporters were herded and penned up at Trump rallies, singled out for abuse, and blacklisted for critical stories, even as their editors negotiated for concessions that seem meager in retrospect. Trump has called for loosening libel laws to make it easier to beat news organizations in court. His Silicon Valley supporter Peter Thiel underwrote cases against Gawker that helped shut down the site and force the sale of its parent company. Rolling Stone and its parent company, Wenner Media, just lost a   libel case in a federal court in Virginia. Even though most cases involve state courts, and are therefore somewhat insulated from federal law, a president’s advocacy can shape laws in state legislatures across the country. Trump has also personally threatened to punish the owners of news organizations whose reports have proved embarrassing or critical. Trump threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting on his taxes. Trump said he would sue NBC for the release of the Access Hollywood tape from 2005 in which he bragged of assaulting women by grabbing their genitals and getting away with it because he is famous. (Trump later denied he had ever done so.) In May, Trump suggested to Fox News he might go after Amazon for unpaid taxes or on antitrust grounds because its founder and CEO, Jeffrey Bezos, personally owns The Washington Post. ”Every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from The Washington Post asking ridiculous questions,” Trump told one of the most sympathetic figures in media toward him, Fox News host Sean Hannity. ”This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos. . .. Amazon is getting away with murder, taxwise. He’s using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.” (I should disclose here that my wife works at Audible, a fully owned subsidiary of Amazon.) In addition, Trump came out against the proposed ATT takeover of Time Warner (parent company of CNN). He also said as president he would have federal antitrust lawyers reconsider their 2011 approval of Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal as part of an assault on media concentration. Such a position is defensible but appears aimed at those owners of media outlets that he sees as providing hostile coverage. Trump has made no such remarks about the Murdochs’ twin media empires at News Corp. and 21st Century Fox, for example. None of this may come to pass. Trump notoriously hates losing. He made his name in the pages of the tabloid press and as the subject of gauzy interviews on entertainment TV shows. He loves being allowed to weigh in on serious matters in interviews with television news anchors. As the winner of the biggest prize of all he may invite the press in to chronicle his triumph. If he does, it is because the siren call of the klieg lights has won out over his anger. But it is hard for the media to rely on his insincerity for salvation. And now, a glance backward to help inform how to proceed. How did the media get this so wrong? The media became a player  —   an antagonist  —   on the trail, thanks to Trump and, he would say, thanks to the media’s coverage too. That may well have affected what people were saying to pollsters. Many states performed outside the margin of error of the projections. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight was off. The New York Times’ Upshot was badly mistaken too. People relied on misinformation spread instantly on social media as well as the shoutfests and jabberjaw punditry on cable news. And this occurred at the same time that unrelenting financial strains have hollowed out newsrooms across the country. Executives at News Corp. the New York Times Co. Gannett and tronc (formerly Tribune Publishing) have all reported deep declines in advertising revenues. Over time, reporters have only become more concentrated in Washington, D. C. and New York, as Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton wrote Wednesday. The   conservative columnist John Podhoretz, also the editor of Commentary magazine, mused on Twitter Wednesday that he might have to think about shutting down his social media account. ”[T]he Twitter echo chamber created a din for many of us that made it impossible to hear what was happening,” Podhoretz wrote. It’s ”perhaps unhealthy for chattering classes (me included) to live partly within this   cocktail party that reinforces things that maybe shouldn’t be reinforced and rewards facile conventional thinking rather than depth,” Podhoretz continued. ”Twitter is a bubble, or is a world of cliques.” Cenk Uygur, the leftist host of the Young Turks and a supporter of Bernie Sanders, predicted in July that Trump would beat Clinton based on a populist appeal tapping into voter anger against the establishment. He looks pretty good in retrospect. But he has for years been considered outside the acceptable norm of media voices. As the conservative political columnist Salena Zito wrote of Trump in September, ”the press takes him literally, but not seriously his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” She has been writing for months about the depths of Trump’s support. One such column in August was titled: ”Stumped by Trump’s success? Take a drive outside US cities.” This can be a period of great reconsideration by the press of how it operates, even as the stories arise all around us. News organizations can yield to mass distraction, and coverage can bounce giddily once again from one outrage and astonishing turn of events to another. It is a time for humility and taking stock. It is a time for listening to voters who unexpectedly turned to Trump and those who envision a very different form of America. It’s one of NPR’s strengths that it can draw on reporters from hundreds of member stations in states both red and blue. Our reporters consistently capture voters in their own voices. News organizations often struggle to do that. In the days and months ahead, I’d like to see less predictive punditry and much more reporting. God knows, the press has much to be humble about. I’d like to see much more careful coverage of Trump’s actual policies and the rules, regulations and laws that emerge. Now is the time to capture not just what Trump has to say, but what people are doing in his name.   years ago, as a rookie reporter in North Carolina, I witnessed an impromptu debate that broke out between two Duke University trustees about the point and power of journalism. An   law dean named Wilhelmina   praised Gene Patterson, a legendary Southern editor, for his leadership at The Atlanta Constitution, which chronicled the battle for civil rights despite opposition from segregationists.   said her family knew that the paper would not ignore the fate of Georgia’s black residents in the 1960s. Patterson, who died in 2013, replied that the newspaper had indeed reported despite pressure to look away  —   but there were limits to the paper’s influence. Despite the paper’s intense scrutiny of Lester Maddox, the combative segregationist was elected Georgia’s governor in 1966. The paper also covered his occasionally surprising policies. As The New York Times later noted, Maddox ”surprised many by hiring and promoting blacks in state government and by initiating an early release program for the state prison system.” So too does the press have to document developments as they unfold in the Trump presidency. His administration will require an unusually robust, muscular form of accountability reporting  —   tethered to fact and fairness, independent of political pressure."
327,"Charts can seem dull. But not to data scientist Tariq Khokhar at the World Bank. When he looked through a year’s worth of charts, graphs, maps and more, he was excited by the numbers. For example, although the world’s population has increased by 2 billion people since 1990, there are 1. 1 billion fewer people living in extreme poverty, under $1. 90 a day (highlighted in blue in the chart below). ”I’m amazed at the progress,” Khokhar says. In December, he worked with his colleagues to identify what he calls the 12 most ”popular and interesting” World Bank charts of 2016, which he highlighted in a blog post on the Bank’s website. The graphs, which range from how many people live without toilets to where the world’s youngest people live, reveal a few intriguing challenges our planet will face in the next few decades. Here’s a sampling of the charts that caught his eye. In the majority of countries, smoking rates have gone down in the past 15 years. But for 20 mostly   and   countries, they’ve gone up. According to the World Health Organization, tobacco smoking kills around 6 million people a year  —   and nearly 80 percent of the world’s 1 billion smokers come from the developing world. Not only is it a health issue, it’s an economic one.   illness or death deprives families of income  —   imagine if the breadwinner of a family gets sick and can’t work  —   and raises the cost of health care. In 2000, just 4 percent of the 5 billion people living in   and   countries had access to a mobile phone. In 2015, that number skyrocketed to 94 percent of the 6 billion people in that population  —   making it easier to find someone who might lend you their mobile phone than finding clean water or electricity. While a 2016 study from the World Bank says that mobile phones have boosted growth and expanded opportunities for some in the developing world (through apps that provide health care information or make mobile payments) not everyone benefits. Only about a third of the people who have access to a mobile phone have access to the Internet, which is necessary to use many of these mobile innovations. Spain, South Africa and Greece have some of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. In the pool of      who want to work and are available to work, or are actively seeking employment, more than half are unemployed. ”This is both a challenge now and in the future,” says Khokhar. A billion more young people will enter the job market in the next decade  —   and only 2 in 5 of them are expected to find jobs, he says."
328,"I don’t want to oversell this new version of A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I don’t know how not to. Everything that the movie version got wrong, this TV adaptation gets right. And not just right, but brilliantly. The difference is as stark, and as significant, as the difference between the movie and TV versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer  —   where the writer of that story, Joss Whedon, took the reins and made a television version much truer to his original vision. Daniel Handler, who wrote the original series of Lemony Snicket books, has done the same thing here. And he’s enlisted, as his key   two   collaborators: Barry Sonnenfeld, of Pushing Daisies and The Addams Family fame, as the director of many of the episodes, and an executive producer. And as another producer, and the show’s central star, Neil Patrick Harris. This new   Netflix version, which is written by Handler, is inspiringly faithful to the original books, with two episodes devoted to each of the first handful of stories. The look, which comes from Sonnenfeld, is     fright mode  —   occasionally bright colors against oppressively grey backgrounds, aptly reflecting the mood of the stories. And these are sad, sad stories indeed. The narrative begins with three children being told their parents have died in a fire that burned down the family home  —   and goes downhill from there. These stories are cracklingly intelligent, and delightfully droll, and occasionally, surprisingly,    funny. They’re also so dark, they come with a warning attached  —   not just at the start, but throughout. In the books, these warnings are delivered by the alleged author, Lemony Snicket. He delivers the same deadpan warnings in the TV version, too  —   but for TV, Lemony Snicket appears throughout as a pessimistic,      narrator, sort of a   cross between Rod Serling and Eeyore. And he’s played by Patrick Warburton, whose delivery is as   and as inexplicably charming, as his disclaimers. Though Lemony urges viewers not to watch A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’m begging you to tune in. I haven’t had this much fun watching TV in quite a while. The three kids playing the unfortunate Baudelaire children, the story’s central heroes, are exceptional. Malina Weissman is Violet, the young teenage inventor. Louis Hynes is Klaus, the   bookworm and Presley Smith is Sunny, the expressive baby with very sharp teeth. Their chief nemesis is Count Olaf, an actor and schemer played by Harris, who adopts several guises and plots in hopes of stealing the family fortune the children will eventually inherit. Different stories and episodes are filled with delightful supporting players and performances. Alfre Woodard, as an easily frightened woman, has her most playful role in decades. Catherine O’Hara, Aasif Mandvi, Joan Cusack and others pop in and out, all having heaps of fun playing outrageous characters. No one has more fun, though, or is more outrageous, than Harris. He was a wonderfully camp, cartoonish villain back when he played the titular bad guy in Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s   Blog  —   but that was only a   for his evil ways in Unfortunate Events, in which he threatens the children who have been newly placed in his care. I don’t know how old children should be to watch this series  —   that’s a call, parents should make for themselves. But no one is too old. The tone of this show is utterly charming, and it never falters. It looks great, sounds great, takes   twists and turns and preserves all the quirky things that made the original book series such a treat. Even the long discourses on proper grammar, and the deeply buried clues and puns, are here. Harris even sings the show’s theme song, which changes each week to reflect the updated action but always ends by encouraging viewers to look away. Don’t you dare. Or you’ll be missing one of the best new TV shows in a long time."
329,"Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer ”radical empathy” and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety. Today the hosts are presented with a question that requires thinking about honesty, trust and judgment in relationships. A woman writes that the man she’s seeing recently confessed to having cheated in past relationships. She’s concerned  —   not that he’ll cheat again, but that he hasn’t expressed much regret for doing it in the past. Is she being too judgmental? Dear Sugars, I recently met a great guy I’ll call ”Richard” on a dating app, and we’ve been seeing each other pretty regularly for about a month. Recently, he shared with me that he would like our relationship to become exclusive and for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend. I’ve been single for about four years (I’m 30) and I would very much like to be in a committed relationship. I told him that I wanted the same thing, but that I’m still in the process of getting to know and understand him and I needed more time. Since then, we’ve shared details about our past relationships with each other. He revealed to me that he cheated on every girlfriend he ever had when he was in college and in law school. He says he has not acted this way for about seven years, and he has since had other girlfriends to whom he was faithful.  When he told me this, I tried to remain open and  . I asked him how he was able to rationalize this behavior to himself, and he said, ”To be honest, I just turned that part of my brain off.” He emphasized that he was much younger then and he was ”sowing his wild oats,” and that he wouldn’t cheat on me now because that simply isn’t what he wants. He wants someone to spend time with and be in a committed relationship with. He is a very    type and doesn’t mince words, so I take him at his word that he doesn’t have any plans to resume his cheating ways. However, there are a couple things that concern me about this. One is that he didn’t express much regret or  . It seemed as though he was saying his bad behavior suited his desires back then, but they don’t now, so he has cut them out. But what I want is a man who has values and principles that guide him through life  —   not someone who picks and chooses when doing the right thing suits him. The second thing is that some of his friends continue to cheat on their girlfriends or spouses. While he acknowledges that their behavior is scummy, it’s odd to me that he can be friends with people like that. I know this might sound super   but I can honestly say that the people I surround myself with are good people who do not cheat on their significant others. Am I judging him too harshly for cheating all those years back? Should I be giving him credit for being forthcoming about it? Or is it obvious that he doesn’t have a strong moral compass? I so would like for this relationship to work, but I’m not willing to commit to someone I don’t deem trustworthy. Sugars, what should I do? Signed, Too Judgy, Or Not Judgy Enough? Steve Almond: TJONJE, it sounds like what’s unsettling you is that this guy doesn’t have an adequate capacity to   and tell you, ”Not only did I do these things, but I know they’re wrong because they were hurtful to the people I was with.” Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio:RSSiTunesStitcher, You believe his declaration, but there’s something untrustworthy about how he’s saying it. It’s like when you say to somebody, ”I’m sorry that upset you,” as opposed to, ”I’m sorry I said something that was clearly hurtful to you.” It feels like he disassociates a little bit. I think you need to have a talk about this before it goes any further and say, ”I know we talked about this and I know you think the issue’s over, but it’s not for me.” Cheryl Strayed: I think you’re being too judgy, TJONJE. I don’t mean to say that you don’t have some valid concerns. It seems to me that the most important concern is Richard’s sense of regret. I would want to know if he has really thought about the consequences of his actions. But I think that’s implicit in the fact that he told you about these things, and that he spent the past seven years not cheating on girlfriends. You ask if he’s trustworthy, but maybe you should ask: What does trustworthy mean to you? Does it mean never having made a mistake? Or does it mean telling you the truth about his life? If it’s the latter, you’ve got that. This man has admitted his past mistakes, even though he knows you feel judgmental about them. Would you rather that he doesn’t tell you those things? I’m not saying it’s OK to deceive and lie and cheat. But I am saying that a lot of people make mistakes within this realm of life, and it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re immoral. The guy I would be much more afraid of is the guy you met on the dating app at the age of 30 who claims to have an absolutely pure background. Lower those judgments. Open your mind and heart. Have some real discussions, and make yourself vulnerable. You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more from people doubting their relationships. Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail. com and it may be answered on a future episode. You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app."
330,"Gen. Michael Flynn,   Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, did speak to Russian ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak by telephone on Dec. 29, the same day the Obama administration announced measures retaliating against Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential campaign, two Trump transition officials confirm to NPR. This is different timing than the Trump transition had announced to reporters Friday morning. Transition spokesman and incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said then that Kislyak texted Flynn on Dec. 28, asking to talk. Spicer also said the text messages showed they wished each other Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and added they spoke by phone later that day, the 28, meaning they couldn’t have discussed the retaliation measures or Russia’s response. But now, the transition officials, including Spicer, confirm to NPR that was not correct. The phone conversation, initiated by the Russian ambassador, actually didn’t happen until the next day, Dec. 29, the same day as the retaliatory efforts were announced. David Ignatius at the Washington Post broke the story Thursday that Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador Dec. 29, although the transition said it actually happened the day before. AP published a report Friday night that supported Ignatius’ version. Spicer told NPR in a phone call late Friday night that he had misread the timing of Flynn’s texts Friday morning and that accounts for the discrepancy. Spicer said the call took place ”around the same time” as when the retaliation measures were announced, which was some time around 2 p. m. ET. But, he insisted that the details of the phone conversation did not change from what he said Friday morning and called it ”doubtful” that Flynn and the ambassador discussed the U. S.’s retaliatory measures or Russia’s potential response, because Flynn told Spicer they did not. The first hint that sanctions against Russia were coming was when President Obama said in an interview with NPR on Dec. 15, ”We need to take action. And we will.” The Washington Post then reported on Dec. 27 that action was imminent. By late afternoon the following day, multiple news sources were quoting government officials as saying the announcement would come on the Dec. 29. So Kislyak likely knew an announcement was coming when he asked to talk to Flynn. Another transition official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, said the ambassador invited the Trump administration to participate in a conference in Kazakhstan on the conflict in Syria set for after the inauguration in late January. Were that to happen it could mark a concrete diplomatic shift in the relationship between Russia and the U. S. The Obama administration has opposed Russia’s aid to the Assad regime, essentially putting the U. S. and Russia on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war  —   even as they have attempted to coordinate on parts of it. Contact between an incoming administration and foreign ambassadors isn’t out of the ordinary. But the timing raises questions, especially in light of Putin’s decision not to respond to the U. S. retaliatory moves. No one can conduct foreign policy, except for the current U. S. government. If someone did, they would be in violation of the Logan Act, which states, in part: ”Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” Others, including Reuters and Ignatius are reporting or have reported that there were multiple phone calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador the day the sanctions were announced. NPR has not confirmed those contacts. The news comes hours after the Senate Intelligence Committee reversed course and said it would, in fact, investigate Russian interference in the election, including ”any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns.”"
331,"The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say they intend to investigate the allegations of Russian meddling in the U. S. elections. In a joint statement, Sen. Richard Burr,  . C. chairman of the committee and Sen. Mark Warner,  . the   said ”we believe that it is critical to have a full understanding of the scope of Russian intelligence activities impacting the United States.” The announcement comes after   Donald Trump acknowledged that Russia was behind the hacking of the Democratic Party in the period leading up to his election. But Trump continues to deny that the hacking helped his election campaign. The senators promised a bipartisan inquiry into events that led to the Intelligence Community assessment released on Jan. 6. They said their inquiry will include, but is not limited to: ”A review of the intelligence that informed the Intelligence Community Assessment ”Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections, ”Counterintelligence concerns related to Russia and the 2016 U. S. election, including any intelligence regarding links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns, ”Russian cyber activity and other ”active measures” directed against the U. S. both as it regards the 2016 election and more broadly.” The lawmakers said they’ll hold hearings on Russian intelligence activity, but also warned that much of their business will be conducted ”behind closed doors because we take seriously our obligation to protect sources and methods.” The committee will produce classified and unclassified reports on its findings. ”The Committee will follow the intelligence wherever it leads. We will conduct this inquiry expeditiously, and we will get it right. When possible, the Committee will hold open hearings to help inform the public about the issues,” they said. In separate comments, Burr said the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence already has held 10 hearings on Russia’s activity around the world. Warner invoked a more ominous tone, saying, ”This issue impacts the foundations of our democratic system, it’s that important. . .. If it turns out that SSCI cannot properly conduct this investigation, I will support legislation to empower whoever can do it right.”"
332,"Just months after a launch pad explosion thwarted its last attempt, SpaceX has successfully launched an unmanned rocket into orbit. The launch, which unfolded Saturday at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, marked a crucial  —   and expensive  —   test for the private space company in the aftermath of its recent, very visible misfire. Shortly after the launch, the   rocket detached its first stage, which subsequently landed safely on a platform in the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX   the entire process along the way. You can watch it here or play the video embedded at the top of this post. The Falcon 9 rocket is bearing 10 commercial satellites for Iridium Communications, which currently operates a network of dozens of mobile communications satellites in   orbit. SpaceX is under contract with Iridium to launch at least 70 satellites into orbit in a series of seven launches for the company  —   beginning with Saturday’s batch. The new satellites will replace the current network, in ”what will be one of the largest ’tech upgrades’ in history,” according to a press release from SpaceX. Still, a cloud of uncertainty hung over the launch, after an explosion left a wreckage of last September’s test in Cape Canaveral, Fla. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said at the time that the blast came while workers were still loading propellant into the rocket, though no one was physically harmed in the accident. In addition to destroying the rocket itself  —   a Falcon 9, like the rocket being launched Saturday  —   last year’s blast also obliterated a $200 million communications satellite. The Israeli satellite ”had been leased by Facebook as part of a project to bring   internet to parts of Africa,” NPR’s Rae Ellen Bichell reports for our Newscast unit. A   investigation by SpaceX dug into what went wrong  —   ”the toughest puzzle to solve that we’ve ever had to solve,” Musk said. That probe wrapped up earlier this month, concluding the accident ”was triggered by the failure of a   helium tank, one of three used to pressurize the second stage liquid oxygen tank,” according to CBS News. The Federal Aviation Administration then signed off on that investigation, approving the new licence for Saturday’s launch. Prior to last year’s accident, SpaceX had managed a string of   successes, including landing a Falcon 9 on a floating barge."
333,"This story is part of Kitchen Table Conversations, a series from NPR’s National Desk that examines how Americans from all walks of life are moving forward from the presidential election. Pennsylvania surprised a lot of people in November when voters abandoned a long history of electing Democrats for president and chose Republican Donald Trump. Jamie Ruppert, a    mother in Luzerne County, is among those who switched parties and voted for Trump. It’s an exciting time in Ruppert’s life: She has two toddlers and a baby due this summer. Her husband recently started a promising new job in the fossil fuel business  —   one that pays well enough that she can stay home with the kids. Ruppert and husband Jesse bought a modest house a bit over a year ago. It sits on two acres in a rural neighborhood outside   Pa. Life is pretty good still Ruppert thinks the country needs a change. ”I was always raised in a Democratic house,” says Ruppert, ”both of my parents voted Democrat for a long time. I voted Democrat for both elections for Obama.” But when Ruppert looks around her community, she sees a lot of problems. And she thinks Trump and his policies can help fix them. The coal industry is a good example. On the campaign trail Trump promised to put coal miners back to work. It’s not just the coal industry that has declined in northeastern Pennsylvania: There used to be garment factories, too. They relocated in search of cheaper,   labor in the South. For   workers in Luzerne County today, options are limited. A lot of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton heard the slogan ”Make America Great Again” and recalled the country’s history of racism, gender inequality and opposition to LGBT rights. But many in Luzerne County, including Jamie Ruppert, heard that slogan and imagined the return of   jobs that pay enough to support a family. Still, Ruppert worries about that different view of Trump’s message she doesn’t want to be seen as a racist or a homophobe. ”I’ve always been for gay rights and always will be,” says Ruppert. She doesn’t support everything Trump said during the campaign but feels like he was being more authentic than Clinton. ”Tax cuts and helping the ’failing’ middle class is what got me behind him,” says Ruppert. Asked how her life would be different if Trump succeeds, Ruppert holds up a plastic container for toys. On the bottom it says ”made in U. S. A.” She says it would mean that her neighbors make more of the products she uses. Use the audio link above to hear the full story."
334,"Every child wants to grow up to be independent  —   to leave their parents’ home, find work, build a life of their own. But that seemingly simple step into adulthood can be a monumental challenge for children with developmental disabilities like autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, or any of a range of other such disabilities that affect about one in six American children, according to the U. S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of them remain dependent on their parents and families for support well into adulthood, or they end up living in a home under the care of professional caregivers. Only a fraction of adults with developmental disabilities end up finding steady employment. But some people are finding work and a path to   by working in the food industry. Parts of this industry are particularly   to many people with developmental disabilities, like Victoria Reedy of Schenectady, N. Y. Reedy is 23 years old and lives with her parents and two sisters. When I met her in her parents’ home, she was dressed casually in a sweatshirt and wore sparkly nail polish. She’s of average height now  —   about five feet five inches  —   but growing up, she says, she was a very small child. ”I was 6 years old, and the same size as my little sister who’s four years younger than me,” says Vicky. She has a condition called panhypopituitarism, which is a problem in her pituitary gland that causes it to not produce enough hormones, including growth hormone. Vicky’s condition affected the development of her brain as well. She struggled with a range of learning problems while growing up, and school felt extremely hard. ”I struggled at just about everything but art,” she says. ”I had a really hard time reading, [a] hard time writing, and learning things in general.” Her speech was affected, too. And she shied away from social interactions. As she grew up, she depended on her parents and a close friend for everything outside her home, from getting around to handling money. But today, Vicky is a very different person. She’s more confident and independent. She even takes the bus everywhere, all by herself. ”I take the bus just about everywhere I have to go, unless I’m traveling with Mom or Dad or any of my friends,” she says. That’s because a year and a half ago, Vicky got a job at a bakery in downtown Schenectady. Puzzles Bakery  Cafe in downtown Schenectady is bright and spacious. The winter sun filters through the glass door and windows and fills the front of the café. On the day I visit, it’s packed with customers sitting down for lunch at the small white tables lined on either side. Vicky is a senior café attendant here. She stands behind the counter, matching orders coming out of the kitchen, making sure the right order goes to the right tables. Vicky also handles customers herself sometimes. She trains interns, organizes food and clean tables when necessary. Some of her favorite tasks, though, involve working behind the scenes, in the kitchen. She loves doing dishes, slicing meat and cheese on an electric food slicer. It’s mechanical, somewhat repetitive work that takes time, but Vicky says she finds it satisfying. In the time that she has worked here, Vicky has even made new friends among her colleagues. Her colleagues say she has grown tremendously at the job. She’s now one of the few employees who have a key to the store, so she can open and close the café when necessary. Sara Mae Pratt, 26, is Vicky’s boss and the owner of the cafe. She says she’s very proud of Vicky. ”She’s come such a long way.” As have many of her other employees, who have some sort of a developmental disability. Pratt opened Puzzles Bakery  Cafe in April 2015 with the goal to employ people with special needs, who otherwise struggle to find jobs. ”There [are] not a lot of opportunities, certainly not in the way of employment,” Pratt says. Once they graduate from the school system, they often ”kind of fall off a cliff,” she says.  And statistics back up her point. According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of   people with disabilities who are employed is about   of the percentage of people without any disability. And some 50 percent of people who are employed struggle to complete their tasks due to their disabilities, according to the BLS. Many face compensation gaps and discrimination at their workplace, according to the Arc of the U. S. A, an advocacy group for the developmentally disabled. The BLS also finds that those who are unemployed report many obstacles to finding employment, including the absence of sufficient and appropriate training. Pratt knew a lot of this from her personal experience. Her    sister, Emily, has autism. As her sister approached adulthood, she says, she and her parents worried what her sister would do once she graduated high school and no longer had any support from the state education system. ”I certainly struggled with what my sister will be doing for the rest of her life. She has a very long life ahead of her.” Her sister is too disabled to work  —   she recently moved out of their parents’ home and into a group home, where she could have    help. But Pratt wanted to help those who could work, to find a sense of   and purpose in their lives. Before deciding to open a café, she did a lot of research and found that working with food is a particularly good fit for many people with developmental disabilities. For one, ”food is very forgiving,” she says. ”If you mess up, [it’s] not a big deal. You can throw it away, try it again.” And it’s no surprise that Vicky enjoys simple, repetitive tasks like doing dishes and slicing and arranging food, she says. ”It can be quite therapeutic to kind of do the same thing day in and day out, and it’s something many people with developmental disabilities can actually excel at.” There is another factor about this work that helps people like Vicky overcome their struggles with social interactions. ”They actually get to take part in the creation of this food and bring it to the customer and see that smile on their face,” says Pratt. ”They’re seeing this day in and day out. That’s the really wonderful thing about food, it really connects people.” Similar bakeries and restaurants exist elsewhere in the country. Some, like Jack’s Bar  Grill in Arvada, Colo. employ people with special needs. Others, like Sunflower Bakery in Gaithersburg, Maryland, also train and then place such individuals at other businesses in the food service industry. Today, more than 50 percent of Pratt’s employees have a developmental disability, she says. That includes    Madaline Hannon, who has autism. She has limited vocabulary and according to her parents, she has always been painfully shy. Now, though, Hannon works four days a week at Puzzles. She only works three hours a day and spends a lot of it serving customers, mostly during the lunch rush. Dressed in a loose   jeans and a baseball hat, Maddy stands behind the counter, keeping an eye on every plate of food that comes out of the kitchen through a little window on the wall behind the café’s counter. She matches the food on the plate with the orders flashing on a little screen above the window, then she calls out the order loudly to find the right customer. ”Order for Mary Ann!” she says, holding a plate with a sandwich in her hands. When the customer raises her hand, Maddy walks over the plate of food to her, then wishes her a good day. She rarely makes eye contact, but she interacts with every customer as she serves them their plate of food. And she tells me she enjoys the work. She’s been working here for about a year and a half, and she says she now has big dreams for her future. ”I wanna work at Disney World, in a bakery,” she says. ”They have more gourmet stuff.”  Maddy still lives with her parents and unlike Vicky, she still depends on them to bring her to work and take her home at the end of her shift. So, I ask her if she’d be willing to leave her parents’ home and move out of Schenectady to pursue her dream. ”Definitely, yes,” she says with a smile.  Her mother, Kathleen Hannon says, this job has transformed her daughter. ”[The] Maddy that walked in here the first day probably didn’t say hello to people who’d come in,” she says. ”Today, she’s out there. I know she will talk to the customers. And we’ve seen a big difference at home. She’s happy!” The job has given Maddy a sense of belonging, she says. ”It’s her job. It’s her friends. It’s her responsibilities. And that’s important. We all want that. We all want to fit in. We all want to belong. We all want friends. And I think that’s helped a lot.” She says her daughter recognizes that she’ll always need extra support, but the job has made her realize how much she can do on her own. ”She’s wandering further and further away from us,” says Kathy Hannon. ”She’s looking for more independence.”  "
335,"At noon on Inauguration Day, precisely the moment Donald Trump is scheduled to be sworn as president, there will be another changing of the guard in Washington. The D. C. National Guard announced Friday that its commanding general, Army Maj. Gen. Errol R. Schwartz, will be stepping down as of 12 p. m. on Jan. 20. As commanding general of the D. C. National Guard, Schwartz serves at the pleasure of the president  —   the only National Guard leader in the country to be appointed by the White House. As with other appointees, like members of the Cabinet, it is at the discretion of the incoming administration whether to keep Schwartz in command once Trump takes office. Still, the abrupt change in command is unusual for the D. C. National Guard, particularly on a day when the force  —   along with 5, 000 additional service members from around the country  —   will be working to maintain the security of the incoming president and those who have come to see him sworn in. ”My troops will be on the street,” Schwartz told The Washington Post, telling the paper that his removal was ordered by the Pentagon but that he doesn’t know who made the call. ”I’ll see them off but I won’t be able to welcome them back to the armory.” What’s more, it has been common for new administrations to hold on to the commanders appointed by the previous president. Schwartz himself was picked for his command by President George W. Bush in the summer of 2008 President Obama kept him on for the entirety of his two terms. Bush, in turn, kept Maj. Gen. Warren L. Freeman, a Clinton appointee, for his first two years in office. And President Clinton left Russell C. Davis  —   who had been appointed by President George H. W. Bush  —   in command of the force for nearly all of his first term. But it’s not the first time an appointee who served during Obama’s administration has been told to hit the road on Inauguration Day. Last month, the  ’s transition staff issued a mandate to all politically appointed U. S. ambassadors to leave their posts on that date, with no exceptions. As former diplomat Ronald Neumann told NPR’s Michele Kelemen, that move was also unusual  —   though by no means against the rules of the transition. ”Some administrations have left people a little longer if they didn’t have a successor right away or the kids were in school or something, for family and human reasons,” Neumann said, ”but there’s no requirement that they do so.” When Schwartz steps down on Inauguration Day, he will be replaced in the interim by Brig. Gen. William J. Walker, the commander of the D. C. Army National Guard’s land component."
336,"Editor’s Note: The photos in this story may be distressing to some viewers.  More than one year later, the photo that woke up the world to the Syrian refugee crisis remains indelible:    Aylan Kurdi lying face down on a sandy beach in Turkey. The Syrian boy’s lifeless body had washed ashore after the rubber boat carrying him and his family  —   to what they had hoped would be new lives in Greece  —   capsized. Now the image has become the focus of a study examining how a single photo of a single individual could stir the emotions and arouse public concern more powerfully than statistical reports of body counts, which at that point  —   five years into Syria’s civil war  —   had reached the hundreds of thousands. Until the photo appeared in September 2015, people did not seem focused on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. But Aylan’s photo mobilized empathy and concern, soon bringing in record donations to charitable organizations around the world to aid the victims. As the study shows, however, such immediate outpourings can be  . The number of average daily amount of donations to the Swedish Red Cross campaign for Syrian refugees, for instance, was 55 times greater in the week after the photo (around $214, 300) than the week before ($3, 850). By the second week, the donation totals had already begun to decline, but still topped $45, 400. After six weeks, the amount had leveled further, down to around $6, 500  —   less than in the previous weeks but nonetheless higher than the original figure. Still more promising, there was a   increase of the number of monthly donors signing up for repeated contributions, growing from 106 in August 2015 to 1, 061 in September 2015, with only . 02 percent of them opting out of the commitment by January 2016. From this, the study concluded, iconic photos may lead to some sustained commitment even beyond the immediate surge of donations. To learn more about how the photo powered our emotions, we spoke to the report’s lead researcher, Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit organization that studies human judgment,   and risk perception. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. How did you measure the emotional impact of this photo?  We looked at the number of Google searches for ”Syria” and ”refugees” and ”Aylan.” Before, there was very little interest in the Syrian refugee crisis. Afterward and for approximately the next month, the searches [for each of these terms] spiked. We also looked at donations to the Swedish Red Cross, which set up a fund specifically to aid the Syrian refugees. Not only did the photo wake people up to make an emotional connection to the situation in Syria. But where people had an avenue for action, like donating, they did. Why did this photo in particular carry such an impact? What is the psychology behind that? It is an open question why this photo among so many stands out. In my opinion, there are a number of things going on. One is that the child is very young, nicely dressed and looks like he could have been one of our own kids. Another is the situation: He is coming with his family seeking a new life, and they were so close yet not quite making it. That adds to the special story. Another element is that we don’t quite see his face, you see the side of his face, so you can project onto him the face of someone you know. You cannot distance yourself as easily. In your paper you mention other emblematic photos, like that of the naked    Vietnamese girl fleeing a Napalm attack. Is it easier to have empathy for one person who is suffering than to feel compassion for large numbers of people who are suffering?  It’s not that people are not compassionate. But that compassion has to be aroused, and the data shows that the photograph helped do that. In addition to the cognitive impact that [a humanitarian crisis] is happening, you have to [evoke] emotion and feeling. Emotion is a critical factor in helping us understand an event, and it is a motivator that impels action as opposed to just abstract thoughts. Writers know this [when they] impress upon us the importance of a larger issue by telling the story through the eyes of one individual. In other words, you can identify with an individual but not so easily with an abstract statistic? We call Aylan an ”identified individual victim.” It is similar to the way The Diary of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel’s Night also helped galvanize attention to the Holocaust. Aylan’s photo provided a window of opportunity for individuals to give and to feel [empathy] for the situation, and that is good."
337,"By now, you’ve probably seen the photo of Aylan Kurdi, the    refugee from Syria who died with his    brother and mother after their small rubber boat capsized on its way to Greece. You might remember his Velcro shoes. His red shirt. His lifeless body lying face down in the sand. The image has opened a debate about the ethics of publishing photos of children suffering and dying. But regardless of one’s position, the photo is now part of a tradition  —   another iconic image of a child that has shaped our understanding of global events and that is likely to live on in our minds for years to come. ”When we see pictures of a dead or dying child, I don’t care who you are, where you are, you’re moved,” says Maggie Steber, a documentary photographer and longtime contributor to National Geographic who served on this year’s Pulitzer Prize selection jury. Steber cites photographer Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of a    Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc  —   often called ”Napalm Girl”  —   as one of the most influential images in history. In the photo, Phuc is running naked down the street after being burned by an explosion. She later recalled removing her clothes and yelling ”too hot, too hot,” as she ran along the road, her back so badly scorched that she spent more than a year in a hospital and required more than a dozen surgeries. ”For people to see that photo and to realize that that was really going on, and having television bring the war into people’s living rooms, that was powerful,” Steber says. She believes that’s partly what caused Lyndon Johnson to bring the Vietnam War to an end. In 2000, former Washington Post photographer Carol Guzy spent time at a refugee camp in Albania during the Kosovo crisis and took a photo that won the Pulitzer Prize  —   one of four in her career. It depicts a young boy being passed through a barbed wire fence at the border. ”It’s actually a joyful photo,” Guzy says. ”Families that had escaped ethnic cleansing did not know if their loved ones had survived or not [they] were lined up along that fence.” When one family saw relatives on the other side of the barbed wire, they celebrated and handed their young children back and forth while waiting to be reunited. Guzy says images of children are particularly moving. ”It’s something about being completely at the mercy of events happening around you, and being unable to protect yourself  —   children especially  —   that reaches the heart and soul of people,” she says. This year, New York Times photographer Daniel Berahulak won the Pulitzer for his image of    James Dorbor, a boy suspected of having Ebola, being rushed into a treatment center in Monrovia, Liberia. The men are wearing protective plastic suits and ”are carrying this tiny boy like he was a rag doll,” Steber says. Seeing how they hold him far away, ”without passion, without connection, was ” she says. Even after a long career as a photographer, Guzy says she is still deeply moved by tragic images  —   including that of    Syrian Aylan Kurdi. ”You would think you’d form some kind of immunity after working for three decades and seeing the worst of humanity,” she says. ”But in my case, I’ve actually become even more sensitive.” When she saw the image of him lying on the beach, ”I was breathless,” she says."
338,"With little power left in Washington, Democrats set out on Sunday to make a big statement against GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act with rallies in dozens of cities. It’s also a step for the party toward regaining its footing after grassroots efforts in 2016 failed to keep the White House in Democrats’ hands. Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate and whose populist candidacy in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary was boosted by a strong online following and   donations, headlined the day. He was recently named to a leadership post among Senate Democrats as chairman of outreach. Sanders used his vast email list from the campaign to help organize support for Sunday’s rallies in support of Obamacare, which stretched from an event led by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco to one featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Boston. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley even led a    at the Utah State Capitol. Warren told an energized crowd outside Faneuil Hall in Boston, ”We knew these fights were coming, and now the first one is here.” In San Francisco, Pelosi insisted, ”We’re not going back.” Sanders and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer went to Warren, Mich. and although Schumer will soon be the most powerful Democrat in Washington, it was Sanders who was the star. Signs like, ”Don’t blame me   I voted for Bernie” dotted the crowd, and Schumer had to pause his speech for a chorus of ”Bernie, Bernie” cheers when Sanders walked on stage in the middle of the New York senator’s remarks. It’s no accident that Sanders and Schumer chose to hold their event in Warren. Surrounding Macomb County tells the story of Democrats’ 2016 woes. It went narrowly for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but last year Donald Trump carried Macomb County by more than 10 points over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump’s raw vote total in the largely white,   county   about 48, 000 votes   was more than four times his margin of victory in the   Democratic state. Both Sanders and Schumer believe Democrats can recapture   working class voters, and holding a rally in Macomb County to defend a healthcare program is one way to show voters who supported Trump that the Democratic Party is attentive to their concerns. Sanders told NPR last week that he could have gone to a lot of places: ”But Michigan is a great state. It’s a state where I did well in the Democratic primary. And is a state where Trump won.” He beat Clinton in the state’s 2016 primary. At Sunday’s rally, Schumer challenged Trump to keep a campaign promise not to cut entitlement programs as he fired up the crowd in support of the ACA. ”We’re gonna win this fight together  —   the American people and the Democrats in the Congress,” Schumer said. In reality, Republicans have enough votes to dismantle large parts of the Affordable Care Act, particularly elements that help fund the law, through a process that allows the Senate to pass budget measures with a simple majority instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on most legislation. The GOP has 52 seats in the Senate. Democrats can play a bigger role in an attempt to repeal and replace the law   which would require 60 votes. That’s a dynamic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow admitted when she spoke at the rally. ”They’ve got the U. S. House, they’ve got the U. S. Senate, they’re going to have the presidency. If they want to rip health care apart, rip Medicare and Medicaid apart, they can do that,” Stabenow said. Republicans point to big increases in health care premiums since the law was enacted, and the fact that many insurers are pulling out of healthcare exchanges created as part of the Affordable Care Act in some states. House Speaker Paul Ryan has also spoken in objection to the mandates on individuals and employers, as well as the taxes enacted to enforce and pay for the law, as evidence of ”bad policy that does not accomplish what it was designed to do.” Republican leaders, including Ryan and Trump, say they will not repeal Obamacare without a replacement at hand. So far, there is no clear plan from Republicans for how to replace the law, but Ryan insists that will be hashed out at the end of January when congressional Republicans hold a retreat in Philadelphia. Stabenow pointed to the face that Democrats’ best hope is to generate enough public support for Obamacare  —   or enough public concern about fully repealing it  —   for Republican lawmakers to see a repeal as politically dangerous. While Democrats point to the good the law has done, it’s clear they have struggled on the messaging front. A poll released by NPR and Ipsos last week showed that less than half of Americans  —   including just 54% of Democrats  —   knew that the law reduced the number of people without health insurance. But, while they would rather control the agenda, Democrats are beginning to discover something Republicans have known for the entirety of the Obama administration: It’s often easier to generate public support around a simplified voice of opposition, than it is to find the votes to create and pass a complicated piece of legislation."
339,"This week, the House and Senate took the first substantial step toward repealing Obamacare. Today, Democrats are holding rallies across the country, in an attempt to get some public momentum behind their longshot goal of blocking that effort. Congressional Democrats are organizing what they call a ”Day of Action,” with events scheduled from California to Illinois to Maine. And in a demonstration of just how much clout the   candidate in last year’s Democratic presidential primary now has within the party that he’s still not a member of, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will host the most   rally of the day, in Warren, MI. Sanders played a major role in organizing the Obamacare rallies, sending out information about the events to the massive email list he gathered over the course of the 2016 campaign. ”The goal is to rally the American people against a disastrous Republican proposal,” Sanders told NPR. He’s hoping the rallies are the first step toward an ”  ” communication strategy that could help Democrats cut into   Donald Trump’s powerful ability to set the daily political agenda. Since Congress came back earlier this month, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders have been pushing back against Republican proposals by doing what they normally do: holding big press conferences, doing TV interviews, and making the most of their time on the Senate floor. Earlier this week, Senate Democrats talked late into the night about all the good they say Obamacare has done. And when the Senate voted to take the first step toward an Obamacare repeal early Thursday morning, many Democrats broke Senate rules by trying to explain their ”no” votes as they cast them. This is the typical minority party playbook. But it’s much harder to break through all the noise in an era where   Trump can basically reprogram cable news with a single tweet. Schumer is trying to get Senate Democrats more engaged on social media. But no one else in Washington has been able to dominate it like Trump. This clearly frustrates Sanders. He wants Democrats to reimagine how they get their message out, beyond floor speeches and press conferences. ”How do you mobilize millions of people,” he asked, ”and get them to understand that the Republicans are doing exactly the opposite of what the American people want?” That’s what this Michigan event and all of today’s other rallies are all about. Sanders tapped the massive email list he put together during his primary campaign, blasting out messages about the Michigan rally, and similar events across the country. He and Schumer will be trying to make their case in a state where Democrats typically did well with   voters  —   but faltered badly in 2016. ”There are many parts of the country that I could have gone to,” Sanders said. ”But Michigan is a great state. It’s a state where I did well in the Democratic primary. And is a state where Trump won.” Democrats are now out of power at pretty much every level of government. Party leaders are trying to figure out their strategy. But so are grassroots activists. One place many liberals are turning  —   an online guide called Indivisible. It’s basically a manual  —    written by former Democratic Congressional staffers  —   that lays out ways that Democrats could use Tea Party tactics to fight Trump. Ezra Levin, who helped write the document, said the Tea Party did one thing very effectively. ”If they were in Texas, they didn’t call members of Congress in California,” Levin said. ”They knew that they were constituents of people who had a voice in Washington. And they focused on their two Senators, and their representative.” That’s what this guide recommends to Democrats trying to figure out how to organize. It offers practical tips like, how to effectively call a lawmakers’ office, or how to best pressure a representative during a town hall. The guide’s been read nearly 4 million times. Levin said he wants readers to understand that it’s really easy for people to become politically active. ”This means getting a handful of your friends together, or joining an existing group. And just getting out there on a regular basis, at district offices or at member events. Or just making calls,” he said. That kind of grassroots spirit is what lifted Sanders’ surprising presidential campaign. It also got President Obama all the way to the White House. But when Obama tried to use his campaign apparatus and email lists to mobilize supporters in legislative fights, he had a mixed record. Now Sanders is trying to do the same thing. Today’s rallies will be the first test of how much momentum he still has."
340,"If repealing the Affordable Care Act is the Republican Congress’ job one, defunding Planned Parenthood is a close second. In fact, the two priorities might be paired. House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . told reporters Jan. 5 that efforts to defund the organization ”would be in our reconciliation bill,” referring to a measure Congress has put on a fast track in order to repeal major pieces of the health law. But just as Republicans are discovering that undoing the health law could be complicated, so too is separating the controversial reproductive health care provider from its federal funding. Efforts to hastily jettison Planned Parenthood from federal ledgers could actually jeopardize GOP efforts to repeal the health law. One problem is that Planned Parenthood gets its funding from several different government sources. According to the group’s most recent annual report, Planned Parenthood affiliates got $553. 7 million from federal, state, and local governments, accounting for almost half of its total funding. According to the organization, about 75 percent of that government support comes from the Medicaid program to pay for direct medical services provided to   patients, including contraception, cancer screenings and sexually transmitted disease testing and treatment. The remaining quarter comes from other sources, primarily the Title X federal family planning program. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that the group gets approximately $390 million annually from Medicaid and $60 million from Title X. None of the funds from either program may be used for abortion, under longstanding federal prohibitions. Only half of the Planned Parenthood affiliates even offer abortion services, the group says. But it is still the largest single provider of the procedure in the nation, and that has made it a target for   lawmakers since the 1980s. In recent years, one of the most ardent foes of the organization has been Vice   Mike Pence. When he was a member of the House of Representatives, he led unsuccessful efforts to defund the program. As governor of Indiana, he was able to accomplish some of his goals. He also vowed to stop federal spending for Planned Parenthood during the campaign last fall. Yet federal lawmakers have been stymied in these efforts. One big reason is that taking away Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding would require a change in the federal law that guarantees most Medicaid patients with a choice to use any qualified provider. The Department of Health and Human Services has repeatedly warned states that have tried to evict Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs that they cannot legally do that because such a move would violate that law. And federal courts have consistently blocked states that have tried to end Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding. Changing that section of Medicaid law likely would require 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster by Democrats. Republicans currently have 52 votes. However, the budget reconciliation bill that is expected to be used to repeal portions of the health law operates under special rules. It cannot be filibustered and needs only 51 votes to pass. That presents two problems for Republicans. According to a 2015 Congressional Budget Office analysis, permanently changing the Medicaid law to make Planned Parenthood ineligible would cost more, not less  —   approximately $130 million over 10 years. That is because, said the Congressional Budget Office, taking away contraceptive access for some women would result in more pregnancies, and ”additional births that would result from enacting such a bill would add to federal spending for Medicaid.” That is not just theoretical. In 2013, Texas kicked Planned Parenthood out of its family planning program and gave up its federal funding. The result was fewer women using birth control and more babies being born, according to an analysis published last March in The New England Journal of Medicine. The second problem is political. While the House under GOP control has been strongly in favor of cutting off Planned Parenthood’s access to federal funds, there are a handful of Republican senators who oppose the idea. And a handful  —   three, to be exact  —   is all it would take to threaten passage of the health law repeal effort. ”Obviously I’m not happy that the speaker has decided to include the defunding of Planned Parenthood  —   an extremely controversial issue  —   in the (budget reconciliation) package,” Sen. Susan Collins,   told reporters earlier this month. A spokeswoman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski,   said ”she is concerned about defunding Planned Parenthood, as she is a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and has opposed broadly defunding the organization.” Collins and Murkowski fought against the inclusion of a   defunding of the organization in a 2015 health law repeal bill that President Obama vetoed last January. Although neither senator has said she would vote against the upcoming budget bill if it includes the Planned Parenthood defunding, they join a growing list of Senate Republicans who in recent days have questioned the idea of repealing major portions of the health law before devising its replacement. Meanwhile, eliminating Planned Parenthood’s access to funding under Title X also would likely be addressed in an appropriations spending bill. The current spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services (and most of the rest of the government) expires April 28. But rather than simply making Planned Parenthood ineligible, Republicans in the House have proposed doing away with funding for the entire    Title X federal family planning program. Instead, they would send the money to the nation’s network of community health centers. Last September, the   campaign released a letter to   leaders vowing to defund Planned Parenthood ”as long as they continue to perform abortions, and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women.” At a CNN town hall Thursday night, Ryan expanded on that. ”We don’t want to effectively commit taxpayer money to an organization providing abortions. But we want to make sure that people get their coverage. That’s why there’s no conflict by making sure these dollars go to federal community health centers.” But that might not work either. ”For health centers, which currently serve about 25 million total patients, to have to absorb an additional 2 million people is totally impossible,” says Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy and law professor at George Washington University who looked at the issue in 2015. In some areas of the country, Planned Parenthood and community health centers may not overlap. Planned Parenthood says that in a fifth of the counties it serves, it is the only provider for   women. Asking community health centers to move into new areas, says Rosenbaum, ”displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how long it takes a new provider to move into a potentially new community.” Despite the difficulties, the shifts in political control this year leaves Planned Parenthood concerned about its future. While the organization has weathered funding threats before, ”it is very true when you have people like Mike Pence and Paul Ryan who have been laser focused for years [on ending funding] that they will make it a very high priority,” says Mary Alice Carter, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for communications. She says the organization is counting on the 2. 5 million patients it serves every year to make sure their elected officials know they oppose the defunding effort. Whether that will be enough remains unclear. Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation."
341,"Just days from the end of her tenure, Loretta Lynch took the stage Sunday at a historic Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala. to deliver her final planned speech as U. S. attorney general. ”We can’t take progress for granted,” Lynch told the congregation. ”We have to work. There’s no doubt that we still have a way to go  —   a long way to go.” In her speech, delivered on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, Lynch focused on her auspicious setting, Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Last week, President Obama designated the church part of a new national monument commemorating the civil rights movement. It was at the church in 1963 that a Ku Klux Klan bombing left four black girls dead and 22 other people injured. ”It reminds us, as few places can, that freedom is not free,” Lynch said. ”And the price of freedom is constant vigilance.” She said she has seen the concerns that the progress made by King and others during the civil rights movement will be undone, ”that with the turn of the electoral wheel, we will be seen as children of a lesser god.” But she countered those concerns with a call to hope, saying she has seen the hard work of her colleagues, of police officers reaching out to community members, of activists raising their voices. ”We are Americans, and we have always pushed forward,” Lynch said, repeating a call to work that became something of a mantra: ”Every generation has to work.” The speech comes on the heels of a   Justice Department report on the Chicago Police Department, which concluded the department ”engages in a pattern or practice of the use of excessive force.” That report included ”numerous incidents” of shooting at fleeing suspects and observed ”routinely abusive behavior” toward minority communities in the city. In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin before her speech Sunday, Lynch called the Chicago report ”emblematic of where our practice is: We try and look at the whole problem. ”We’ve got to look at the causes within the police departments,” she continued. ”We talk to community members who came in and told us their stories stories of pain, stories of loss  —   but also stories of police officers with whom they connected.” Asked about her regrets as she prepares to leave office, Lynch said again she regrets her unscheduled meeting last year with former President Bill Clinton, a conversation that raised questions about whether she could remain impartial during Hillary Clinton’s email investigation. She later said she would accept the FBI’s findings in the probe. But the Justice Department is ”more than the work of more than one group of people and the work of more than one administration,” she told Michel. ”The work that we do spans time, it spans generations and we build on it.” She added: ”We have to admit that change is hard and policing is changing a lot in this country. That being said, I still believe that the work that we have done has been positive.”"
342,"People planning to watch  —   or protest  —   Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities this week should prepare to maneuver through lots of security, including thousands of law enforcement personnel, National Guard troops, fences, magnetometers and   trucks. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson outlined the massive security preparations during a briefing at the Multi Agency Communications Center at a secret location in Virginia. From that room, dozens of representatives from an alphabet soup of different agencies will gather to monitor events starting Thursday, with a   ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, through Saturday’s prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral. But the main focus will be Friday’s swearing in of the 45th president and the inaugural parade from the Capitol to the White House. Johnson says officials expect 700, 000 to 900, 000 spectators to attend the Inauguration Day ceremonies. He said 99 groups are expected to rally in favor of or against the new president. Johnson said officials ”know of no specific credible threat directed toward the inauguration,” but they’re taking no chances. Johnson said the ”global terrorist environment is very different” this year than it was during President Obama’s inaugurations in 2009 and 2013. He said law enforcement has to be concerned with homegrown violent extremism, acts of   lone wolves and people who have  . ”We’ve got to be vigilant, we’ve got to plan, we’ve got to prepare,” Johnson said. After terrorists drove trucks into crowds in Nice and Berlin last year, officials are protecting against a similar action in Washington. ”Hard perimeter areas,” where nongovernment vehicles will not be permitted, will be fortified by dump trucks, heavy trucks loaded with cement and with buses, Johnson said. ”That is a precaution that we are doubling down on in particular this inauguration.” There are also concerns about possible airborne threats. Noting the airspace above Washington is already   to drone flights (as well as most other air traffic) Johnson said unauthorized flights are ”something we have planned for, and there is technology to deal with it.” He would not say what that technology entails. Johnson said some 28, 000 officials will be dedicated to security for the inauguration, including Department of Homeland Security personnel from the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, as well as police from various departments in Washington, D. C. and from out of town, and some 7, 800 National Guard troops. Gates to the Inauguration Ceremony will open at 6 a. m. Friday. There will be sites for demonstrations along the parade route and on the National Mall. More information about the inauguration schedule can be found here."
343,"There’s a popular saying in Spanish  —   O todos en la cama, o todos en el suelo. It conveys a selfless commitment to equal treatment, and translates roughly like this: Either we all get the bed, or we all get the floor. Among many immigrants in the U. S. there’s been a feeling that when it comes to the spoils of U. S. immigration policy, the government has given Cubans the bed all to themselves, while it has relegated others  —   Mexicans, Haitians, Central Americans  —   to the floor. This is because of the       policy, which since 1995 has granted Cubans who touch American soil a privilege not afforded other immigrants who come without a visa: the right to stay and get on a fast track to citizenship. This special treatment ended this week when, in the final days of his administration, President Obama announced an abrupt end to the policy, a capstone to his    effort to   relations with Cuba. Effective immediately, Cubans arriving on U. S. soil without a visa will be treated just like any other immigrant. They will be turned away. This does not mean Cubans will stop coming. ”What it means,” said Florida International University political scientist Eduardo Gamarra, ”is that for the first time, we’re going to have undocumented Cubans. And how the Cuban community responds to that is going to be very interesting.” For decades, Cubans have occupied a rarefied station, particularly among the Latino population of the United States. Because those arriving in the U. S. after Fidel Castro’s ascension in 1959 were seen as fleeing political persecution, the U. S. generally allowed them to stay. In 1966, Congress passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans to get green cards after being in the U. S. for two years, later reduced to a single year. Though the Cuban government opposed these policies, they were the status quo until 1994, when the U. S. agreed to amend the rules.     allowed only those Cubans who made it to U. S. soil to stay. Those caught at sea were to be turned away. The stated hope was that the threat of getting repelled would discourage Cubans from risking their lives on rickety boats. But they kept coming, and once here, a green card was pretty much ensured. Leaving their country has always carried risk for Cubans, as it has for other immigrants. But unlike for their counterparts, the specter of illegality and all its repercussions (see: the 2016 presidential election) has not applied to Cubans. They have never really had to worry, for example, about deportation once they’ve made it to the U. S. This privilege has affected in fundamental ways the identity that   have forged both in terms of their place in American society and in relation to other Latino groups. ”Cubans have never been, and have never seen themselves, as ’illegals,’ or even, particularly, as a minority group,” said Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at FIU who is  . ”They have never seen themselves as anything other than added value to this country. It’s part of the Cuban exceptionalism narrative that is just as strong as the American exceptionalism narrative.” The dynamics here are complex. That stems in part from the fact that most of the Cubans who fled Castro’s regime soon after the 1959 revolution were political exiles, not economic migrants. They were of the largely white middle class whose property and businesses Castro seized and nationalized. Beginning in the ’60s, these exiles used their entrepreneurial drive to turn Miami into a vibrant frontier city. Over the decades, this set Cubans apart from many other Latinos in the U. S. who aside from tending to be economic migrants also lacked the legal status that would have allowed them to achieve their full potential. Even as the makeup of the Cuban influx began to change in the ’80s and ’90s  —   with more Cubans coming for economic reasons  —       allowed them a unique confidence in their place in the United States. ”That’s always been a schism impeding solidarity between Cubans and other Latino groups,” Grenier said. Though it has rarely led to   tension, it has been more evident at times, as it was last year when large groups of Haitians and   seeking asylum found themselves stuck at the U. S.  border while long lines of Cubans got through. ”The policy has clearly contributed to that,” Grenier said. The fact that   unlike other Latinos, have traditionally been a reliable conservative voting block has also contributed to this schism. And even as the   political center has shifted to the left in recent years, Grenier said, there is a   distance when it comes to issues like immigration between the young Cubans marching for immigrant rights and the Mexicans, Guatemalans and Colombians with whom they’re linking arms. ”It’s a feeling of solidarity with other Latinos and their plight,” Grenier said. ”You see young Cubans fighting for the other guy.” Grenier said he expects the end of     to gradually change notions of   identity as newer migrants become subject to the construct of ”illegality” that drives so much of the policy and rhetoric around immigration in the United States. While before, young Cubans were fighting for the other guy, ”now you’re going to be fighting for yourself,” Grenier said. ”You’re going to have a horse in the race.” Gamarra said Cubans in the U. S. are going to find their community stratifying in ways familiar to other Latino groups. ”You’re going to have privileged and nonprivileged Cubans,” he said. ”You’re going to find the phenomenon of people trying to demonstrate that they were here before yesterday. You’re going to find mad rushes to find ways to become documented.” At the same time, Gamarra says the end of     will not necessarily usher in a level playing field. Obama kept in place a policy that grants roughly 20, 000 visas to Cubans annually, a relatively large number for an island of 11 million people. Nonetheless, Gamarra said the policy’s end may strengthen solidarity between Cubans and other Latinos, ”because we aren’t all going to be on the bed together,” he said. ”We’re all going to be on the floor.”"
344,"This time last year, Stephanie Johnson was miserable. She was in her third year teaching special education at a junior high school in Lindon, Utah, about 40 minutes south of Salt Lake City. On the outside it looked like she was doing great. Her classes ran smoothly, students loved her, parents loved her, but like many special education teachers, inside she felt as though she was drowning. She said she thought about leaving all the time: ”I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just so much work. I just feel like I cannot do it.” It’s a very different Johnson I find this year at her new school, the Renaissance Academy, a charter school in the nearby city of Lehi. On a Friday afternoon, her classroom, which she shares with one other special education teacher, is empty of kids. Monday through Thursday, these two teachers instruct all of the school’s special education students. On Fridays, though, they have the classroom to themselves, meaning they’ll actually have the time to do the thing so many special education teachers find so difficult  —   the record keeping. ”There’s still a lot of work to do and I love that we have Fridays to get that done.” In fact, Johnson says she loves a lot about her new job. And there’s one person behind the scenes making that possible. In a cramped office down the hall, four filing cabinets loom over Kim Beck, the school’s special education director. Inside the cabinets, Beck keeps tons of paperwork on all special education students, required by law, showing they are receiving the help they need. ”I try to take most of that paperwork load off of the teachers, so it allows them to teach during the day,” Beck says. And she does much more. She tests students to see if they need special education services, or if they’re ready to move on. It’s also her job to schedule meetings with parents. ”I don’t think the paperwork in and of itself is too cumbersome,” Beck says. ”Where it becomes cumbersome is the teacher that’s teaching all day is now having to do that paperwork.” She says this division of labor might not work everywhere. ”You have to find a special ed person who likes paperwork and those are few are far between,” she says, adding, ”I do love paperwork.” This approach, dividing and conquering, wasn’t a directive from any school administrator. The teachers just made it happen, and it’s unique. Laurie VanderPloeg,   of the Council for Exceptional Children, says she is not aware of this happening anywhere else in the country. What she is aware of is this  —   special education teachers are spending the majority of their prep time on paperwork, ”in lieu of assessing and designing and delivering that specially designed instruction that they need to be providing to the students with disabilities.” From VanderPloeg’s perspective, that is taking a toll on student results. Johnson says the students benefit from the division of responsibilities  —   and so does she. She admits that she still stays late and comes in early, but the difference is that she gets to focus on teaching her students. She says a friend approached her at a party recently, commenting, ”Stephanie, have you been losing weight? You look so good. I don’t know, you just look so good.” Johnson replied, ”Oh, that’s my new job. That’s what you’re seeing on my face. It’s my new job.”"
345,"Iraqi forces are nearing what is expected to be the toughest part of the fight for the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. As troops push toward the river dividing the city, they face new tactics from Islamic State fighters adapting to an urban environment and the limitations of U. S. air and artillery support. The more densely populated west side of the historic city, with its twisting streets and covered market, is still in ISIS hands. But Iraqi   troops this week for the first time reached the east bank of the Tigris River that splits the city. ”We know ISIS very well by now and we knew it would take a long time,” Iraqi Gen.     told NPR in a recent interview near the front line. Saadi commands 12 battalions of   forces. He won’t say exactly how many troops are under his orders, but several thousand of his fighters have led Iraq’s battle against ISIS for the last two years, pushing them back on several fronts, from areas north of Baghdad to Tikrit to Fallujah and now in Mosul. The last time I saw Gen. Saadi was in Fallujah, as Iraqi forces took back that city in western Iraq last summer. He says ISIS is putting up a tougher fight in Mosul. The extremist group has held the Iraqi city since it overpowered the Iraqi army and police in June 2014 and declared it the capital of their   Islamic state, or caliphate. ”Their fighters in Mosul are tougher than they were in Fallujah,” says Saadi, over tea in an abandoned house in a village near the front line. ”In Fallujah, there were just fighters and a few car bombs. Here until now, they have detonated more than 250 car bombs just against my men.” As the fight has moved into more heavily populated neighborhoods and out of the open spaces of the countryside, he and U. S. commanders say ISIS is increasingly using drones. ”They are using them for many purposes,” says Saadi. ”One of the purposes is to track me.” He says the small drones bought on the market are used to help ISIS snipers and suicide bombers in targeting. ISIS has begun attaching explosives to larger drones. Mosul was a commercial center, filled with factories and workshops. ISIS has taken machine tool shops and converted them to manufacturing   mortars. It has built car bomb factories across the city and has welded steel plates onto vehicles to turn them into more lethal   bombs. Saadi shows us one of the locally made mortars. It’s almost indistinguishable from Iraqi army mortars apart from the black and white ISIS logo painted on it. The Iraqi   forces, trained by the U. S. are considered by the U. S. military to be the most professional in the Iraqi forces. Iraqi   troops are backed directly by U. S.  air support. The Iraqi army and federal police are supported by Iraqi air strikes. But as the fight moves further into the city, air strikes and artillery have limited use. ”Hospitals, mosques, schools, churches  —   those are all the places the US is not supposed to hit and all the places that ISIS is hiding in,” says Saadi. Although Iraq and international organizations have prepared camps for a flood of displaced Iraqis, relatively few have been able to leave. More than 700, 000 civilians are still living in west Mosul. In last year’s battle for Fallujah, military leaders believe ISIS fighters escaped with thousands of civilians, all of them fleeing when the Iraqi army opened up a corridor. In Mosul, Iraqi forces have surrounded the city and the battle plan has allowed no escape for anyone. Civilians now running out of food and water will be able to leave only as their neighborhoods are liberated. ”The civilians are a problem,” says Saadi. ”Their position near the front line makes us a little worried. It means we go slowly.” Near the airport in the Kurdish capital Erbil, the deputy commander of U. S. forces in Iraq tries to explain the complexity of the fight for Mosul. ”Picture any large metropolitan city on the U. S. East Coast  —   dense, older cities with smaller streets. And then picture having to eradicate all crime and any enemy force in there,” says Brig. Gen. Scott Efflandt. ”It requires street by street, house by house, room by room operation,” he said. ”There’s no quick way to do it. You have to walk, you have to climb stairs, you have to open doors and then repeat the process again and again and again and then when you’re doing that you have to leave someone behind to guard the area you just went through. ” That’s without U. S. troops on the frontlines. After the U. S. and its allies invaded Iraq in 2003, American forces spent eight years in Iraq. Mosul is the biggest urban battle involving the U. S. in years. However, unlike previous battles, most of the 5, 000 U. S. troops in Iraq aren’t anywhere near the line of fire. ”When we think of what we do in Iraq, it’s very difficult for people to understand we are not side by side with an Iraqi soldier shooting a rifle. It’s not what we are doing here,” says Col. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division  —   a force whose soldiers actually walked the streets of Mosul early in the war. Sylvia commands about 2, 500 troops advising and assisting the Iraqi military, mostly at tactical operations centers. At Camp Swift, the small U. S. base outpost near Makhmour in northern Iraq where Col. Sylvia is based, a steel door connects the base to the Ninevah Operations Command. Iraqi generals sit next to U. S. officers looking at surveillance feeds from coalition aircraft . ”Mosul is an area twice the size and twice the area of Washington, D. C.,” says Sylvia. ”It would be tough for anyone to execute. When you put it in perspective it’s impressive what they’ve been able to achieve so far.”"
346,"Iraqi forces have made a crucial step in the bloody quest to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, according to a spokesman for the country’s military. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool announced that the city’s university has been fully retaken from ISIS militants. Special forces, known in Iraq as the   Service, or CTS, raised the Iraqi flag above the campus Friday, the Associated Press reports  —   but the troops were still days away from claiming complete control. ”Iraqi forces entered the university grounds Friday and managed to secure more than half of the campus the next day amid stiff resistance from IS militants, who mainly deployed sniper and mortar fire to slow down the advancing troops,” the wire service adds Sunday. Iraqi military launched its campaign to retake the northern city  —   the last major Iraqi city still in ISIS hands  —   last October. The former Iraqi commercial center is the place ISIS leader Abu Bakr   first declared the caliphate, or Islamic state, shortly after the group captured it in June 2014. And it has been one of the central pillars of the militant group’s diminishing territorial claims. Earlier this month, Iraqi troops reached the Tigris River, which bisects the city, retaking much of Mosul’s eastern half. Yet, as Jane Arraf reports for NPR, the toughest fight is likely still to come. ISIS still holds the west side of the city, where more than 700, 000 civilians are believed to remain. Brig. Gen. Scott Efflandt, the deputy commander of U. S. forces in Iraq, tells Jane that part of the complexity of the fight ahead lies in the urban combat required: ”Picture any large metropolitan city on the U. S. East Coast  —   dense, older cities with smaller streets. And then picture having to eradicate all crime and any enemy force in there. ”It requires street by street, house by house, room by room operation. There’s no quick way to do it. You have to walk, you have to climb stairs, you have to open doors and then repeat the process again and again and again and then when you’re doing that you have to leave someone behind to guard the area you just went through. ” And they will continue to do so without the presence of American troops on the front lines. For now, CTS spokesman Sabah   tells Reuters the special forces are combing the university’s campus Sunday for remaining militants. ”The university is completely liberated and forces are sweeping the complex for any hiding militants,” Numan said. ”Most buildings are   so we’re being cautious.”"
347,"After its nearly century and a half run, Ringling Bros. and Barnum  Bailey Circus plans to shut down ”The Greatest Show On Earth.” The historic American spectacle will deliver its final show in May, says Kenneth Feld, the chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, the producer of Ringling. Feld announced the news on the company website Saturday night, citing declining ticket sales  —   which dipped even lower as the company retired its touring elephants. ”This, coupled with high operating costs, made the circus an unsustainable business for the company,” Feld says. Ringling has been phasing out elephants as a result of shifting public tastes and criticism from animal rights groups over the   of the animals. The company held its last show featuring elephants in May, before completely retiring the animals to its   conservation center in Polk City, Fla. established by Feld Entertainment in 1995. Elephants had been a circus mainstay almost as long as the circus itself has been a staple of American entertainment, since Phineas Taylor Barnum introduced Jumbo, an Asian elephant in 1882. But before the traveling exhibition evolved into a regular destination for wholesome family fun, Barnum ”made a traveling spectacle of animals and human oddities popular, while the five Ringling brothers performed juggling acts and skits from their home base in Wisconsin,” reports the AP. ”Eventually, they merged and the modern circus was born. The sprawling troupes traveled around America by train, wowing audiences with the sheer scale of entertainment and exotic animals.” The Feld family bought Ringling in 1967 and employs about 500 people for both touring shows ”Circus Extreme” and ”Out of This World.” Those employees were told about the closure after shows in Orlando and Miami, on Saturday night. ”The Felds say their existing animals  —   lions, tigers, camels, donkeys, alpacas, kangaroos and llamas  —   will go to suitable homes,” adds the AP. ”Juliette Feld says the company will continue operating the Center for Elephant Conservation.” In addition to the circus, Feld Entertainment also runs a number of   traveling shows, from Monster Jam and Supercross to Marvel Universe Live and Disney on Ice. Each year, Feld Entertainment’s live shows draw some 30 million attendees. Before it draws the curtain, the two touring circuses will perform a total of 30 shows over the next four months, in major cities including Atlanta, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and Brooklyn."
348,"Celebrities, politicians and activists, ranging from Bernie Sanders to Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, are asking President Obama to grant clemency to a man who was part of a militant group that fought for Puerto Rican independence. Oscar López Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981, convicted for ”seditious conspiracy” to overthrow the the government of the United States, in relation to his membership in the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, or FALN. Between 1974 and 1983, the FALN claimed responsibility for more than 70 bombings in New York, Chicago and Washington, D. C. The bombings caused millions in property damage, dozens of injuries and five deaths. López Rivera’s supporters say he is a political prisoner serving an unjust sentence. His opponents say he is an unrepentant terrorist. Born in Puerto Rico, López Rivera moved to Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood as a teenager. He fought in Vietnam, where he earned the Bronze Star, but became disillusioned by the war and what he saw as U. S. imperialism. After the war, López Rivera worked as a community organizer in Chicago. He also became involved in activism around the cause of Puerto Rican independence. The more he researched Puerto Rican history, the more he became convinced that Puerto Rico was a colony of the United States. ”There were resolutions of the United Nations pointing out very, very clearly that colonialism was a crime against humanity and that colonized people have the right to   and to independence and to achieve it by any means necessary  —   including the use of force,” López Rivera said in an October telephone interview from the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. At some point in the 1970s, López Rivera became a member of the clandestine FALN. The group set off bombs at government and corporate buildings, and left communiques in phone booths calling for a ”free and socialist Puerto Rico.” The majority of the bombs damaged property without causing injuries or deaths, but not all of them. The FALN’s most deadly attack was in January 1975  —   the bombing of a crowded restaurant in New York’s financial district called Fraunces Tavern. The bomb killed four and injured 60, leaving law enforcement scrambling to find the perpetrators. ”It was truly the first truly clandestine terror organization that we confronted and we had no clue as to how to approach this,” said Rick Hahn, a former FBI agent assigned to the FALN case. ”They were very sophisticated and we didn’t realize it, and I think that was part of the problem we had in identifying FALN members  —   false hair items, reversible clothing . .. professional   kits, that sort of thing.” In 1976, the FBI found an apartment linked to López Rivera containing dynamite and FALN written materials. López Rivera went into hiding, and wasn’t apprehended until five years later. By then, police had also arrested 11 other members of the group. López Rivera was tried under what was then a rarely used statute, ”seditious conspiracy,” which means ”to oppose and attempt to overthrow by force the power of the United States government,” among other crimes. He was sentenced to 55 years, and later given an additional 15 after being convicted for a conspiracy to escape. ”They were sentenced not because of what they did but because of who they were politically,” said Jan Susler, López Rivera’s lawyer. ”Seditious conspiracy is really a thought crime. It’s agreeing to be part of challenging the United States government. And in this case it was agreeing to be part of the FALN.” In 1999, President Clinton offered to commute the sentences of most of the imprisoned FALN members  —   16 in all. López Rivera was offered a deal, but he refused it because, he says, not all of his   were included. Now, supporters like Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez of Illinois are hoping Obama will use his pardon powers to let López Rivera go. ”I have never been an advocate of violence in order to meet your goals, but I also am a person who believes in justice and in fairness. He wasn’t indicted for murder, ” Gutierrez says. ”I can only deal in the realm of what a person was indicted for and convicted and, based on that, he should be able to come home.” His supporters often compare him to Nelson Mandela, who was also involved in an armed political movement and served a lengthy prison term. But not everyone agrees. ”I would love to ask people who support his release and say, If not a terrorist, what has Oscar López done to help the Puerto Rican people?” said Joe Connor, who was 9 years old when his father  —   a    banker at J. P. Morgan  —   was killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing. ”I’m hearing he’s a freedom fighter, he’s done all these things, he’s not violent. But what did he do, if not be a terrorist? There’s no answer to it because he was a terrorist.” Connor says López Rivera does not deserve clemency because he hasn’t expressed remorse for his actions or the deaths caused by the FALN. The Fraunces Tavern bombing case has never been solved. López Rivera has denied involvement in its execution or planning. A petition to release López Rivera has over 100, 000 signatures, but organizers say they’ve gotten no indications from President Obama. In the official response to the petition, the White House said it ”does not comment on individual pardon applications.” López Rivera had said he will no longer condone violence in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. But he says if he walks out of prison one day, he’ll walk out with his head high. ”I had made a decision . .. dealing with finding meaning and purposing life, and not living a life just to exist, you know. And the struggle for me is where I found meaning in life, and I knew that that would keep me strong, and it has,” he said. If Obama leaves him in prison, López Rivera is projected for release in 2023  —   when he’ll be 80 years old. This story was produced by NPR’s Latino USA, who will be releasing an   audio documentary about Oscar López Rivera later this month. "
349,"As seaweed continues to gain popularity for its nutritional benefits and culinary versatility, more people are skipping the dried stuff in the grocery store and going straight to the source: the ocean itself. At low tide on West Coast beaches, foragers hop between rocks looking for bladderwrack, sea lettuce and Irish moss to take home with them. Sea vegetable foraging has become so common, in fact, that you can take a class to learn what to harvest and what to avoid. ”Seaweed foraging is more popular than it used to be,” says Heidi Herrmann, owner of Strong Arm Farm in Healdsburg, Calif. ”With the rise of those little flavored snack packs of seaweed that kids eat in their lunches, seaweed is now a normal household word.” Herrmann commercially forages seaweed to sell to restaurants in places like Napa and San Francisco. She also leads seaweed foraging classes several times a year. The only equipment her students need is a pair of scissors and a bag to carry the seaweed. It’s one of many foraging classes offered along the West Coast. They can cost anywhere between $ $445, and can last for several hours or several days. Some include cooking lessons. Others teach how to harvest seaweed from a kayak. With or without a class, seaweed may be the safest food to forage. Unlike mushroom foraging, where many species can kill you, there are no deadly seaweeds. This has led to the idea that it’s safe to ”eat the beach,” which is not exactly true. Some seaweed should be avoided. For example, consuming a lot of acid kelp (Desmarestia ligulata) can cause intestinal distress. As with all foraging, research is key. ”Those general rules that say, ’All of this is edible’ or ’All of that is edible’ [are] a lazy person’s way of not having to know anything,” says John Kallas, a researcher and educator for Wild Food Adventures in Oregon. ”You don’t just blindly go out and gather stuff. Knowledge is what keeps you safe.” Still, as Kallas is quick to point out, the beach is full of edible seaweed. Many West Coast varieties are similar to   Asian seaweeds. This includes versions of nori, which the Japanese use in sushi kombu, the base for the broth dashi and wakame, commonly used in seaweed salad. There are also   varieties, like sea lettuce, a delicate green seaweed also used in salads. Then there’s bladderwrack, which looks like flattened deer antlers and can season meat or thicken sauces. Another example is dulse, which looks like red film tape and is commonly dried and flaked into dishes for seasoning. Even something as unappetizing as feather boa kelp can have surprising culinary applications. This aptly named kelp  —   it looks like something you’d wear to a costume party  —   has a leathery strap and small blades that give it a corrugated, leafy appearance. Not only are the leaflets edible, so are the hollow oval bladders that keep the plant afloat. ”The bladders are a great substitute for olives,” says Kallas. ”But when you bite them, they pop.” Seaweed is high in protein, and contains Vitamin B12, iodine and   fatty acids. It can be a natural source of MSG, which helps provide a savory umami flavor in dishes. As such, seaweed can flavor soups, thicken sauces, be baked into bread or cakes, or dried and eaten like potato chips. Dennis Judson, who leads seafood foraging classes for Adventure Sports Unlimited, recommends making pickles out of seaweed, particularly bullwhip kelp, which is a long tube with a ball at the end that looks like a whip. ”I cut it into strips, like little donuts,” says Judson. ”Then I put it in jars and pickle it. Then I put the pickles in Bloody Marys. They’re delicious.” Seaweeds are algae, not plants. They’re divided into three types: red, green and brown. (Kelp is a type of seaweed.) Like plants, seaweed uses photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy. While they can be harvested all year, they’re usually at the height of growth in spring and summer. They often grow rapidly, as much as two feet a day. Because of this, most seaweed can withstand ethical foraging. The important thing is to only take the   blades and leave the    —   essentially, the roots of the seaweed  —   intact so it can keep producing. It’s also important to check regulations before foraging, which can vary drastically based on location. Washington state requires a permit to forage, while Oregon restricts seaweed foraging to a season. California, on the other hand, allows personal seaweed foraging all year long, restricting it to 10 pounds per person a day. Both the California and Washington state departments of fish  wildlife report increased interest in seaweed foraging from the public. But while harvesting seaweed may seem new, it’s an ancient activity, stretching back thousands of years. For Herrmann, seaweed foraging is more than just gathering food. It’s about feeling connected to the past, and to nature. ”When you’re at the shore, you see all these colors and textures and creatures, so many questions come to mind,” she says. ”And it’s timeless in the sense that you’re collecting food in a way that has been done for so many years before you, in so many cultures and climates. So it feels like being in a long continuum, and the practices of gathering food in general.” Joy Lanzendorfer is a writer based in Petaluma, Calif. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and others. She’s on Twitter @JoyLanzendorfer."
350,"In 2009, the heavy metal band Disturbed received a Grammy nomination for its song ”Inside The Fire,” a   emotional track delivered with aggressive guitar riffs and raspy singing. Recently, the band received another Grammy nomination, but this time it was for a song with a very different sound: an acoustic cover of Simon  Garfunkel’s ”The Sound of Silence.” Lead singer David Draiman says the band’s drummer, Mike Wengren, had the idea: ”It had been something that his family had played in the background when it was time to do the chores at home,” Draiman says. Once they’d settled on the song, the group’s guitar player, Dan Donegan, urged his bandmates to depart from their signature sound in favor of something gentler. Melodic singing wasn’t out of the question for Draiman: When he was young, he trained to be a cantor, the singer who leads a Jewish congregation in prayer. ”I hadn’t attempted to go to that spot of my vocal ability for many years,” he says. ”Listening to the way my vocals sounded in that beautiful bed of music  —   and not having heard my voice in that way for so long  —   it was really just very, very overwhelming.” Disturbed’s latest album, Immortalized, is out now. Hear more from Draiman at the audio link."
351,"When Kennedy Odede was a kid, he lived on the streets of a slum in Kenya. He’d grown up in tough circumstances. His stepfather was violent. There wasn’t enough food to go around. He wasn’t sent to school. A friend convinced him he’d do better out on his own. He’d have his freedom, he’d be able to find his own food. So when he was around 10, Kennedy left home. His new world was a world of violence. He was caught up in gang fights. He remembers being stabbed in the arm: ”I still have the scar,” he says. Then one day, when he was 12 or so, he met Martin Luther King Jr.  —   on the pages of a book that an older friend at a community center gave him. ”I was looking for hope in my life,” says Kennedy, who’s now in his early 30s. ”When I read the story of Dr. King, it was a powerful story. Dr. King gave me a reason to believe you can change your own life and change your own community. His idea is that you don’t have to wait. Anyone’s path can change. For me that was really powerful.” On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we talked to Kennedy Odede from Kenya, where he started a nonprofit called Shining Hope for Communities. It runs a free primary school for girls and helps youth find jobs. (And in case you’re wondering, his name is an homage to John F. Kennedy: Odede was born a breach baby but survived, which his parents took as a sign he’d be a leader, ”so I had to get a leadership name,” he says.) The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What struck you about Dr. King’s life? The world was full of hatred at that time in America. But he didn’t allow darkness to conquer his life. He looked for light, he looked for hope. I admire people who, because of circumstances, could turn out to be negative and yet turned out for peace, to fight for justice. Violence was part of your life on the streets.  When I read about nonviolence, the lesson for me is that violence cannot solve problems, you know what I mean? Nonviolence is a powerful weapon. I was used to having to fight back, but when you’re nonviolent, it gives you peace of mind. I work in the slums now with young people. I go to tough neighborhoods and tell them my story and Dr. King’s story. What’s their reaction to the idea of nonviolence? People say nonviolence is a sign of weakness. What do you tell them? In my community there used to be a lot of men beating their wives. I tell people, they are the weakest men. I tell them, if you are strong, you don’t have to shoot. The weak people are violent. Peace is the most powerful tool to conquer your enemies. It confuses them. They are trying to make you be violent, and if you don’t react with violence, you’ve already won because you didn’t do what they want you to do. So what should you do if someone attacks you on the street to rob you? Ask the person, what do you want, do you want my phone? I believe you have to defend yourself, make sure nobody hits you, but I don’t think you can attack somebody because they snatch something from you. I see my friends who are killed when someone tries to snatch something and they fight back. Does Dr. King’s story have meaning to the youth of Kenya today? People say, ”Dr. King is old school, from the 1960s, we don’t need him now, we have to move on.” I think we need him more than ever. There’s a lot of violence in the world, and for me, violence doesn’t just mean you assault the other person’s body, it’s also what comes out of your mouth. Words that bring hatred  —   for me that’s violence. Dr. King didn’t divide. He wanted to listen. It’s a time to listen more and speak less. Do you have a favorite Dr. King quote? ”Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve . ... You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”"
352,"The last person to leave footprints on the moon has died. NASA reported that Gene Cernan died Monday at the age of 82, surrounded by his family. Gene Cernan flew in space three times, including twice to the moon. Cernan was big, brash and gregarious. And if he hadn’t been lucky, he could have missed his chance to walk on the moon. Cernan challenged himself his whole life. When he entered the military, he chose to be a naval aviator. Landing on an aircraft carrier is perhaps the hardest thing to do in aviation. Cernan did it because it wasn’t easy. He said he was constantly pushing himself to do better and be better. ”My dad always used to say, ’Just go out and do your best. You’re not going to be better than everyone at everything.’ And he was right,” Cernan said, ”I wasn’t. But he was also right one other time when he said, ’Someday you’re going to surprise yourself. Just do your best and someday you’re going to surprise yourself.’ ” Cernan’s final trip in space was also the final time NASA sent people to the moon, the Apollo 17 mission, which took off on Dec. 7, 1972. Four days later, Cernan landed the lunar module on the moon with astronaut Harrison ”Jack” Schmitt. Cernan couldn’t hide his enthusiasm as he exited the spacecraft, saying, ”We’d like to dedicate the first steps of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible. Oh my golly! Unbelievable!” Decades later, Cernan reflected on that moment in a 2015 NPR interview, no less thrilled to be the last, rather than the first, to go there. ”The first steps had been made by others long before I got there. But those were my first steps.” Cernan is one of only three people to travel to the moon twice (Jim Lovell and John Young were the others). Before Apollo 17, he flew on Apollo 10, which was the mission just before the first lunar landing. On Gemini 9 in 1966, he conducted the second American spacewalk (which almost ended in disaster). Cernan had trouble controlling his body in the weightlessness of space. He became exhausted. His visor fogged up and he barely had the strength to get back into the capsule and close the hatch. ”Fate played another trick because I might not have come home from that flight. We didn’t know much about what we’re doing [yet].” Dreaming big and working hard were two things Cernan always did. He grew up in Chicago. Neither of his parents went to college, but he earned several degrees in engineering. Despite Cernan’s technical background, his time on the moon and in space forever altered his life. Cernan said he gained a new perspective, because ”when you leave the Earth, it’s not only technologically different  —   it’s philosophically different and it’s spiritually different.” Many astronauts had difficulty describing what it was actually like to be in space  —   not in the technical sense, but in finding the words to share that remarkable experience. He chronicled some of them in his 2016 documentary, Last Man on the Moon. ”Many of the astronauts didn’t really know how to describe that because that’s not what they were going there for,” said Francis French of the San Diego Air and Space Museum, who has written many books on the space program. ”Gene Cernan in the decades after his mission really reflected on that and he [very well described] what that’s like.” There’s something else about Cernan: He had the opportunity to land on the moon during an earlier mission, Apollo 16, as the pilot. But he turned it down, because he wanted to be commander, in charge of the mission. ”I sort of felt like I’d been an underdog most of my life,” he recalled. ”[Achieving the command of Apollo 17] I proved to myself that I was good enough. That I could get the job done. That was a big point in my life.” Cernan spent his   life trying to inspire young people. He once said, ”Dream the impossible  —   and go out and make it happen. I walked on the moon. What can’t you do?”"
353,"  years after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, many schools across the country either remain segregated or have  . Journalist Nikole   tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal. ”There’s never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources,”   says. ”They often don’t have the same level of instruction. They often don’t have strong principals. They often don’t have the same technology.” Still, when it was time for  ’ daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in   Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino.   later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine. For   sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. ”It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it’s also upheld by individual choices,” she says. ”As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children . .. we’re not going to see a change.”   adds that her daughter is thriving at school. ”I know she’s learning a lot,” she says. ”I think it is making her a good citizen. . .. It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her.” On why she chose to send her young daughter to the public school in her neighborhood, One of the things I’ve done in my work is kind of show the hypocrisy of progressive people who say they believe in inequality, but when it comes to their individual choices about where they’re going to live and where they’re going to send their children, they make very different decisions, and I just didn’t want to do that. So for me it was a matter of needing to live my values, and not being someone who contributed to the inequality that I write about. On the importance of having students from different races and income levels in the public schools, The original mission of public schools . .. is this understanding that no matter where you come from, you will go into the doors of a school and every child will receive the same education. And no, my daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40, 000 a year in   tuition, but that’s kind of the whole point of public schools. And I say this  —   and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you’re maybe not as good of a parent  —   I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids. I just don’t. I think that we can’t say ”This school is not good enough for my child” and then sustain that system. I think that that’s just morally wrong. If it’s not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools? On the history of school desegregation since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education  Brown v. Board happens, and the way that we’re taught it or the myth about it is immediately our nation repented and went into an integrated future together. That’s not what happened. There was massive resistance, and we don’t see real desegregation occurring in this country until 1964, and really most rapidly from 1968 on. . .. Then you see pretty rapid desegregation particularly in the South, but then that changes, and in 1988 we start to go backwards. So we reach kind of the peak of schools integrating, of black students attending majority white schools at the highest rates that they ever have in the country, and then we start to see school districts   which means black students are starting to go to schools that are more and more segregated. And school districts that had had a degree of integration are losing that integration. . .. On American resistance to desegregating schools and housing, When I started what I kind of call the segregation beat about five years ago . .. I think we had stopped talking about this as a problem. If you look at No Child Left Behind, which comes out of the Bush administration, that was all about giving up on integration in schools and just saying, ”We’re going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability.” So no one was discussing integration anymore. I think it’s because . .. we never really wanted this. . .. It’s always had to be forced, and as soon as . .. our elected officials and our courts lost the will to force it, most white Americans were just fine with that. . .. One of the things that I really try to do with my work is show how racial segregation and racial inequality was intentionally created with a ton of resources. From the federal government, to the state, to city governments, to private citizens, we put so much effort into creating this segregation and inequality, and we’re willing to put almost no effort in fixing it, and that’s the problem. "
354,"Archaeologists have unearthed a unique pendant buried on the site of a Nazi extermination camp. They say that they know of only one other that is similar, which belonged to Anne Frank. Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial announced the find on Sunday, saying that they have ascertained the charm may have belonged to a girl named Karoline Cohn. ”Aside from similarities between the pendants, both Anne Frank and Karoline Cohn were born in Frankfurt, suggesting a possible familial connection between Frank and Cohn,” Yad Vashem said. ”Researchers are currently trying to locate relatives of the two families to further explore this avenue.” The charm bears Hebrew writing that says ”Mazel Tov” (Congratulations) the date 3. 7. 1929 (Cohn’s birth date) and the word Frankfurt. The reverse side has the Hebrew letter Hey, which is sometimes used to represent God, and three stars of David. The only difference between the two charms is the date of birth  —   separated by just three weeks, according to archaeologists. ”Based on searches that we carried out, the only name that fit in terms of her birth date was a Jewish girl by the name of Karoline Cohn, whose birth date is indeed July 3rd, 1929,” said Yad Vashem’s Joel Zissenwein in a video released by the memorial. ”And she was indeed on a transport that we recorded that departed from Frankfurt am Main to Minsk Ghetto.” Researchers found the pendant in Sobibor, a death camp in Poland where more than 250, 000 Jews were killed, according to The Associated Press. It was found in the area ”where victims undressed and their heads shaved before being sent into the gas chambers,” Yad Vashem said. Researchers think it slipped through floorboards in this area, remaining buried until archaeologists found it a few months ago. The Sobibor camp was razed to the ground by Nazis in an attempt to conceal their crimes. But recent excavations have uncovered the foundations of gas chambers and items belonging to the camp’s many victims. Frank died in 1945 at the   concentration camp in Germany. ”This pendant demonstrates once again the importance of archaeological research of former Nazi death camp sites,” said Israel Antiquities archaeologist Yoram Haimi. The researchers have also uncovered other personal items, such as a women’s watch and a star of David necklace. Haimi added: ”The items found here, bottles or dentures  —   all these things, even the most shocking among them  —   tell us the story of what happened here in the camp.”"
355,"European leaders are expressing alarm after U. S.   Donald Trump said the EU is ”basically a vehicle for Germany” and reiterated his view that NATO is ”obsolete.” Speaking about the EU, Trump said ”people want their own identity,” and therefore ”I believe others will leave.” He has previously applauded the U. K.’s decision last year to depart from the   bloc and repeated that sentiment, saying that ”I think Brexit is going to end up being a great thing.” Trump made the comments in an interview published Sunday with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild newspaper. ”I’ve spoken today not only with EU foreign ministers but NATO foreign ministers as well and can report that the signals are that there’s been no easing of tensions,” German Foreign Minister   Steinmeier told reporters, according to Reuters. Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said reality was ”perhaps more difficult than what is going on on Twitter,” according to The Associate Press, in an apparent reference to the  ’s penchant for posting on social media. Trump’s opinions on NATO appear counter to those of his pick for Secretary of Defense, retired Marine General James Mattis. Mattis stated during his confirmation hearing last week that NATO ”is the most important alliance there is,” NPR’s Tom Bowman reported. Trump also repeated his earlier criticism that many NATO members ”aren’t paying what they’re supposed to be paying.” NPR’s Frank Frank Langfitt explains that ”Trump’s criticism that other NATO allies don’t pay their fair share is nothing new and he has a point.” Here’s more from Frank: ”NATO has set a goal that nations should spend the equivalent of 2 percent of their GDP on defense, but most don’t. However, the idea that the U. S.  —   the dominant military force in NATO  —   might not defend an ally frightened many in Brussels and beyond.” When asked directly about whether the U. S. will guarantee European security in the future, Trump simply replied, ”I feel very strongly toward Europe  —   very strongly toward Europe, yes.” Trump also stated that he was eager to make a trade deal with the U. K. saying his administration would ”work very hard to get it done quickly and done properly.” U. K. Foreign Minister Boris Johnson appeared to be the only EU leader who responded positively to Trump’s interview, according to The Washington Post. ”It’s very good news that the United States of America wants to do a good   deal with us and wants to do it very fast, and it’s great to hear that from   Donald Trump,” Johnson told reporters, the Post reported."
356,"Ernest Peterson has spent his entire adult life in Washington, D. C.  —   almost all of it in Shaw, a neighborhood of colorful row houses and   side streets about 2 miles from the White House. In Shaw, Peterson bought his first house and started a business. And, for 20 years, on the Saturday before Labor Day, he organized a community picnic at the elementary school near his house. Over the years, friends and neighbors moved away or got locked up. He lost touch with many of them. But despite living in Shaw for nearly 40 years, Peterson is increasingly starting to feel like an outsider in his neighborhood. ”I go outside, and these people who been here for 15 minutes look at me like, ’Why you here?’ That’s that sense of privilege they bring wherever they go,” he said in his front yard on a sunny Saturday in November. ”I been here since ’78. They been here six months or a year, and they question my purpose for being here.” In a city facing some of the most intense pressure on housing in the country, the feeling is not uncommon for many of Washington’s longtime residents. Even neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of poverty and crime  —   places once thought immune to the influx of newcomers  —   are being eyed by developers. At Brookland Manor, a housing development in Northeast Washington home to about 1, 200 mostly   residents, the landlord has stepped up evictions of poor tenants, according to reporting by The Washington Post, as the owners prepare to redevelop the property, often filing lawsuits for late rent payments totaling less than $100. (Update on Feb. 1: A representative from the development company told the Post they have always sued over unpaid rent and lease violations.) In neighborhoods south of the Anacostia River, so far largely left out of the district’s housing boom, activists are fighting to preserve   housing as developers anticipate a growing appetite for   units. But for Shaw, a neighborhood where newcomers began arriving more than a decade ago, gentrification is not a new reality. Now, several years into a period of dizzying demographic and physical change, longtime residents say they are still trying to negotiate a place for themselves in a neighborhood they’ve long called home. Home on P Street, In some ways, Peterson’s stretch of P Street looks a lot like it did when he came to Shaw in the 1970s after moving from North Carolina to attend law school at Howard University. The same two historic churches hug corners at either end of the street. The elementary school is a charter now, but the facade has remained mostly unchanged. Carlos Pyatt grew up across the street from where Peterson lives. Pyatt hadn’t been back to this block since he moved away in the early ’80s. When Pyatt looks back at his childhood on P Street, he remembers riding skateboards and bicycles, playing touch football and tag. The woman who still lives next door to Pyatt’s old house, now in her   remembers a less rosy picture  —   a period after the neighborhood’s heyday as a center for   culture and commerce, when Shaw was still reeling from the effects of the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and, later, the rise of crack cocaine. ”I left before the epidemic hit,” Pyatt said, surveying his old house for the first time in three decades. ”I had no idea that was going on. To me, it feels the same, but the people who haven’t left, they’ve seen it.” Pyatt’s old   neighbor bought her house for $42, 000 in 1981. In 2017, the property’s tax assessment was more than $888, 000. The city’s assessment of her home jumped nearly $150, 000 in the past year. Developers call her up constantly asking if she wants to sell. Even with all that equity, it can be hard to keep up with the property taxes on a fixed income, which makes the option to sell tempting. Many have taken the offers. Alex Padro, who represents Shaw on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, cites this trend as proof that longtime residents benefit from the community’s growth. ”They decided to take advantage of the     wealth creation opportunity and sold their family homes and moved to the suburbs,” he said. ”Grandpa and Grandma were no longer having to climb up several flights of stairs and they have a college fund for the grandkids.” While exploding home prices can generate windfalls for longtime owners who decide to sell, the upward direction of the housing market has also generated concerns about the availability of affordable housing in neighborhoods like Shaw. Even if longtime homeowners or renters aren’t displaced, the trend certainly constricts who is able to move in. Despite initiatives to preserve housing for   and   residents, census data from the neighborhood point to a period of major demographic change. In 1980, Shaw was 78 percent black. In 2010, the black population in the neighborhood had dropped to 44 percent. And that’s not just because more white people moved in, increasing the overall total population and driving down the neighborhood’s black majority. The actual number of black residents, not just their percentage of the population, has been consistently dropping over the past two decades as well. Home sales also illustrate what’s happening. In 1995, the median home price in Shaw was $147, 000. Today it’s $781, 000. In 1979, the average family income was $50, 089 when adjusted for inflation. Between 2010 and 2014 it was $145, 096. Curtis Smith, administrator at the historic Third Street Baptist Church down the street, said very few of his congregants still live in the neighborhood. Most commute in from the suburbs or elsewhere in the District. ”In the old days, maybe 80 percent could walk to the church,” he said. ”Now just turn that around.” Shifts like this one have meant that institutions such as churches preserve some of the few remaining ties drawing former residents back to the community. Smith hopes his church can serve as a centerpiece of the community, not just as a relic of the past. ”We’re trying to portray that we’re not the black church on the corner, but we’re the community church,” he said. Though every now and then someone who is not a longtime congregant will stop in for the free community movie nights or public forums on topics like neighborhood policing, it’s not often. Smith said that’s something churches throughout Shaw are grappling with  —   how to play a role in a community that looks less and less like their membership. A few blocks away, the owner of Hollywood Styles Barbershop is thinking through a similar set of questions. For decades, the shop has occupied this small brick storefront just off Seventh Street, a stretch of Shaw that typifies much of the change here. Convenience stores and Ethiopian takeout joints housed in   storefronts carry on next door to upscale coffee shops, bakeries and bars. Shop owner DeLonta Dickerson said barbershops are some of the few remaining businesses from the old Shaw. Like churches, barbershops can remain a link to the neighborhood long after people move away. The chrome and vinyl chairs lined up on each side of the small space have seated generations of the same families. Dickerson started coming here as a kid and took over the business in 2009 when the shop’s longtime owner died. Over the years, Dickerson has seen new condos rise on every corner and a subway station crop up across the street. He leases his storefront, and while he figures the owner could sell out to a developer one day, he doesn’t think about it much: ”I’m not sure if I’d go for another space, or if it’s something that I’d just want to leave behind.” Who benefits? For those longtime residents who remember Shaw as a   neighborhood pockmarked with empty lots and plagued by crime, rather than the hub of   commercial and cultural activity experienced by the generation before them, at least some of the improved resources and services such as lighting, a new library and a renovated recreation center are welcome changes. Dominic Moulden, who has been organizing residents in Shaw for 30 years and represents the tenants rights organization OneDC, said that doesn’t mean everyone benefits from the new amenities. ”If you can’t spend $100 to eat, $5 or $7 for coffee, you can’t buy anything in your own neighborhood,” he said. Peterson puts it this way: Poor   in Shaw had been asking for improved services for years, and it’s only now that white people with money and influence have moved in that they’re getting them. Resources are available now not because of who lives in Shaw, said Padro, but because the city’s tax base improved significantly over the past decade. As more people move into the city, its coffers are in a better position to fund new amenities and services. While the tax base may be in a different position than it was just a decade ago, Moulden said the city is still failing to meet the most basic needs of some residents, particularly when it comes to housing. A 2015 analysis of census data by the D. C. Fiscal Policy Institute found that the number of apartments with rents less than $800 per month  —   a number that represents 40 percent of monthly income for a family of four living at the poverty line  —   decreased by 42 percent between 2002 and 2013. That’s a decline of more than 24, 000 units. Padro says public strategy sessions, extensive committee work and community surveys have all been employed to bring everybody into the fold when big decisions are made. Virginia Lee, who is in her late 60s and has lived in Shaw for 17 years, says she still feels longtime residents have lost some political clout, especially when it comes to leverage at ANC meetings. She says   became less visible at meetings and she began to feel that her input wouldn’t be taken seriously. ”It’s a sense that I have as a black woman, that my voice has low impact,” Lee said. Building relationships, One week before Thanksgiving, dozens of   kids lined up in front of a stretch of long folding tables as volunteers heaped their paper plates with green beans, turkey and mashed potatoes. Three of the round banquet tables are crowded with older residents. Harold Valentine is one of them. He moved to Washington in 1981 from Boston, where he struggled to kick a drinking problem. He hasn’t had a drink since he moved to D. C. Valentine said this kind of event wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago  —   at least not here at Kennedy. And the senior citizens? They would never have crossed the street at night to come to Kennedy. Valentine said this is a prime example of both the kind of positive change he has seen spring up in Shaw  —   and of the distance still left to go. Seated inside a quiet preschool classroom just off the recreation center’s front lobby, Valentine cites the programs that now occur here day and night, his pride for the former gang leader he mentored at Kennedy and who now serves as a member of the recreation center’s board  —   all proof, he says, that positive changes really are happening in Shaw. Valentine also wants the recreation center to be a gathering place for the whole community, though he realizes that dream is not entirely the reality yet. He’s not exactly sure how to get there, but said his idea for where to start is rooted in an old saying a pastor once told him. ”I wouldn’t go across the street for another program, but I’d go around the world for a relationship,” he said. That’s precisely what Valentine thinks Shaw needs. He’s optimistic about the progress, and says he is not trying to argue that improving life here won’t also require tangibles such as regulations, programs and money. What he is saying is that there has to be something more. For as much good as Valentine sees happening in his neighborhood, he recognizes there are real lapses when it comes to how people from different backgrounds interact with each other. The neighborhood’s changing demographics have created a space where identities such as race, age and class are constantly brushing up against each other. It’s a tension Shaw is still dealing with years after ”gentrification” began. ”Until I sit down and talk to you, we’re not going to get anywhere,” he said. ”I can say good morning to you, but unless I sit down and say, ’Where are you from?’ until I let you into my comfort zone and you’re not afraid of what happened once upon a time here in Shaw, there’s not going to be that cultural assimilation.” Derek Hyra, an associate professor at American University who has studied gentrification in Shaw, sees building bridges as at least partly a question of policy. Hyra suggests refining the Community Development Block Grant  —   federal funding allocated to cities each year for community development work, which fund projects such as affordable housing but can also go toward improvements like sidewalks or parking. He’d like to see some of that money support community gardens, arts programs or festivals  —   or whatever mutual interest the community identifies. Peterson wonders if, in the long run, that will really matter. Even if longtime residents are able to stay in their homes, he wonders what the community will look like once his generation begins to die out. ”I see very few people who look like me that will be here in the next five or 10 years,” he said. ”You can’t stop progress” Peterson wrestles with the nuance of the shifts he has seen in Shaw. That’s because he came here 40 years ago for many of the same reasons that people move in today. ”You can’t stop progress,” he said. ”I understand because we left, a lot of us black folks, in [the] ’30s, ’40s, and ’50, we left small towns to come to urban centers seeking employment. Same thing is happening now. There’s nothing in these small towns for these kids anymore.” That doesn’t mean he grants newcomers a free pass. Those conflicting feelings and experiences have left many lifers trying to reconcile the optimism they have for their neighborhood’s future with the pain inflicted by cultural or political alienation. For those whom the displacement hasn’t been physical, there is still a sense they have been somehow removed or pushed aside amid the tide of newcomers, or that there isn’t the sense of community there once was. ”You sometimes get the effect that nothing existed here before they came,” said Lee. ”All the goodness that has come with the gentrification and certainly the refurbishing and preserving of buildings . .. all that has come has been material in nature and very little has been done to preserve the human aspect of a city that’s being transformed. We have our gathering spots they have their gathering spots. The fact that we use the same sidewalks and streets has very little to do with ongoing communication.” When Valentine talks about the future he envisions in Shaw, he repeatedly uses words like integration and reconciliation  —   the act of making different beliefs compatible. He sees the process as both grand  —   such as his idea for a ”reconciliation square” designed to unite neighboring churches  —   and rooted in the    like the relationships he builds with people at the recreation center. That’s where Lee thinks it will start. ”Every day when I go out my door, I go out and figure just speaking to people who pass by is a way of inserting some humanity in the process,” she said. The type of grand ”reconciliation” Valentine talks about may not be possible. But many longtime residents of Shaw say they are confident any progress  —   in the integration of public spaces, in preserving cultural institutions, in crafting policies that preserve affordable housing and prevent displacement  —   will also require something that has often proved elusive here: a little bit of empathy."
357,"When Donald Trump won the presidential election, he made a pledge to every citizen: that he would be president for all Americans. In the weeks before Trump’s inauguration, we’re going to hear about some of the communities that make up this nation, from the people who know them best, in our series Finding America. The No. 48 bus runs through the Central District of Seattle. It’s a historically black community that Carla Saulter and Gabriel Teodros know well. It’s also a neighborhood that is gentrifying as Seattle has boomed in the past decade. During a ride on the 48, the two bus companions discussed the changes they’ve been seeing in their city. Saulter says riding the bus allows her to see how different parts of the city have changed physically and demographically. ”The thing about the 48 is that it goes through so many different communities,” Saulter says. ”Of course, over time, the riders of the bus [have] changed, and that’s one of the ways you can really see, just viscerally feel, the changes in the community, is that who’s riding the bus is so different now than it was even 10 years ago.” Use the audio link above to hear the full story. "
358,"Bobby Rush is one of the last living blues legends of his generation. He toured the South and the chitlin’ circuit in the ’50s and was often forced to perform music behind a curtain for white audiences. Shortly before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rush heard through fellow Chicago bluesman J. B. Lenoir about a Baptist minister and activist who offered hope: Martin Luther King Jr. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, Rush shares his memories about the early days of the civil rights movement, the harrowing racism he endured and the powerful message Dr. King delivered when they met in person. Listen and download the audio above."
359,Americans across the U. S. are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. ’s legacy with a day of service. We reflect on his life and message by revisiting his celebrated I Have a Dream speech in its entirety.
360,"Noor Salman, the wife of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, has been arrested on federal charges. Salman is charged with ”Aiding and Abetting by providing material support to a terrorist and Obstruction of Justice,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina said in a statement. On June 12, 2016, 49 people died when Mateen opened fire at Pulse in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U. S. history. He was killed in a firefight with police. Salman is due to make her initial court appearance at 9:30 a. m. Tuesday in Oakland, Calif. according to a tweet from the U. S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Florida. ”This is an example of the fact that investigations do continue long after they’re publicly discussed,” U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said during an interview with MSNBC. ”It was always our goal, and we said from the beginning, we were going to look at every aspect of this case, every aspect of this shooter’s life, to determine not just why did he take these actions, but who else knew about them, was anyone else involved, is there any other accountability that needs to be had here in this case.” Mateen and Salman married in 2011 in Contra Costa County, Calif. as The   has reported. She moved to the San Francisco area after her husband’s death, according to The Associated Press. ”I was unaware of everything,” Salman told The New York Times in a November interview. ”I don’t condone what he has done. I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.” In a statement to NPR, Salman’s attorney Linda Moreno reiterated that her client was not aware of Mateen’s plans: ”Noor Salman had no foreknowledge nor could she predict what Omar Mateen intended to do that tragic night. Noor has told her story of abuse at his hands. We believe it is misguided and wrong to prosecute her and that it dishonors the memories of the victims to punish an innocent person.” As NPR’s Dina   has reported, Salman has cooperated with authorities but there are inconsistencies in her story: ”For example, she said she didn’t know that the attack was coming, but she also told authorities that she tried to talk him out of the attack. She was with him when he bought ammunition last week. She actually joined him at the Pulse nightclub before the attack, although it’s possible she didn’t know that he was there to case the place. So a grand jury is looking at all of this. It’s not clear if they’ll bring charges, but they’re certainly considering that.”"
361,"It was the first day of school for Dan Lear’s three kids. In a scramble to get his boys to class on time, the Seattle lawyer wound up parking in a space he probably should have avoided. ”There was a fire hydrant, but the curb wasn’t painted and the fire hydrant was painted a kind of a funny color. And so I thought, and maybe it was wishful thinking, but I thought I would be OK to park there,” he says. Sure enough, Lear returned to a ticket. ”I was bummed! I mean, obviously no one’s really happy when they get a ticket but I went home, I put it on my fridge and I let it sit there cause I just didn’t want to deal with it,” he says. So he found something that would  —   DoNotPay, a free online ”robot lawyer.” It has helped drivers in London and New York City appeal parking tickets. It had just expanded into Seattle, and Lear decided to give it a go. He logged in and the DoNotPay bot asked Lear a series of questions  —   like where the ticket was issued and a description of what happened. Within minutes, he had a   letter to send to the city. The verdict? ”Ultimately, yeah, they let me off,” Lear says. The idea behind DoNotPay belongs to Joshua Browder, a    student at Stanford University who’s originally from London. He wants to expand the service into San Francisco, so he spends time doing field research, combing the streets, peeking at parking tickets and studying signs. He looks for confusing signage, like one he noticed on a recent visit near the city’s Mission District. ”There are two signs,” he says after his field trip. ”The first one says 7 to 9 a. m. and 4 to 6 p. m. you can’t park. And that one is fine and clearly marked. But then there’s a sign below it that says no parking up to 6 a. m. but there’s no start time. . .. It’s covered up, and it looks like it’s been covered up by the local authorities.” Browder’s bot has, so far, helped drivers overturn more than 200, 000 parking tickets in London, New York and Seattle. This month it will enter several more cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles, the capital of cars and traffic. In Los Angeles, about 40 percent of challenged citations are dismissed. DoNotPay’s success rate is 60 percent, according to Browder. It’s easy to see why drivers would flock to this service. But how do city officials feel? ”Currently, we have four   field investigators to do the investigations for signs and curbs in the city of Los Angeles,” says Wayne Garcia, parking operations chief for the city of Los Angeles. He says he’s anxious to see what will soon come through the mail, given how even a modest uptick in appeals could overload resources. But he admits there could be an upside. ”Our staff spend a great deal of time reviewing letters from motorists in trying to decipher what they’re actually contesting,” Garcia says. And that’s because most people just don’t write like lawyers. ”If this process will help the motorists really focus in on why they’re contesting their parking citation, it would also help our staff in reviewing the contested parking citation,” he says. Browder says he wants to ”level the playing field so anyone can have the same legal access under the law.” He also wants this kind of legal help to go beyond parking tickets. And in some cities he’s already done that  —   with   disputes and unexplained banking charges. Right now, he’s working on the bot’s ability to help refugees apply for asylum. ”If one day someone can have the same standard of legal representation as the richest in society then I think that’s a really good aim,” he says. And Browder says it’s all part of an even larger ambition to, one day, make justice free."
362,"  Donald Trump said he’s finishing a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act with a proposal that would provide ”insurance for everybody,” according to a report by The Washington Post. He did not get into any specific details about his healthcare plan during a telephone interview with the newspaper. But he did say it would be ”much less expensive” and would involve ”much lower deductibles.” Trump added that he does not plan to cut benefits for Medicare and that he does not want a   health care system. His plan will be revealed, Trump suggested, after the U. S. Senate confirms his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary, Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia. The Senate Finance Committee has not announced the timing of Price’s confirmation hearing yet. Still, Trump said he expects Republicans in Congress to replace Obamacare quickly with his plan and is ready to put pressure on lawmakers, telling the Post: ”I think we will get approval. I won’t tell you how, but we will get approval. You see what’s happened in the House in recent weeks,” Trump said, referencing his tweet during a House Republican move to gut their independent ethics office, which along with widespread constituent outrage was cited by some members as a reason the gambit failed. Trump’s comments come as Republicans continue their debate over how exactly to repeal and replace Obamacare, while Democrats have been holding rallies around the country in support of the existing health care law. Last week, GOP lawmakers approved a budget resolution that sets up a framework for repealing the Affordable Care Act. But House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . has said that lawmakers are not ”holding hard deadlines” for replacing the federal health policy."
363,"Prosecutors in South Korea have requested an arrest warrant for the de facto head of the nation’s biggest conglomerate, Samsung, on charges of bribery and embezzlement in connection with a swirling scandal that led to the president’s impeachment.  Investigators say Jay Y. Lee, the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics and the scion of the one of the largest companies in the world, helped improperly direct company money to the confidant of President Park   in order to curry favor with the government. That confidant is now at the center of a criminal investigation and ongoing political scandal, and the president is awaiting a trial by a constitutional court on whether a resounding impeachment vote in parliament will result in her official removal. Prosecutors allege that Lee directed funds to Park’s friend, Choi   and in return won support from the administration for a controversial merger between two company affiliates. On Thursday, Lee appeared at the prosecutor’s office for questioning which lasted until Friday morning. Before the interrogation began, he said to a throng of cameras, ”I am deeply sorry, and I apologize to the Korean people for failing to put our best face forward due to this incident.” In a statement, however, the company denied the accusations: ”It is hard to understand the special prosecutors’ decision. Samsung has never given support or wanted reward in turn. In particular, Samsung cannot accept the special prosecutors’ claims that there was an illegal solicitation regarding the merger or the management succession. We believe the court will make a good judgment.” Already, lawmakers who supported the ouster of the president have spoken out in support of the charges. The culture of conglomerates, or chaebol, having outsized influence in politics and society has been one of the grievances of protesters who have been demonstrating against the president for months. ”This is a decision that values law and principle,” the Democratic Party of Korea’s spokesman Gi   said. ”Arresting Lee will save Samsung and the national economy. This is the beginning of a real and extensive chaebol reform. It’s a great opportunity to break apart the ugly relationship between politics and business.” Haeryun Kang contributed to this post."
364,"A group of scientists is gathering this week in the U. K. to discuss a slab of ice that’s cracking in Antarctica. The crack could soon split off a frozen chunk the size of Delaware. One glacier scientist, Heidi Sevestre, spent six weeks last year living on that giant slab of ice off the Antarctic Peninsula. ”It’s like being on a different planet,” says Sevestre, a glaciologist with the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She and her colleagues would get really excited whenever they saw a bird pass overhead because it was the only other sign of life around. ”Everything is gigantic, everything is white,” she says. And everything seemed so frozen and still. But it wasn’t. ”When you’re camping on the ice shelf, you have no idea that you’re on something that is floating and moving,” she says. The ice shelf is in constant motion: rising with the tides, splitting off icebergs at its edges, and growing again as inland glaciers feed it. The ice shelf Sevestre was studying is called Larsen C, and it now has a massive   crack running through it. ”The big rift is slicing the ice shelf from top to bottom,” Sevestre says. It’s now a third of a mile deep, and as wide across as 25 highway lanes. But this is not just another sad climate change story. It’s more complicated. ”A lot of things are going on deep inside the ice,” says Adrian Luckman, a glaciologist at Swansea University in the U. K. He’s also leading a project to track changes in the ice shelf. Luckman says climate change is certainly influencing this region. Larsen C used to have two neighbors to the north, Larsen A and Larsen B. As the air and water warmed, those ice shelves started melting and then splintered into shards in 1995 and 2002. But the crack in Larsen C seems to have happened on its own, for different reasons. ”This is probably not directly attributable to any warming in the region, although of course the warming won’t have helped,” says Luckman. ”It’s probably just simply a natural event that’s just been waiting around to happen.” Larsen C has a bunch of cracks. All ice shelves do. This particular crack has been around since at least the 1960s. The unusual part is that in 2014, this crack  —   and only this crack  —   started growing in spurts. Why? ”Well, that is a little bit of a mystery and that’s why it drew itself to our attention,” says Luckman. It left other cracks in the dust about 50 miles ago. Now, scientists are crunching satellite and radar data to figure out how. ”And that knowledge will be useful in helping us to understand other ice shelves and how they might respond to rifts coming into them,” says Luckman. One puzzling aspect is how it managed to plow through areas of softer ice, called suture zones, that bind the ice from neighboring glaciers into one giant sheet. ”There’s something different about that ice that slows it down or causes it to hang up for some period of time,” says Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University. But, starting in 2014, that soft ice did very little to slow down this rift. ”We need to get to the bottom of understanding what changed that allowed this rift to progress as it has, and will other rifts follow suit,” says McGrath, who spent four field seasons camped out on the Larsen C ice shelf. (At one point, bad storms kept him inside his tent for more than a week. ”Yeah, you’re peeing in a bottle,” he says. ”There were moments during those seven days that I questioned whether I should have studied tropical reef ecology. ”) Scientists are split on how important this crack is for the stability of the whole ice shelf. ”Just because this iceberg calves off, the ice shelf isn’t just going to collapse and disappear overnight,” says McGrath. Some say if this giant section breaks off, it won’t make a difference. Others think it could eventually cause the whole shelf to fall apart. ”I am cautiously worried,” says Ala Khazendar, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ”Ice shelves are very important. They are the gates of Antarctica in a way, and the gatekeepers of Antarctica.” The ice shelves are already floating, so if they fall apart it does not immediately affect sea levels. It’s what they hold back  —   water from all the inland glaciers  —   that could be problematic. Khazendar says there are two possible scenarios. One, the iceberg will break off, he says, ”and nothing spectacular will happen for many, many years.” The glaciers will bulk it up with ice until it’s back to its former look. Or, two, this iceberg is just the first of many irreversible losses for Larsen C, which, in combination with enough warm summers, will be weakened and shatter like the previous Larsens. ”We shall see if that big calving leads to a collapse of the ice shelf. At the moment, this is still a big question mark,” says Heidi Sevestre. According to pessimistic estimates, if the ice shelf completely disintegrated and if all the water packed in those glaciers made their way to the sea, it could significantly raise global sea levels. ”It is quite a large impact, indeed,” says Sevestre. The    ice shelf experts gathered in the U. K. this week aren’t sure whether this more serious chain reaction will happen, but they are confident, at least, that the   chunk will come off. The crack only has about 10 miles left to go."
365,"Since he began running for president, Donald Trump has been talking about a smaller federal role in education. The confirmation hearings begin Tuesday for the person he has nominated to carry out his vision, Betsy DeVos. In her home state of Michigan, DeVos has been a powerful advocate of school choice and a larger private role in education. If confirmed, she’ll take over a huge federal bureaucracy of some 4, 400 employees and a $68 billion budget. To get an idea of what’s ahead, I reached out to a former Republican education secretary, Margaret Spellings. She ran the Education Department under George W. Bush, from 2005 to 2009, and was a leader in the implementation of his signature education achievement, the No Child Left Behind Act. Today, she is the president of the University of North Carolina system, with 17 campuses and more than 220, 000 students. She says she has not advised the incoming Trump administration on any official level, but she has met Betsy DeVos.  She also recently penned a joint letter with other former Education secretaries William Bennet and Rod Paige endorsing DeVos. Here’s an edited version of our conversation. How do you balance the federal, state and local roles in improving public education? This is something we’ve debated for a long time. It changes. We’ve seen the pendulum swing from a more muscular federal role like we had during No Child Left Behind in the Bush era, to times when the primacy was in the states, which is the case now [with the Every Student Succeeds Act]. We’re now in a phase where states can be incubators of innovation. But what specifically should the federal government do to make sure   minorities and kids with learning disabilities receive the best education possible? Isn’t equity the central issue here? We do not have equity without accountability and transparency. The reason we’ve moved the needle for poor and minority students is because we’ve cared enough to find out how they’re doing and made them a priority. When we walk back  —   and this is going to happen [under ESSA]  —   at the state level, now that we have this crazy quilt of accountability systems with a lot of fine print, we know who gets masked in the data. That’s what I’m going to be paying attention to. The federal role in education is, and has always been, a civil rights focus. Did the U. S. Education Department, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, go too far in dictating or imposing education policies that weakened local control of schools? When we spend a lot of federal money, we ought to expect something for our money. But federal dollars on average make up no more than a small percentage of local school budgets. Right, but it’s billions of dollars. So we should know how well we are meeting the objectives of Title I [the government’s main aid program in   education] helping poor and minority students meet their full potential. In my book, accountability and transparency and measurement come into play. But we should take a lighter hand [in terms of solutions] and those [solutions] ought to be reserved for states. And frankly, in NCLB’s case, the federal intervention was oversold. There was a ton of local control in funding and policymaking. But you would agree that the federal government’s relationship with states was strained and adversarial? Well, one of the things I’m proud of with NCLB was that it was a public policy debate that involved compromise. The construct for NCLB was that we care about poor students. That we invest resources through a muscular federal role. Among the ideas in Donald Trump’s education agenda are school choice, ending the Common Core and shrinking or eliminating the Department of Education. Are those the right things to focus on right off the bat? The Department of Education should not be abolished. I do take the view that we need a   department of education focused on our neediest students. On Common Core standards, local control tells us that when states embrace standards, [federal officials] are not in a position to stop them. That ship has sailed. I can’t imagine that the administration would insist that states must abandon Common Core. On choice, it’s tricky to drive a policy agenda on something like choice when [the federal government represents] only 8 to 9 percent of school funding. How do you compel state and local taxpayers to spend their dollars on choice? That’ll be interesting to see. Having people vote with their feet makes a lot of sense, if we have the right kind of transparency, information and accountability. What do you think about Trump’s proposal to ” ” $20 billion in federal funds to create a voucher program? I think they’ll try to create a pot of money that mayors or governors would contribute to to create [vouchers]. That’s a possibility. Another possibility is   funds to support vouchers and school choice programs. Do you have any concerns about a possible drop in federal funding for early childhood education? States that have seen good results have invested heavily in early childhood education. So if we’re about results, that will continue. If I were to make a wager, I wouldn’t bet on a lot of changes for early childhood education programs like Head Start, but predicting Washington behavior is not prudent. The nation’s two big teachers unions have vowed to oppose Trump’s education agenda. How can Trump and his nominee, Betsy DeVos, avoid a big fight with unions? We do need to make a distinction between national teachers unions and teachers and what their concerns and issues are. Mrs. DeVos wants to hear from teachers. She knows what she doesn’t know, and I think she understands she needs to have good relationships to be a successful and productive secretary of education. I think her approach is going to be around the empowerment of individuals to vote with their feet to make meaningful choices. Most of our students are educated in traditional public schools, so [choice] is part of the solution but not a silver bullet. What about higher education  —   what are you concerns there? Where I would expect the Trump administration to focus is on workforce training, community colleges and people who need credentials more than BA degrees."
366,"President Trump and his team are filling approximately 4, 000 jobs in the federal government that are held by political appointees. Below is an index of the people appointed to Cabinet positions, key White House staff roles and lead positions at other prominent government agencies. Those requiring confirmation go through the following steps to officially get the job: nomination, Senate hearing, committee approval and, finally, a full Senate vote. (This chart was last updated on April 24, 2017.)"
367,"The final few days before   Donald Trump takes the oath of office will be filled with a flurry of congressional activity, as the Senate holds confirmation hearings for eight more of his Cabinet nominees. Most are expected to be fairly routine, but a few could be   affairs, including hearings for Education   Betsy DeVos and Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing to confirm several new Cabinet members shortly after Trump is sworn in as president at noon on Friday. ”I’m hopeful that we’ll get up to six or seven, particularly national security team, in place on day one,” McConnell told reporters last week after meeting with the   at Trump Tower in New York. Last week’s hearings included several national security picks, including Defense   James Mattis, who sailed through his hearing and received a congressional waiver required due to his recent military service Secretary of   Rex Tillerson, who faced very tough questions  —   particularly from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio Attorney   Jeff Sessions, who had to defend his record on race against opposition from most Democrats and civil rights groups Mike Pompeo for CIA director and John Kelly, who was nominated to run the Department of Homeland Security. This week’s hearings are for more positions that oversee domestic policy, and discussions are likely to focus on issues like climate change and the role of public education. Here’s a rundown of what’s coming up: Betsy DeVos will have her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) committee at 5 p. m. It was postponed from last week amid concerns of incomplete financial disclosures and ethics review. The HELP committee, however, said the delay was ”at the request of Senate leadership to accommodate Senate schedule.” On Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that DeVos had left a $150, 000   political donation off of her disclosure forms. DeVos, a billionaire GOP donor who once chaired the Michigan Republican Party, is a vocal supporter of school choice and vouchers, but doesn’t have much experience in public education. She has gotten the support of many Republicans, including some who were very critical of Trump during the campaign, such as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush. Earlier on Tuesday, at 10 a. m. Interior   Ryan Zinke will have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The Montana Republican congressman was just sworn in to his second term and was a somewhat surprising choice for Trump, especially since he was considered to be a top GOP recruit to challenge Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester for reelection in 2018. He’s a former Navy SEAL commander who served in Iraq and was awarded two Bronze Stars. Zinke is a vocal defender of public access to federal lands, and even resigned his position as a delegate to the Republican National Committee after the party platform included support for transferring federal public lands to the states. However, environmentalists have been critical of his nomination he’s a supporter of coal, oil and gas exploration, and has backed building the Keystone XL pipeline. The middle of the week features four simultaneous confirmation hearings, all beginning at 10 a. m. The hearing for U. N. Ambassador nominee Nikki Haley before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will round out the testimonies of major members of Trump’s foreign policy team. The South Carolina governor was no fan of Trump during the primary, even directly criticizing him during her State of the Union response last year. That alone made her a surprise choice for the position, in addition to the fact that she has little foreign policy experience, so expect Democrats to grill her on international issues. She’s the daughter of Indian immigrants and was the first woman and the first minority to lead the Palmetto State. Georgia Rep. Tom Price will also testify before the HELP Committee on his nomination to be the Health and Human Services secretary, a position that’s sure to get more scrutiny as Republicans have begun pushing to repeal and replace Obamacare. Price is an orthopedic surgeon, who has been a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act and proposed his own alternative. Even though he has been endorsed by the American Medical Association, the New York Times reported that his nomination has, nonetheless, left many of the country’s medical professionals divided. NPR’s Scott Horsley reported that Price is under plenty of scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest as he seeks to overhaul the country’s healthcare system, but has recently taken steps to inoculate himself from many of his financial interests. The confirmation for Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general tapped to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is sure to attract plenty of attention as he testifies before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He’s been a leading critic of the very agency he’s seeking to lead. Pruitt has been a leading opponent of President Obama’s environmental and climate regulations, according to NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce: His official biography calls him ”a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” He has repeatedly challenged the agency’s rules in court, and he has even sued the EPA for an allegedly cozy ”sue and settle” relationship with environmentalists. One profile noted that Pruitt would sue the federal government ”every chance he can get.” Pruitt is also a climate change skeptic, writing in National Review last year that: ”Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged  —   in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.” Commerce   Wilbur Ross will also have his confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which was also postponed from last week due to ethics paperwork delays. He’s a billionaire investor and turnaround specialist. And like Trump, Ross has been a vocal opponent of free trade and supports renegotiating current trade deals. Treasury   Steven Mnuchin will testify before the Senate Finance Committee at 10 a. m. on Thursday. The wealthy hedge fund manager and former Goldman Sachs executive was Trump’s chief fundraiser during the campaign. Mnuchin will face plenty of questions about his own financial interests and how he would plan to mitigate conflicts of interest if confirmed he’s promised to divest from as many as 43 companies and funds if confirmed, as well as step down from several corporate boards. However, the New York Times reported he won’t step down as an unpaid adviser for ”Steven T. Mnuchin Inc. ,” which manages his own investments. NPR’s John Ydstie also reports that Mnuchin’s time as chairman and CEO of the California bank IndyMac, which has ”been called a foreclosure machine,” is also sure to be a major focus of the hearings. Here’s what Ydstie reported in November: Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac on the condition that the FDIC agree to pay future losses above a certain threshold. They renamed the bank OneWest Bank and, after running it for six years, they sold it last year for a profit, estimated at close to $1. 5 billion. OneWest foreclosed on more than 36, 000 homeowners under Mnuchin’s tenure. Rick Perry will testify before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at 10 a. m. as well on his nomination to be Secretary of Energy. The former Texas governor also briefly ran for president before withdrawing early on in the 2016 campaign he, too, was initially critical of Trump before endorsing him last May. The Austin   reports that Perry has cut ties with several oil and gas companies ahead of his hearing."
368,"The U. S. has released 10 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the Arab nation of Oman, reducing the detainee population to 45 in the waning days of the Obama administration. The freed prisoners were not identified by name or nationality, though the Oman News Agency, citing the country’s Foreign Ministry, reported that the 10 had arrived in the country on Monday for ”temporary residence.” Prior to Monday’s announcement, Oman had taken in 20 Guantanamo detainees over the past two years, and all of them were from Oman’s neighbor, Yemen. At its peak, Guantanamo had close to 700 prisoners. When President Obama entered office in January 2009, he immediately pledged to close the prison in Cuba, which was down to 242 detainees at the time. Many have been released to their home countries or to other nations over the past eight years. However, most of those still in Guantanamo are considered by U. S. authorities to be too dangerous to be released, and Congress has barred them from being brought to the United States.   Donald Trump recently called on the Obama administration to stop releasing Guantanamo prisoners. On Jan 3, Trump tweeted: ”There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.” The Obama administration promptly rejected Trump’s call. Trump said during the presidential campaign he would like to see additional terror suspects sent to the prison. ”We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up,” Trump said last February."
369,"When Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings’ names  —   even the dog’s name. ”Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha,” she says. A lot of people mix up children’s names or friends’ names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla. and she wanted to find out why it happens. So she, and her colleagues, Cassidy Fox, Christin Ogle, and senior researcher David Rubin, did a survey of 1, 700 men and women of different ages, and she found that naming mistakes are very common. Most everyone sometimes mixes up the names of family and friends. Their findings were published in the journal Memory  Cognition.  ”It’s a normal cognitive glitch,” Deffler says. It’s not related to a bad memory or to aging, but rather to how the brain categorizes names. It’s like having special folders for family names and friends names stored in the brain. When people used the wrong name, overwhelmingly the name that was used was in the same category, Deffler says. It was in the same folder. And there was one group who was especially prone to the naming  . ”Moms, especially moms,” Deffler says. ”Any mom I talked to says, ’You know, I’ve definitely done this. ’” It works something like this: Say you’ve got an armful of groceries and you need some quick help from one of your kids. Your brain tries to rapidly retrieve the name from the family folder, but it may end up retrieving a related name instead, says Neil Mulligan, a cognitive scientist at UNC Chapel Hill. ”As you are preparing to produce the utterance, you’re activating not just their name, but competing names,” he says. You flick through the names of all your other children, stored in the family folder, and sometimes these competing names win. Like in the classic scene from the TV show, Friends. When Ross says his wedding vows, he is asked to repeat his fiancée’s name, Emily. He says his former girlfriend’s name Rachel instead. Now Ross probably had both Rachel’s and Emily’s names in his mental folder of loved ones and a mental   ensued. And it’s not just human loved ones that are filed together. ”Whatever dog we had at the time would be included in the string along with my sister Rebecca and my brother Jesse,” Deffler says. So your family dog typically gets filed with other family members. This of course sparks the question  —   what about your family cat? ”You are much more likely to be called the dog’s name than you are to be called the cat’s name.” Deffler says. This implies that psychologically, we categorize the dog’s name along with our family member’s names, according to Mulligan. ”And we don’t do that with cats’ names, apparently, or hamsters’ names or other animal names,” Mulligan says. Maybe that’s why we call the dog man’s best friend."
370,"Over the past eight years, Michelle Obama  —   a former attorney with degrees from Princeton and Harvard universities  —   has dealt with a lot of cheap (and often mean) shots lobbed in her direction. But while she has her detractors, this first black first lady is widely admired  —   and not just for her famously defined arms (they even have their own Tumblr). So it’s not surprising that, in these last days of disco for the Obama administration, a few fans of the first lady would share their love for her in the   book, The Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own, a collection of essays edited by author Veronica Chambers. These writers aren’t academically dissecting Obama in her role as first lady. No, these are FANS, so much so that some don’t need to call her by her last name. It’s just Michelle. Among them is a Top Chef, a jazzy jazz musician, and an original member of the Hamilton cast. Many of the essayists felt a connection, an intimacy with the first lady that Obama helped foster not just by being one of the people, but by reminding black Americans, as Chambers writes, that ”blackness is not burdensome, and we . .. have joy as a birthright.” In the book’s preface, film director Ava DuVernay declares, outright, that Michelle Obama’s mere presence in the White House was like taking a broom and sweeping out the dirt of past administrations. In one visit, Michelle supplanted the cartoons of Monica, Katrina and their representative presidencies, ripe with mishandled trust and low morals. In that one photo op, Michelle infused the image of the first lady with pride, panache and polish. Many of us saw a woman to be admired. A woman to be trusted. Scratch that. Many of us saw a Black woman to be admired. A Black woman to be trusted. There it is. Indeed. For many black women, writer Benilde Little sums up that feeling of pride meshed with admiration when she explains why she burst into tears upon seeing a   inauguration photo of the first lady in The New York Times: ”I’m just so happy,” Little writes. ”She’s just like me.” Little describes how Obama’s working    league background helped provide a more fully fleshed out portrayal of black women, something beyond the ”perfect pitch, high bourg or stone ghettoians.” While the first lady isn’t a product of the Jack and Jill set, we know her origin isn’t one of black pathology, either. Nope, her story is the norm for many black Americans: two   parents who pushed and encouraged her to aim high and do well, which she did. Then she got married and had some kids. Feminist Brittney Cooper put it real plainly in her essay: As    Michelle could correct   stereotypes of black women as neglectful parents and   welfare queens. She is, as blogger Damon Young writes in his essay, ”a regular black chick.” (He means that in a good way, trust me). While black Americans collectively saw her and saw our sisters and cousins and aunts and moms, we (black men) saw her and saw our classmates and our neighbors our coworkers and our colleagues. We saw the woman we wanted to approach, to court, to date, to commit to, to marry, and to start a family and grow old with, even if we didn’t actually realize we wanted to do any of those things before we saw her. In fact, Michelle’s   and sista girl realness comes up a lot, as writer after writer describes how she made the White House  —   and her husband  —   seem more relatable. Not all of the essays are perfect, but I don’t think readers will come away from this collection disappointed. They are reflections on a woman who feels like a good girlfriend to a large portion of the American public, though they only know her from afar. And the wistfulness in them brings to mind an oldie but goodie from Boyz II Men:"
371,"As President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice has grappled with with multiple crises  —   wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of the Islamic State, and cyber attacks blamed on China and Russia. Rice, who served as Obama’s United Nations ambassador during his first term, says there have been many successes over the past eight years. But she says her biggest disappointment has been the failure of the international community to stop Syria’s brutal civil war. ”I think all of us have profound regrets about Syria, because of the extraordinary human toll of the conflict, and the fact that the war has had consequences for Syria’s neighbors that are quite profound,” she said. As she prepares to leave office, Rice spoke with NPR Morning Edition host Rachel Martin in the West Wing of the White House. Obama articulated this red line that Syrian President Bashar Assad could not cross, and then he used chemical weapons and the U. S. did not respond. We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the Security Council. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile. But the fundamental problem of Syria persists, and that is that there’s an enormous human suffering. The conflict still rages and the United States, the international community, the U. N. Russia everybody else has not managed to find a negotiated solution. The Obama administration recently imposed sanctions against Russia for the cyber attack on our election. But the administration knew about the hack long before Nov 8. Why the delay? I think this is sort of a misunderstanding. We did what was the most important thing to do  —   back in October, on Oct. 7th, which was to inform the American people that indeed from the   judgment of our intelligence community and 17 intelligence agencies, that the Russian government at the highest levels was involved in cyber activity designed to influence the outcome of our election. So we wanted to the maximum extent possible inform the American people, but not to rush to react until the election had ended and we had plenty of time as we knew we would, depending on what evolved between Oct. 7th and the election itself, to calibrate what we thought was the appropriate response. I want to ask you about your successor, retired Gen. Michael Flynn. I’m not going to get into commenting on the views or the comments of my successor. My responsibility is to execute the most responsible, comprehensive, effective transition that we possibly can. That is the direction that President Obama has given and that’s what we’re doing. We’ve met for hours to try to share with our successors what we know about the challenges and the opportunities they’ve faced. We have prepared hundreds of briefing papers for General Flynn and his incoming team. Those conversations have been candid and constructive. I am not going to characterize what the next administration might do. I will ensure that we continue, up until noon on the 20th of January, to do all we possibly can, which is our sacred duty to the American people, to enable them to pick up the reins and to the greatest extent possible be ready to defend and secure this country on day one. Have you had conversations with Flynn about climate change? We’ve touched a bit on that but not in great depth. I think the incoming administration has said a number of different things on this topic. And I think we need to see where they land. It is manifestly in the interests of the United States to deal with the very real threat that climate change poses. And that’s why President Obama has worked so hard to reduce our own admissions and to lead internationally in forging the Paris climate agreement. And there are more steps that can be taken. We need to do that for our own interests, and I hope very much that as the incoming administration reviews both the domestic and international steps we’ve taken, that they’ll realize as well that it’s in our interest to continue with the Paris agreement and to deal with climate change as the real threat it actually is."
372,"More than a hundred female federal inmates, sentenced to   prison, have instead been held for years in two windowless rooms in a detention center in Brooklyn. Conditions for the women have been found to violate international standards for the treatment of prisoners. The problem in Brooklyn actually started in Connecticut, in what was the only federal prison for women in the Northeast. But the prison population across the country increased nearly   over the last 40 years, and men’s prisons were overflowing. In December 2012, the Bureau of Prisons decided to move the women out of the Danbury prison and move men in. The women were sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a jail in Brooklyn, until a new prison could be built on the site. The move was supposed to last 18 months. But nearly three years later, many are still stuck at MDC. ”We felt like we were animals that was taken to a pound and then that was it, they just closed the door and left us,” says Ramona Brant, 53. Brant was granted clemency by President Obama in February. Before that, she spent the first 19 years of a life sentence at Danbury for a nonviolent drug charge. She says it was OK  —   there were activities, jobs, access to the outdoors  —   until March 2014, when she and the others were moved to the jail. ”Little by little they started filling it up and before we knew it, it was 120 women in this one room, and it was unbearable,” she says. A report released by the National Association of Women Judges finds conditions for the women at MDC violate both the American Bar Association’s standards and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners. The judges said the women had no access to the outdoors and inmates complained of being unable to get appropriate medical care, especially gynecological care. At least one inmate was visibly pregnant. The warden told the judges the Bureau of Prisons couldn’t find doctors willing to work there. David Patton, executive director of the Federal Defenders of New York, the public defenders’ service for people who can’t afford a private attorney, says his organization has had issues with the facility for years. ”There have been maggots in the food,   mattresses, dryers that vent into the sleeping area, a lack of fresh air and recreation,” Patton says. Unlike Danbury, which is a   prison, MDC is a detention center, just meant to hold people while they await trial. ”Jails, like the MDCs, tend not to have the programming, the level of medical and mental health treatment and a whole range of other services that you find in a prison,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. He points out federal courts have ruled that prisoners have the right to outdoor exercise. ”The Supreme Court has made quite clear that prison conditions that might be tolerable for a few weeks or even a couple of months can ripen into unconstitutionality if they go on for a sufficiently long amount of time,” Fathi says. Sister Megan Rice, 86, spent 13 months at MDC during her sentence for vandalizing a nuclear facility in Tennessee. She says without appropriate support, the women are denied any real shot at rehabilitation. ”They’re meant to be given opportunities to grow, to leave the prison as a more healed person,” she says. Neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the Justice Department, which oversees it, would talk on record about the conditions or the delay in returning the women to Connecticut. Meanwhile, the new Danbury facility is finally ready. The bureau says they began transferring inmates back last month."
373,"In one of his last moves in office, President Obama has commuted the   prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the Army private who leaked a massive trove of military secrets to WikiLeaks. The former intelligence analyst’s prison sentence has been shortened to expire on May 17, 2017, according to a statement from the White House. This commutation was issued along with 208 others, including one for Oscar   who was part of a militant group that fought for Puerto Rican independence. Obama also pardoned 64 individuals, including retired Gen. James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to federal authorities. Manning, a transgender woman formerly known as Bradley, had requested clemency from Obama and said her life was at risk in an   prison, as we reported. She has admitted to ”releasing more than 700, 000 documents, including battlefield reports and U. S. embassy cables.” Her lawyers at the ACLU expressed relief after the decision, saying that Manning has already served more time behind bars than any other whistleblower in U. S. history, and under difficult conditions. ”Since she was first taken into custody, Chelsea has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement  —   including for attempting suicide  —   and has been denied access to medically necessary health care,” said lawyer Chase Strangio in a statement. ”This move could quite literally save Chelsea’s life, and we are all better off knowing that Chelsea Manning will walk out of prison a free woman, dedicated to making the world a better place and fighting for justice for so many.” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Margaret Huang, argued in a statement that the move was long overdue: ”Chelsea Manning exposed serious abuses, and as a result her own human rights have been violated by the U. S. government for years. . .. President Obama was right to commute her sentence, but it is long overdue. It is unconscionable that she languished in prison for years while those allegedly implicated by the information she revealed still haven’t been brought to justice.” House Speaker Paul Ryan released a statement protesting the commutation: ”This is just outrageous. Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. President Obama now leaves in place a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes.”  Sen. John McCain called the commutation a ”grave mistake” that may ”encourage further acts of espionage and undermine military discipline.” He added: ”Thousands of Americans have given their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq upholding their oaths and defending this nation. Chelsea Manning broke her oath and made it more likely that others would join the ranks of her fallen comrades. Her prison sentence may end in a few months’ time, but her dishonor will last forever.” It’s worth noting one name that did not appear on the list today: Edward Snowden. As NPR’s Carrie Johnson has reported, the NSA leaker, who is living in Russia, has also mounted ”a   bid for clemency.” Cartwright ”had been charged with falsely telling FBI investigators that he did not provide classified information for a book written by New York Times reporter David Sanger,” The   has reported."
374,"The education philosophy of Betsy DeVos boils down to one word: choice. The billionaire has used her money to support the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. For more than three hours on Tuesday,   Donald Trump’s pick to run the Education Department handled tough questions on school choice, charters and the future of the nation’s schools from the Senate committee that handles education. In her opening remarks, DeVos made clear she doesn’t think traditional public schools are a good fit for every child. ”Parents no longer believe that a     model of learning meets the needs of every child,” she said. ”And they know other options exist, whether magnet, virtual, charter, home,   or any other combination.” The problem, say DeVos’ critics, is her faith in the free market, and that she thinks parents should be able to use   dollars to pay for alternatives outside the system. That led to this exchange with Sen. Patty Murray,  .: Murray: ”Can you commit to us tonight that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?” DeVos: ”Senator, thanks for that question. I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk about how we address the needs of all parents and all students. And we acknowledge today that not all schools are working for the students that are assigned to them. And I’m hopeful that we can work together to find common ground and ways that we can solve those issues and empower parents to make choices on behalf of their children that are right for them.” Murray: ”I take that as not being willing to commit to not privatizing public schools or cutting money from education.” DeVos: ”I guess I wouldn’t characterize it in that way.” Murray: ”Well,” she said, laughing, ”okay.” Congress passed a big, bipartisan education law just a year ago  —   and, as the committee’s Republican chairman, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, pointed out during the hearing, vouchers didn’t make the cut. So he asked DeVos if, as secretary, she would try to push them onto states anyway. Her answer: ”No. I would hope I could convince you all of the merit of that in maybe some future legislation, but certainly not any kind of mandate from within the department.” Alexander is a strong supporter of DeVos, and began the hearing by saying he believes she is ”on our childrens’ side.” Also on DeVos’ side: former senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who introduced her and swung back at teachers unions and others who oppose her, in part, because the billionaire has never taught in, managed or attended a public school. In Lieberman’s words, it’s a positive that she’s not part of the ”education establishment.” ”Honestly, I believe that today that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job,” he said. The committee’s Democrats were frustrated not just with some of DeVos’ answers, but also with Chairman Alexander  —   first because he chose to hold the hearing before the Office of Government Ethics could finish its review of her financial holdings, looking for conflicts of interest, and second because Alexander held senators to a strict,   time limit, prompting one of his colleagues to lament what he called ”a rush job.”"
375,"There hasn’t been a more controversial pick for secretary of education, arguably, in recent memory than Donald Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos. The Senate confirmation hearings for the billionaire Republican fundraiser and activist from Michigan start today. DeVos is a champion of vouchers and expanding charter schools in a broader push for greater school choice  —   closely aligned with the views of the  . Her hearing was pushed back nearly a week because of Democrats’ concerns over her ”extensive financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest,” as Sen. Patty Murray of Washington put it. She’s the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor  Pensions Committee, which will conduct the hearing. Here are five areas of questioning that are likely to come up: 1. Money, DeVos and her family have given more than a million dollars to sitting Republican senators, according to Federal Election Commission reports, as well as some $10 million more to superPACs and party committees. That has prompted numerous   groups, including End Citizens United, to call for some senators to recuse themselves on a DeVos confirmation vote. Given that DeVos once said she expects a return on investment for contributions, expect Democrats to challenge her on how the DeVos family has used its billions to support ballot measures, organizations, causes and politicians in Michigan, as well as some of the elected officials who’ll be sitting in front of her. 2. ESSA  Expect tough questions on   Trump’s call for redirecting some $20 billion in federal aid to school choice. Trump has yet to put any meat on the bones of that idea. DeVos will certainly be asked whether that idea might mean redirecting money from federal Title I programs for the poor and disadvantaged. Or whether the new administration will seek to reopen the Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed with rare bipartisan support in 2015. Supporters, however, say DeVos has the leadership and vision to radically shake up the federal education bureaucracy, foster change and further return power to the states. ”Betsy has worked for years to improve educational opportunities for all children,” is how Lamar Alexander,  . put it. He’s the former education secretary who chairs the committee. ”As secretary, she will be able to implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind just as Congress wrote it, reversing the trend to a national school board and restoring to states, governors, school boards, teachers, and parents greater responsibility for improving education in their local communities.” 3. School choice, Even some proponents of expanding choice options are voicing fears that DeVos favors an unbridled approach to choice, with too little oversight and accountability. Michigan has one of the   charter programs in the country and critics point to Detroit’s troubles as one outcome of that. The state also has a high proportion of charter schools run by   organizations. That’s thanks, in part, to the advocacy and funding by DeVos, her family and the organizations they’ve supported. Sen. Murray put it this way in a release, after meeting with DeVos earlier this month: ”I continue to have serious concerns about her long record of working to privatize and defund public education, expand   private school vouchers, and block accountability for charter schools, including   charter schools.” GOP senators on the committee, meanwhile, seem thrilled that a strong advocate of greater school choice is before them. ”Looking forward to working with her,” Kentucky’s Rand Paul tweeted after DeVos was nominated. 4. Vouchers, Choice critics also worry that DeVos will push the federal government toward vouchers for private schools, a policy opponents say has amounted to a triumph ”of ideology over evidence.” ”If confirmed, would you use your position as Secretary of Education to promote the expansion of private school voucher programs in public education?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asked in a   letter listing more than 40 issues and questions she plans to bring up. Conservatives, meanwhile, are elated that they have a nominee who they believe will stand up to teachers unions they see as major impediments to choice and change. 5. Higher ed, Where does DeVos stand on key higher ed issues of access, debt, affordability and accountability that got lots of attention during the presidential race? ”There’s not much to draw on there,” says Lauren Asher, president of The Institute for College Access  Success. During the campaign, Trump did tell supporters at a rally, ”If the federal government is going to subsidize student loans, it has a right to expect that colleges work hard to control costs and invest their resources in their students. If colleges refuse to take this responsibility seriously, they will be held accountable.” Asher hopes nominee DeVos voices support for continued tough oversight of   colleges, something the Obama administration prioritized. ”Making sure that students including veterans and service members should be protected from waste, fraud and abuse plays directly into college affordability,” Asher says. As the Century Foundation recently pointed out, Republicans have a long track record of standing up for the interests of students and taxpayers when it comes to higher education. DeVos is likely to get questions on one of the only higher ed proposals the Trump campaign outlined during the race: an   repayment plan for federal student loans that caps a borrower’s payment at no more than 12. 5 percent of his or her monthly income. Remaining debt after 15 years of payments would be forgiven under Trump’s plan. Sen. Alexander says that in higher ed, too, he’s hoping DeVos will reduce bureaucracy and help ”clear out the jungle of red tape that makes more difficult for students to obtain financial aid.”"
376,"Donald Trump loves superlatives: words like ”biggest,” ”best” and ”greatest” pepper many of his statements, whether at a microphone or on Twitter. But a recent poll lends him another, less attractive superlative: the lowest favorability rating of any incoming president in at least 40 years. That’s what a new ABC   Post poll shows, with only 40 percent of Americans currently viewing Trump favorably and 54 percent unfavorably. That’s the lowest favorability for any incoming president since at least Jimmy Carter in 1977 in that poll. (Carter’s data are the earliest the poll presented.) The   performer on this measure was George W. Bush in 2001, and his favorability rating was 16 points higher than Trump’s currently is. A new   poll bolsters this finding, showing Trump with 44 percent favorability (along with 53 percent unfavorability). (A Pew poll from last month had him at an even lower 37 percent.) Americans have a similarly dismal view of his transition  —   in both polls, only 40 percent of Americans said they approve of how Trump is handling his transition. According to the   Post data, that is likewise far lower than for other recent presidents. George H. W. Bush, Clinton and Obama all had transition approvals of 80 percent or higher. Even the relatively unpopular George W. Bush received 72 percent approval of his transition, according to the   Post data. (The CNN poll likewise found that only 40 percent of Americans approve of how the   is handling the transition.) Trump himself, of course, isn’t pleased with the latest numbers and used his favorite social media platform to voice his disapproval on Tuesday morning: Ironically, that kind of complaining about poll numbers may be helping to drive those poll numbers lower. Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain raised this as a possibility on Tuesday. ”I think you can assume that it is because he seems to want to engage with every windmill that he can find, rather than focus on a large aspect of assuming the most important position on earth,” he told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. ”And, obviously, apparently, according to the polls, many Americans are not happy with that approach, when he has not even assumed the presidency.” The tweeting itself hasn’t endeared Trump to many Americans. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that almost   of American voters believed that ”Trump should close his personal Twitter account.” Even Republicans were about evenly split, with 49 percent saying he should close the @realDonaldTrump account, compared with 45 percent who disagreed. Even this relatively low favorability, though, is an improvement over Trump’s midcampaign lows. As of April 2016, Trump’s favorability was only at about 28 percent, according to averages from RealClearPolitics. That average also trended upward after Election Day, when it was 37. 5 percent, though it has leveled off since   settling at just above 42 as of Tuesday. And Trump still won. What’s more, however ugly Trump’s numbers may be, he may take some small comfort that when he takes office, his administration won’t be the most unpopular institution in Washington  —   Congress’ approval rating is currently at 14 percent. And that Congress, controlled by Republicans, gives him wide latitude in starting out on policy."
377,"Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that the Obama administration is attempting to ”undermine the legitimacy” of   Donald Trump. U. S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russian government, at the direction of Putin, hacked several U. S. targets as part of an ”influence campaign” to shape the outcome of the election. More recently, an unverified document reportedly assembled by a former intelligence operative accused Trump of colluding with Russia, and the Kremlin of holding blackmail material as leverage over Trump. Both Trump and Russia have rejected the allegations. At a news conference with the president of Moldova on Tuesday, Putin was asked about the unverified dossier. He denounced it in ”colorful language,” as NPR’s Lucian Kim reports from Moscow. Putin ridiculed one of the more lurid accusations in the dossier in particular, and said the document illustrates how far Western political elites have fallen, Lucian reports. But he also rejected the broader accusations of Russian involvement. ”What we see is the continuing sharp domestic political struggle although the presidential elections are over and they ended with a convincing victory of Mr. Trump,” Putin said, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. He said the allegations of Russian interference cause ”enormous” harm to U. S. interests and are meant to ”bind the   by hand and foot” to prevent him from carrying out his campaign pledges. ”Look, how can anything be done to improve the  . S. relations if such [a] hoax as the interference of some hackers in the election campaign emerges?” Putin asked, according to TASS. Intelligence officials in the U. S. say they stand ”resolutely” behind their conclusion of hacking operations directed by senior officials in Russia, but much of the evidence they drew on for conclusion remains classified. Trump has openly challenged the intelligence community’s consensus on this issue, but last week said for the first time he ”thinks” Russia was responsible for the election hacks."
378,"Before Luke Whitbeck began taking a $   drug, the   ’s health was inexplicably failing. A pale boy with enormous eyes, Luke frequently ran high fevers, tired easily and was skinny all over, except his belly stuck out like a bowling ball. ”What does your medicine do for you?” Luke’s mother, Meg, asked after his weekly drug treatment recently. ”Be so strong!” Luke said, wrapping his chubby fist around an afternoon cheese stick. Luke now spends days playing with his big brother, thanks to what he calls his ”superhero” medicine, a drug called Cerezyme, which has saved his life. For the Whitbecks, finding a way to pay for the drug has been a   struggle. Their family business and its insurer cough up hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, spreading the cost across the people it insures. Cerezyme is an orphan drug, which means it was created to treat a rare disease, one that affects fewer than 200, 000 people in the U. S. The orphan drug program overseen by the Food and Drug Administration is loaded with government incentives and has helped hundreds of thousands of patients like Luke feel better or even stay alive. But the    program has opened the door to almost unlimited price tags and created incentives for drugmakers to cash in, and to cash in repeatedly, a Kaiser Health News investigation shows. The explosion has burdened insurers as well as government programs like Medicare and Medicaid with drugs that cost up to $840, 000 a year that they have almost no choice but to pay for. The Orphan Drug Act has clearly spurred the creation of   drugs. And more are needed: The National Institutes of Health estimates that   million Americans, or about 1 in 10, suffer from a rare disease. All told, there are about 7, 000 of them. But the costs are adding up quickly. Annual sales from orphans are expected to grow 12 percent a year through 2020  —   a pace that   makers could ”only dream about,” market watcher EvaluatePharma said in its most recent orphan drug report. In 2014, the average annual price tag for orphan drugs was $111, 820 versus $23, 331 for mainstream drugs. What’s more, the number of orphan drugs is growing, and their total portion of prescription drug spending is growing, according to EvaluatePharma. Orphan drug sales worldwide are expected to account for just over 20 percent of all drug sales, excluding generics, by 2020. Europe and Japan have strong orphan drug programs as well. At Aetna, orphans are now the   part of the giant insurer’s spending on drugs and are driving up insurance premiums, said Dr. Ed Pezalla, Aetna’s former national medical director for pharmacy policy and strategy. For many drugmakers, orphan drugs look so profitable that they’re drawing attention from mass market drugs. ”Companies [are going] after the rare diseases . .. and a larger set of patients with other diseases [are] left behind,” said Alan Carr, a research analyst for Needham  Co. High prices are a reflection of the high cost of developing new drugs, said Anne Pritchett, vice president for policy and research at the industry lobbying firm Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. ”You may have a company that focuses on a rare disease area for 20, 30, years and never turns a profit [but] they keep at it,” Pritchett said. Others dispute that calculation. In a December report to Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services said orphan drugs cost about $1 billion to develop compared with $2. 6 billion for mass market drugs. The creators of the orphan drug program say the price spiral  —   and loopholes in the approval process  —   have undermined the spirit of a   law. ”What was intended for a good purpose can be used for a purpose that’s harmful to patients who can’t afford drugs,” said former U. S. Rep. Henry Waxman,  . a primary sponsor of the 1983 Orphan Drug Act. ”And it makes the whole cost of all of these pharmaceuticals much more expensive for everybody.” ”That’s not normal”  One winter day in early 2016, Meg Whitbeck stood in her Connecticut home holding a baby onesie. Meg’s days were filled with Luke spiking high fevers, rushing to the doctor’s office and watching her toddler struggle to keep food down. Just before slipping the onesie over Luke’s head, she paused. It was a   onesie Luke was 18 months old. ”That’s not normal. Babies fly through clothes the first year and a half of life,” Whitbeck said. As Meg lifted another onesie from Luke’s dresser, she took a deep breath as she realized: It was full of   and   clothes. Within weeks, Luke would be lying in a hospital bed at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla, N. Y. If handed a toy, he would hold it, but he lacked enough energy to play. Luke was diagnosed with Gaucher disease  —   a genetic condition that affects only about 6, 000 people in the U. S. Luke’s body lacked the glucocerebrosidase enzyme, and every cell in his tiny frame was becoming compromised. Luke’s liver and spleen were swollen, and without treatment his bones would eventually become fragile. Brain damage could follow. Some babies die before the age of 2, if they aren’t treated. Patients can live decades with enzyme replacement therapy. Dr. David Kronn, who heads the medical genetics unit at Maria Fareri, said Luke’s condition was ”quite severe” and he needed help fast. Luke immediately began treatment, but the family said it spent months uncertain whether its health insurer, Oxford Health Plans, which is owned by UnitedHealthcare, would cover the drug. The drug is made by Sanofi Genzyme and costs $6, 356. 69 for each treatment, the Whitbecks’ paperwork shows. ”At the time, there was a lot going on physically with Luke,” Meg Whitbeck recalled. In the first two months after his diagnosis, the family would receive bills and ”we were just putting it all in a pile.” In late April, the Whitbecks received a letter from the insurer asking for additional medical information to process the payments for Luke’s medicine. It was the first time, Meg said, that she became scared about how the drug would be paid for. She recalled wondering: ”How can something that’s going to keep my baby alive not be covered by insurance?” UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman Tracey Lempner said her company covered Cerezyme and the dosage suggested by the doctor from the beginning. Last May, the Whitbecks received a confirmation letter that UnitedHealthcare would cover the drug. Even then, though, the Whitbecks said they were required to get the coverage reauthorized at random intervals, ranging from three weeks to 10 weeks. And in late October, fear struck the family when a letter arrived saying Luke’s medicine was reauthorized for just one week. In an emailed statement, UnitedHealthcare said it granted a request in early November from Luke’s doctor to approve payment for a full year. The insurer declined multiple requests for interviews with executives. But Lempner stated in an email that ”specialty medications like these are among the greatest drivers of pharmacy benefit costs for all employers, individuals, insurers and the government.” At the request of Kaiser Health News, Express Scripts, which manages pharmacy benefits, analyzed the orphan drugs on its approved list, or formulary. Four orphans cost more than $70, 000 for a   supply, or $840, 000 annually. An additional 29 orphan drugs cost at least $28, 000 for a   supply, or more than $336, 000 a year. At those prices, the revenue for a an   maker can build up quickly: A $50, 000 orphan taken by 50, 000 patients could reach $2. 5 billion in annual sales a $300, 000 orphan for just 5, 000 people could hit $1. 5 billion a year. Just after Christmas, Biogen Inc. announced it would market Spinraza, its newly approved treatment for spinal muscular atrophy, for up to $750, 000 in the first year and $375, 000 in later years. Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges wrote in a note that the price could be ”the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of the US market’s tolerance for rare disease pricing.” Executives at Express Scripts, the pharmacy that supplies Luke’s medicine, said orphan drugs like Cerezyme often have very few competing drugs that could help them drive down the cost. ”We have very little negotiating power because the pharmaceutical company can set the price and we have to be a price acceptor,” said Dr. Steve Miller, chief medical officer for Express Scripts. In the past year, the Whitbecks said, they have paid more than $17, 000 out of pocket for Luke’s medical care. Most of the cost falls on Oxford, the insurer that covers the 25 employees and their families where Drew works. The small company, owned by Meg’s side of the family, said medical coverage for its employees amounts to about $338, 000 a year, and employees don’t pay monthly premiums. The ultimate cost to the Whitbecks is unclear, but they fear the drug treatments, plus related care, could reach into hundreds of thousands per year if the reauthorizations ever stop. Meg has gone back to work part time as a dietitian, and the Whitbecks launched a fundraising effort called ”The Warrior Campaign” on social media, which shows they have raised nearly $12, 000 thus far. They also applied for $15, 000 in aid from Sanofi Genzyme’s patient assistance program. So far, the company has paid for a month of Cerezyme and provided guidance from a case manager, the family said. While she appreciates the support, Meg Whitbeck is daunted by the uncertainty of what the family has to come up with. ”We’re not going to not treat Luke, but we’re also never going to be able to pay these bills,” she said. ”It was almost laughable.” Much of the drug’s early development cost was paid for by the National Institutes of Health, according to a 1992 report from the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The report notes that Genzyme spent about $29. 4 million on RD for the early version of the drug, Ceredase. The company quickly recovered those costs. Ceredase launched with a nearly $300, 000 price tag in 1991 as one of the most expensive drugs in the world. Cerezyme, a genetically engineered successor, came to market in 1994. French pharmaceutical giant   acquired Genzyme for $20. 1 billion in 2011. Sanofi Genzyme declined multiple requests for interviews. In an email, company spokeswoman Lisa Clemence said the company has raised the price of Cerezyme slightly since it launched and that relative to inflation, it is 33 percent less expensive today than 22 years ago. Asked how drug prices are set, Clemence emailed that it is ”determined by the clinical value they provide to patients and the rarity of the disease they treat.” Cerezyme is still the drugmaker’s     medicine, with nearly $800 million in 2015 annual sales, according to the French company’s annual financial filing. Despite competition, prices to treat Gaucher disease have not come down indeed, the newest drugs on the market are priced at about $300, 000 as well. Drew Whitbeck joked that, in the end, it all feels like Monopoly money to him. Meg would like the company to justify Cerezyme’s price. ”I totally get from a scientific point of view, what it takes to create, manufacture and deliver these medications,” she said. ”But why can’t they make it a little less expensive? What’s holding them back?”   specialty drugs, which include orphans, have seen ”incredible price increases the past few years, across the board,” said Craig Burns, vice president for research at America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents health insurers. AHIP, in a study led by Burns, found that the prices of 45 orphan drugs increased 30 percent, on average, from 2012 through 2014. Former U. S. Rep. James Greenwood, now president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group, said insurers are overstating the impact. ”The insurance industry likes to tell us that the reason our premiums [and] our copays and coinsurance are going up and our deductibles are going up” is high prices for orphans or other drugs, Greenwood said. ”It just isn’t the case.” The bulk of health care spending, Greenwood said, is for hospitals, doctors and nursing homes. Prescription drugs get attention, he said, because ”we are an easier target.”  Insurers, including UnitedHealthcare, try to mitigate the costs of orphans and other   drugs by requiring patients to pay a larger share, setting quantity limits and asking patients to try other less expensive drugs first, a process known as step therapy. Some believe that amounts to rationing. ”Nobody wants to talk about rationing, but there is already some of that anyway because of [the] levels of insurance that we have,” said   Milne, director of research at Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, ”What would God really think about this?”  In the early 1980s, Abbey Meyers was known on Capitol Hill as the housewife from Connecticut  —   an angry mother who wouldn’t put up with pharmaceutical companies ignoring her son’s illness, Tourette syndrome. A drugmaker had stopped producing medicine for the disorder, saying there weren’t enough patients to justify the cost. Meyers mobilized advocates, lawmakers and even TV actor Jack Klugman from the popular Quincy M. E. show to persuade Congress to pass the Orphan Drug Act. Under the law, companies with orphan drugs win some of the richest financial incentives in the regulatory world: a 50 percent tax credit on research and development in the U. S. fee waivers, and access to federal grants. In a 2009 webinar, an FDA official referred to the incentive package as ”our ’basket of goodies.’ ” Most important, once an orphan gains FDA approval, the agency guarantees it will not approve another version to treat that specific disease for seven years, even if the brand name company’s patent has run out. Now, three decades since the program started, Meyers is worried that corporate greed is ruining her legacy. ”They will set a price of $300, 000 a year for their drug for a fatal disease. And they’ll go to church every Sunday, and they will pray, and they’ll ask for God’s grace, you know?” Meyers said during an interview at her Connecticut home. ”I’m wondering, what does God really think about this?”  Epilogue  Just before Christmas, the Whitbecks coped with another health scare. There was a blockage in Luke’s chest port, an implanted catheter through which Cerezyme is delivered into his body each week. He needed surgery to fix it. He came down with pneumonia afterward but has recovered. ”I hope in 2017 there are no hospital admissions,” Meg Whitbeck said. Then she paused and recalled that the family hadn’t yet seen all the bills from the port surgery. The family’s savings disappeared in 2016. And the Whitbecks are still trying to figure out if they have to pay an outstanding $6, 000 bill for Cerezyme that appeared on the latest pharmacy statement. ”We’re not scared,” Whitbeck said, but ”when you’re a parent of a child with a chronic illness, you’re always walking on a tightrope. . .. Every day we have to give [Luke] the   and make sure everything is good. If it’s a good day, everything is like a normal family.” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent newsroom that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. KHN’s John Hillkirk, Heidi de Marco, Francis Ying, Lydia Zuraw, Emily Kopp, Elizabeth Lucas, Diane Webber and Marilyn Thompson contributed to this report. NPR’s Scott Hensley, Joe Neel and Meredith Rizzo also contributed."
379,"More than 30 years ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed a landmark health bill aimed at motivating pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs for people whose rare diseases had been ignored. By the drugmakers’ calculations, the markets for such diseases weren’t big enough to bother with. But lucrative financial incentives created by the Orphan Drug Act signed into law by President Reagan in 1983 succeeded far beyond anyone’s expectations. More than 200 companies have brought almost 450   orphan drugs to market since the law took effect. Yet a Kaiser Health News investigation shows that the system intended to help desperate patients is being manipulated by drugmakers to maximize profits and to protect niche markets for medicines already being taken by millions. The companies aren’t breaking the law but they are using the Orphan Drug Act to their advantage in ways that its architects say they didn’t foresee or intend. Today, many orphan medicines, originally developed to treat diseases affecting fewer than 200, 000 people, come with astronomical price tags. And many drugs that now have orphan status aren’t entirely new. More than 70 were drugs first approved by the Food and Drug Administration for mass market use. These medicines, some with familiar brand names, were later approved as orphans. In each case, their manufacturers received millions of dollars in government incentives plus seven years of exclusive rights to treat that rare disease, or a monopoly. Drugmakers of popular mass market drugs later sought and received orphan status for the cholesterol blockbuster Crestor, Abilify for psychiatric conditions, cancer drug Herceptin, and rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, the   medicine in the world. More than 80 other orphans won FDA approval for more than one rare disease, and in some cases, multiple rare diseases. For each additional approval, the drugmaker qualified for a fresh batch of incentives. Botox, stocked in most dermatologists’ offices, started out as a drug to treat painful muscle spasms of the eye and now has three orphan drug approvals. It’s also approved as a mass market drug to treat a variety of ailments, including chronic migraines and wrinkles. Altogether, KHN’s investigation found that about a third of orphan approvals by the FDA since the program began have been either for repurposed mass market drugs or drugs that received multiple orphan approvals. ”What we are seeing is a system that was created with good intent being hijacked,” said Bernard Munos, a former corporate strategy adviser at drug giant Eli Lilly and Co. who reviewed the KHN analysis of several FDA drug databases. It’s ”quite remarkable that it has gone on for so long.” And the proportion of new drugs approved as orphans has ballooned. In 2015, 21 orphan drugs were approved, accounting for 47 percent of all new medicines, up from just 29 percent in 2010 in 2016, nine more orphans won approval, 40 percent of the total. (You can search a database of orphan drugs with a tool at the end of this story.) When a drugmaker wins approval of a medicine for an orphan disease, the company gets seven years of exclusive rights to the marketplace, which means the FDA won’t approve another version to treat that rare disease for seven years, even if the brand name company’s patent has run out. The exclusivity is compensation for developing a drug designed for a small number of patients whose total sales weren’t expected to be that profitable. But the exclusivity is a potent pricing tool. Drugmakers can charge whatever they want by shielding their medicine from competition. The market exclusivity granted by the Orphan Drug Act can be a vital part of the protective shield that companies create. What’s more, manufacturers can return to the FDA with the same drug again and again, each time testing the drug against a new rare disease. Critics have assailed drugmakers in the past for gaming the orphan drug approval process. But the extent to which companies have been winning approval for drugs that aren’t what advocates call ”true orphans” hadn’t been documented until the Kaiser Health News investigation. Munos said he was ”shocked” by the sheer number of mass market drugs being repurposed as well as those approved multiple times. Even agency officials said they weren’t aware of the scope of the issue. After reviewing KHN’s findings for two weeks, Dr. Gayatri Rao, director of the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development, said she ”appreciated the work” and expressed interest in studying how often drug companies are ”repurposing” a drug for a new rare disease, or taking ”multiple bites of the apple.” ”We are going to look into this,” she said, adding that she could consider a regulatory change. Rao pointed out that the ”repurposing” of drugs does have scientific and patient benefits. For example, cancer drugs approved for one type of malignancy can be tested and approved for others. Gleevec, a drug that revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia, now has nine orphan approvals. But in a 2015 commentary published in the American Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Martin Makary at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine focused on cancer drugs including Gleevec, arguing that the drug was never meant to serve an orphan population. Instead, Makary and his team wrote, drugmakers purposely identify small patient populations to gain additional approvals  —   a process he described as ”salami slicing.” ”By salami slicing the disease into subgroups, it allows them to get the orphan drug approval with all the government benefits and even some of the subsidies,” Makary said. The prices of such medications often rise because they have seven years without competition for a new set of patients, Makary added. The FDA has taken a different view of repurposing. ”We always talked about how we permit the second bite of the apple, third bite of the apple, as one small way to incentivize repurposing,” Rao said, noting that industry and patient groups have been pressing the FDA for even stronger incentives. ”Now, all of sudden, it seems like, wow, this practice may be driving up prices.” Novartis, which owns Gleevec, said in an email statement that the company is advancing research and following the science to ”bring the right treatments to the right patients based on unmet need, not the size of the patient population.” Two KHN reporters spent six months analyzing data and talking to lawmakers, patients, advocates, doctors and companies to understand how the FDA’s orphan drug program has evolved amid a national uproar over soaring drug prices.   Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to bring down prescription drug prices, and on Wednesday during a press conference he said the drug industry is ”getting away with murder.” The investigation examined how drugmakers use the law to their advantage  —   often with the guidance of former FDA officials  —   and have made the development of medicines that were once thought to be business backwaters into one of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest sectors. Orphan drugs now account for seven of the 10   drugs of any kind, ranked by annual sales, according to EvaluatePharma. ”Orphans are wicked hot,” said Dr. Tim Coté, a former FDA official who now runs a consulting firm that advises drugmakers on orphan drugs. No one disputes that orphan drugs have helped or saved hundreds of thousands of patients suffering from debilitating or even fatal rare diseases. And drug industry officials say companies should be rewarded, not punished, for making those treatments possible and for pursuing new drugs that aren’t always an economic success. Research and development is ”long, costly, risky,” said Anne Pritchett, vice president, policy and research at industry lobbying group PhRMA. ”When you look at cystic fibrosis, it was 25 years to the development of an effective therapy . .. I think we would be concerned about anything that would undermine the current [orphan drug] incentives.” Former U. S. Rep. Henry Waxman,  . a champion of the 1983 Orphan Drug Act, takes a different view. ”The Orphan Drug Act has been a great success because many people with diseases that affect very few people now have drugs available to them,” Waxman said. ”But it’s been in some ways turned on its head when it becomes the basis of manipulating the system for the drug company to make much more money than they would in an open, competitive market.” Booming business  On a late summer day, Tim Coté sits in a corner office of his Sandy Spring, Md. consulting firm, Coté Orphan. He leans into his computer microphone to dispense insider knowledge about the orphan drug approval process on a webcast hosted by FDAnews, a trade news organization. Listeners have paid about $300 a head, but Coté said he wasn’t paid for doing it. The FDA is more flexible in evaluating drugs for rare diseases, he said, explaining that ”about half of them get through with just one pivotal clinical trial. Not so for common diseases.” The FDA, citing a report from the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said about   of orphan drugs were approved with one adequate and   trial with supportive evidence. It typically requires two or three such trials to approve a mass market drug. Coté also told the webinar audience that clinical trials for orphan drugs are usually smaller and the approval is a ”different scientific and regulatory experience.” Coté knows his stuff. He was Rao’s immediate predecessor as chief of the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development. It’s not unusual for government officials to leave the FDA and other regulatory agencies and obtain jobs as consultants or industry executives. Coté’s website, headlined ”The Inside Track,” notes that he oversaw applications that led to the approval of at least 150 orphan drugs when he was at the FDA and that his firm is now the largest submitter of orphan drug applications. ”We write the entire application,” the website for Coté’s company notes, adding that his staff of 25 includes regulatory scientists with deep knowledge and experience in FDA’s ”unwritten rules” regarding orphan drugs. Many of Coté’s more than 300 clients are small biotech companies  —   begun by researchers or even passionate parents who found investment backing. Parents Ilan and Annie Ganot, for example, started Solid Biosciences to find treatments and potentially a cure for their son with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Coté will guide them through the regulatory process since most don’t have the expertise. He can offer his expertise and develop an application that makes it easier for the FDA to designate and approve the drug. ”When you make the FDA smile, the value of your asset goes up. And that’s how the game is played,” he said in an interview, adding quickly, ”It’s really not a game because people’s lives are what is in balance.” Coté and other   officials play a vital role in helping drugmakers choose rare disease targets and get through the FDA approval process. A small cottage industry has grown around the Orphan Drug Act. Dr. Marlene Haffner, who preceded Coté in FDA’s orphan office, started her own consulting firm, too, to advise small and large companies on orphan drug applications. A third company is Camargo Pharmaceutical Services, led by industry veterans and former FDA officials, which advises companies focused on repurposing drugs for orphan approval. The firm tries ”to be in front of the FDA a lot  —   three to four times a month,” said Jennifer King, Camargo’s director of marketing. Fees for consulting on orphan drugs industrywide range from $5, 000 to $100, 000, depending upon the services provided, Coté said. Getting through the orphan approval process involves a series of steps. First, drugs must be designated by the FDA as potential candidates for approval. A company has to demonstrate that its drug is a promising treatment for a disease that affects fewer than 200, 000 patients. If the FDA agrees and makes the formal designation, financial incentives kick in, including a 50 percent tax break on research and development and access to federal grants. When drugs get orphan designation, companies often reap other financial rewards. Shares in publicly traded companies often rise on the news  —   sometimes soaring as high as 30 percent. That happens, in part, because orphans have a track record of being approved at much higher rates than drugs for common diseases. The 50 percent RD tax credit pays off, too. In 2012, one of the biggest orphan drug companies, BioMarin, received $32. 6 million from a combination of federal and state of California tax credits. BioMarin Spokeswoman Debra Charlesworth confirmed that the orphan credit made up the ”vast majority” of that deferred tax benefit. She also noted that credit ”has successfully fueled an industry that didn’t previously exist” and led to more rare disease research.   orphan drug tax credits cost the federal government $1. 76 billion in fiscal 2016  —   roughly what President Obama asked Congress to spend to fight the Zika virus before a $1. 1 billion expenditure was approved. And, because so many orphan drugs are under development, the U. S. could grant nearly $50 billion in tax credits from 2016 to 2025, estimates the Treasury Department. There’s a lot of creativity behind figuring out how to make a drug an orphan. In Coté’s webinar and in multiple interviews, he described many ways companies can win orphan status. They can test their drugs on children with adult diseases, such as schizophrenia, or find drugs for ailments like malaria that are uncommon in America. ”African sleeping sickness, horrible problem in Africa but not here, not in the U. S.,” Coté told his webinar audience. ”So a drug development effort that was aimed toward some of these tropical diseases can actually get all the benefits of the Orphan Drug Act.” Another popular strategy is to create     drugs that represent incremental steps forward. About 30 percent of Coté’s clients are companies looking to improve upon some other orphan drug ”which just made billions and billions,” he said in an interview. Repurposing an already approved drug is another strategy his firm promotes. In a video posted on his website in July, Coté explained the advantages for companies that can move directly into a clinical trial without much preparatory work because the drug’s safety has already been demonstrated. ”All you gotta do is establish that the product can work in this new orphan indication,” he said, adding tips on how to do it and still make money. ”That is not a true orphan drug”  Turning mass market drugs into orphans has been a familiar path for some of the most popular drugs ever discovered. AbbVie’s Humira is the   drug in the world, and most of its sales are in the U. S. where revenue reached $7. 6 billion through the third quarter of 2016 and $11. 8 billion worldwide, according to the company’s latest financial report. Humira was approved by the FDA in late 2002 to treat millions of people who suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Three years later, AbbVie asked the FDA to designate it as an orphan to treat juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which, they told the FDA, affects between 30, 000 and 50, 000 Americans. That pediatric use was approved in 2008, and Humira subsequently was approved for four more rare diseases, including Crohn’s and uveitis, an inflammatory disease affecting the eyes. The ophthalmologic approval would extend the market exclusivity for Humira for that disease until 2023. When asked why AbbVie sought multiple orphan designations and approvals for Humira, the company declined to comment. Peter Saltonstall, executive director of the National Organization for Rare Disorders, said that Humira is ”not a true orphan drug.” But, he said, the company has ”the ability to go out and get orphan designation. That’s the way the law reads right now . .. they can do whatever they want to do.” It is difficult to say exactly how or if orphan exclusivity affects the price of Humira, which is a complex biologic drug and also has been protected by numerous patents. The drug has long been AbbVie’s top seller, accounting for 63 percent of its revenues, according to its most recent financial filing. EvaluatePharma notes in its recent report that Humira, as well as a handful of other top drugs, receive less than 25 percent of their sales from orphan uses. Still, if Humira’s orphan uses accounted for just 10 percent of annual sales, the revenue would surpass $1 billion. By stacking up a series of orphan disease approvals, one   exclusivity period leads into another, maximizing the length of a company’s monopoly.   Pharmaceuticals, for example, had some form of orphan exclusivity for Carnitor, a metabolic disorder drug, for more than 20 years. It received a second orphan approval four months before its first one was set to expire. And it won its third orphan approval, for an IV formulation of the drug, just one day before its second exclusivity period was set to expire in December of 1999. ”The sequence and timing of regulatory filings for Carnitor reflect the time required to conduct large controlled clinical trials, as well as evolving medical strategies and regulatory pathways pursued by different sponsors over many years,” said GianFranco Fornasini, senior vice president of scientific affairs at  . The FDA’s Rao said each new exclusivity period is disease specific and once any   period runs out, generics can come in. Gleevec, for example, won FDA approval to treat several kinds of rare cancer. All but one of its orphan exclusivity periods had expired by 2015, allowing two generics to enter the marketplace. But Gleevec still has exclusivity until 2020 to treat newly diagnosed Philadelphia   acute lymphoblastic leukemia in patients who are also on chemotherapy. It’s also true, Rao explained, that some of the drugs that go through the orphan process may not specifically treat a rare disease. For example, a very toxic cancer drug might may not work well in earlier stages because its risks outweigh the benefits. But the company may propose that it will help a smaller group of   cancer patients and win orphan approval just for that group. Former FDA orphan drug director Haffner said her FDA office worked on rules defining how companies could legitimately pursue approval for a small group of patients with a specific unmet medical need. ”People have played games with the Orphan Drug Act since it was passed,” said Haffner, who first took a job at drugmaker Amgen after leaving the FDA and then became an independent consultant. ”It’s the American way, I don’t mean that in a nasty way. But we take advantage of what’s in front of us.” In 2013, the FDA clarified the Orphan Drug Act’s regulations and said it wanted to avoid the possibility that some companies could ”potentially ’game’ approvals by seeking successive narrow approvals of a drug.” In reality, Rao said, the regulations did not really change ”much of what our practice was.” The agency wanted to address what Rao said were ”common misconceptions” and frequently asked questions, so officials changed wording in the regulations to better define exactly what could be considered an orphan drug. Breaking down larger, broader diseases into smaller groups is still allowed under certain conditions and companies can still win multiple orphan approvals for a single drug  —   even if the total population served rises above the 200, 000 mark. Amgen Inc. ’s Repatha won marketing approval and exclusive rights in 2015 for the orphan disease homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia, which affects a population of about 300 people in the U. S. On the very same day, the drug was approved as a mass market drug to treat up to 11 million people with uncontrolled levels of LDL cholesterol, said Amgen spokeswoman Kristen Davis.  Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, who ran a broader market trial on Repatha, said, ”It’s certainly not considered by any of us to be an orphan drug.” Safeguarding the prize, Considering the long history of what’s happened, Tim Coté acknowledges that there are ”some loopholes” in the Orphan Drug Act. Perhaps 3 percent or less of approved orphans were not in the ”spirit” of the law, he said. But Coté, rare disease advocates, patients and people in the drug industry expressed fear that changing the Orphan Drug Act or questioning its success would hurt the development of drugs for rare patients. Former U. S. Rep. Jim Greenwood, now president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, an industry trade group, said that concerns about high prices for orphan drugs aren’t justified. The incentives, he said, should not be altered because rare diseases are ”tragically killing and brutalizing mostly children.” Greenwood seemed unaware that dozens of orphan approvals stemmed from the repurposing of mass market drugs, like Humira or Enbrel, another drug developed first for rheumatoid arthritis. Still, he said, ”I would argue that the risk of losing incentives in the system far outweighs the benefit of trying to save a few pennies on the health care dollar.” It’s a sentiment that Coté and other advocates share. While talking about the $311, 000 annual   for cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco, Coté said any parent whose child has the disease would be a big fan of the drug. ”The price point is justified because actually it has a dramatic effect on the children. Dead children . .. people are willing to pay a lot to prevent that,” Coté said. ”And that’s a real good thing that we have this drug. OK?” The first drug to specifically target the underlying biochemical defect of cystic fibrosis, Kalydeco is approved to treat a subset of patients who have specific mutations in their genes. Development of the drug was financed by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which sold its rights to sales royalties from Kalydeco and other cystic fibrosis drugs for $3. 3 billion in 2014. Others, including Henry Waxman, are far more critical and have tried to do something about it over the years. Waxman proposed multiple bills to rein in corporate profits by amending the orphan drug law that he sponsored, but none succeeded. The FDA has also tried, but failed, to keep corporations in check. In 2012, drugmaker Depomed Inc. filed suit against the FDA for refusing to give its drug Gralise seven years of market exclusivity as a treatment for pain related to shingles. Rao said the agency wanted to see proof that Gralise, a    pill, was clinically superior to other drugs, noting there ”were a bunch of other generics on the market” with different formulations and dosing requirements. Gralise’s active ingredient, gabapentin, is the same one as in Pfizer’s mass market blockbuster Neurontin, which is also approved for treatment of shingles pain. The FDA approved Gralise but denied seven years of exclusivity. In response, the drugmaker sued the agency and won its case, arguing that according to the law they didn’t have to prove their drug was clinically superior to gain the monopoly. Today, the drug is one of Depomed’s top products with sales of $81 million in 2015. And, in a recent proxy statement, Depomed listed ”protecting Gralise exclusivity” as a corporate objective under the category of ”enhance and protect future cash flow.” Its orphan exclusivity ends in 2018. Depomed spokesman Christopher Keenan said Gralise wanted patent exclusivity to block competition. But, Keenan said, ”had the patent effort failed on all fronts the Orphan Drug Designation would have been very important.” After reviewing KHN’s analysis, Rao said she wants to better understand why drugmakers are applying for multiple approvals and has asked for a    review of all orphan designations granted in 2010 and 2015. She said the agency lacks the resources to run an analysis of the entire orphan drug database. ”Our goal is to try to get it right,” she said. ”There are over 7, 000 rare diseases, likely more, the vast majority of which have nothing. . .. I want to ensure that we continue to keep our eye on that prize.” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent newsroom that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. KHN’s John Hillkirk, Heidi de Marco, Francis Ying, Lydia Zuraw, Emily Kopp, Elizabeth Lucas, Diane Webber and Marilyn Thompson contributed to this report. NPR’s Scott Hensley, Joe Neel and Meredith Rizzo also contributed. "
380,"The number of people 60 and older with student loan debt has quadrupled in the past decade, and older Americans now represent the   segment of the U. S. student loan market, according to a new report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As of 2015, more than 2. 8 million Americans over 60 had outstanding student loan debt  —   up from some 700, 000 in 2005. The vast majority are loans taken out by parents or grandparents to finance education opportunities for young people, with 73 percent of borrowers over 60 reporting that their student loan debt is owed ”for a child’s   grandchild’s education.” Many private student loans require students to apply jointly with a   or   the report notes, and more than half of   are over 55. The average amount owed has also increased dramatically. In 2005, the average amount owed by borrowers 60 and older was about $12, 000. In 2015, it was more than $23, 000. The increase in both the frequency and the magnitude of student loan debt has led to financial problems for some older borrowers. The CFPB report found multiple indications that people over 60 were struggling to repay student loan debt as they moved into retirement, including: Social Security is the only source of income for nearly   of people 65 and older. ”This means that benefit offsets may impose serious financial hardship for many of the affected older borrowers,” the report states. The conclusion by the CFPB is that older Americans are frequently in a poor position to handle paying back student loans on behalf of their children and grandchildren. ”Unlike their younger counterparts, who generally are expected to experience income growth over their lives, older consumers typically experience a decrease in income as they age,” the report concludes. For federal student loan programs, the CFPB recommends an ”overhaul” to help older Americans take advantage of   repayment plans. The report’s authors give the following example: ”Consider the case of a retiree whose income is limited to only her $1, 165 monthly Social Security check, which is the median Social Security benefit for an older consumer that depends on Social Security for all of her income. If this retiree has defaulted on a federal student loan, the government can deduct or ’offset’ $60 from her monthly Social Security benefit, reducing her annual income to $13, 240. ”However, by rehabilitating or consolidating her defaulted student loans, this same borrower would no longer be subject to the Social Security offset and would also become eligible for an   repayment plan. Given her low income, the [  repayment] payment formula would set her monthly payment amount to $0.” For private loans, the CFPB suggests lenders provide more and better information to students, parents and grandparents. ”Prospective cosigners would benefit from lenders and school financial aid officials providing counseling   effective information and communication regarding the liability that a   undertakes,” it says, but does not suggest federal regulation to mandate such practices."
381,"For several years, Oxfam International has released an annual report on global wealth inequity. The numbers were startling: In the 2016 report, Oxfam said the world’s richest 62 people owned as much wealth as the poorest 3. 6 billion. The numbers were also wrong, Oxfam announced Monday. Better data show that last year’s report should have said that just nine billionaires possessed as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet in 2016. And this year, Oxfam says, you only need eight megarich men to balance the scales with the accumulated wealth of 3. 6 billion people. The charitable organization’s executive director describes the disparity as ”obscene.” ”Inequality is trapping hundreds of millions in poverty,” Winnie Byanyima said in a statement. ”It is fracturing our societies and undermining democracy.” Oxfam’s   statistics, released shortly before the World Economic Forum began in Davos, Switzerland, are based on two sources: the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook, which looks at wealth distribution within countries, and Forbes’ annual list of billionaires, which evaluates the assets of wealthy individuals. The most recent Credit Suisse Databook used ”new and better data,” especially on the distribution of wealth in India and China, to conclude that the world’s poorest people possessed even less money than previously calculated. That meant a sudden shift in Oxfam’s numbers, too. The poorer half of the world consists of 3. 6 billion people with $409 billion, the group says. All the billionaires on the Forbes 2016 list  —   1, 810 people  —   possess as much wealth as a full 70 percent of the rest of the world, Oxfam concludes. Oxfam notes there are two common questions about its methodology. The first is whether the debt from wealthy people, like   U. S. citizens with large amounts of student loans, drags down the global wealth totals. Oxfam argues that the number of indebted   people is ”insignificant” on a global scale, and that the vast majority of people living in debt are actually poor, not just seemingly poor. The second is whether exchange rates distort the numbers, which are all converted into U. S. dollars for comparison’s sake. Oxfam says exchange rates have fluctuated over the years, while the disparity shown by Credit Suisse has been ”persistent.” ”By any measure, we are living in the age of the ” the organization writes."
382,"”People keep asking me, how close are we to going off the cliff,” says Dr. James Johnson, professor of infectious diseases medicine at the University of Minnesota. The cliffside free fall he is talking about is the day that   bacteria will be able to outfox the world’s entire arsenal of antibiotics. Common infections would then become untreatable. Here’s Johnson’s answer: ”Come on people. We’re off the cliff. It’s already happening. People are dying. It’s right here, right now. Sure, it’s going to get worse. But we’re already there.” His declaration came in response to a report of a woman in Nevada who died of an incurable infection, resistant to all 26 antibiotics available in the U. S. to treat infection. Her death was reported in the Jan. 13 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That kind of bacterium is known as a ”superbug,” which belongs to a family of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. In cases like the Nevada woman, who was infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae, the term ”nightmare superbug” has been coined because this particular specimen was even resistant to antibiotics developed as a last resort against bacterial infection. People in the U. S. have died from   superbug infections before. The CDC estimates that 23, 000 die every year from   infections. A British report, The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, estimates that globally, 700, 000 people die each year from infections that are  . In many of those cases, the infection’s resistance was discovered too late, perhaps before a   effective drug was finally initiated. In poor countries, those newer, more expensive antibiotics often are not available. The Nevada case is different in that resistance was discovered early in treatment, but even the drugs seen as the last line of defense didn’t work. ”This one is the poster child because of resistance across the board,” Johnson says. The woman described in the report was in her 70s and treated in a hospital in Reno. About two years ago, on an extended visit to India, she broke a thighbone, according to the report. She had several hospitalizations in India because of infections, says Dr. Lei Chen, of the Washoe County Health District in Reno and an author of the MMWR report. When the patient was admitted to the Reno hospital, health workers discovered that the bacteria specimen tested was resistant to a class of antibiotics called carbapenems  —     enterobacteria. ”Before, we could go to carbapenems, and they could reliably squash the bugs,” says Johnson. ”This case broke down even our last great gun.” The woman’s most recent hospitalization for infection in India had been in June 2016. She was admitted to a hospital in Reno in August, and state health department officials were notified that she had CRE. ”Lab results showed she was resistant to all 14 drugs we tested,” says Chen. Further tests at the CDC lab showed resistance to 26 antibiotics. She died in September of multiple organ failure and sepsis. ”This was my first time to see such a resistant pattern,” says Chen. CRE infections are rare in the U. S. The CDC does not require that hospitals report CRE cases but estimates that some 175 cases have been reported in the states as of January 2017. ”The majority of [CRE] cases still respond to one or two classes of antibiotics,” says Chen. CRE infections are more common in India and Southeast Asia. The reasons aren’t clear, but all infections spread more easily in parts of the world with inadequate sanitary facilities. Then, as people cross borders and board airplanes, the bacteria spread in the same way that brought CRE to Reno. That’s why Dr. Randall Todd, director of epidemiology and public health preparedness at the Washoe County Health District, says all hospitals should double down on preventive efforts, including a travel history. ”It’s important that health care providers and hospitals keep in mind that our world is ever shrinking,” he says. ”When someone comes in, it’s important to know where in the world they’ve been.” Then, if CRE or other resistant infections are diagnosed, the hospital can set up appropriate precautions, like isolating the patient, and immediately start lab tests to try to find an effective antibiotic. But in this case, there was no effective antibiotic. ”And we’re going to see more of these, from a drip, drip, drip of cases to a steady drizzle to a rainstorm,” predicts Johnson. ”It’s scary, but it’s good to get scared if that motivates action.” The action needed is to use antibiotics wisely, in people and in animals, so strains of bacteria don’t get a chance to develop resistance, says Johnson. And to continue research into development of new antibiotics. ”We do have some new drugs coming along, so there’s hope,” he says. But as new antibiotics become available, ”we have to use them selectively, not  .”"
383,"Most Broadway musicals that close after 16 performances barely prompt memories, let alone documentaries. But in 1981, the Stephen   Furth opus, Merrily We Roll Along, rolled along so bizarrely, it became the stuff of Broadway legend, worthy of a 2017  . Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened is a theatrically captivating documentary in which a director looks sideways at a musical that goes backwards. In the opening moments of the film, director Lonny Price is rummaging around in a cardboard box filled with film from an   special about Merrily. The special never aired  —   it was scrapped when the show closed so quickly  —   and he’s startled to find    footage of his younger self. Barely out of his teens, Price was cast as one of the show’s leads, along with a couple of dozen other     . Now as a   film director, he’s looking back at his own professional acting debut. Once he cues up the filmed interview, the kid staring back at him from the screen is a     innocent, thrilled to be cast in the first project director Hal Prince and   Sondheim tackled after their Broadway triumph with Sweeney Todd.  ”I walk around smiling all day,” he says. ”This show, if I never do anything again in the rest of my life, I will have had this moment. If I get hit by a truck the night after the opening, I don’t think I’ll care.” He was perfect casting for the exuberant youngster he was playing. You can hear it in his voice on the cast album, as he sings: ”It’s our time, coming through, me and you man, me and you.” This song, though, isn’t how the show starts it’s how it ends. Merrily We Roll Along is about college pals whose friendship sours over time, but as Price explains in voiceover, it’s told in a way that sweetens over time: ”The big conceit of the show is that it goes backwards,” he says. ”These unhappy characters start in their 40s, and in each following scene, it’s a few years earlier they’re a few years younger, a few years less bitter, less jaded, until finally at the end of the show they’re . .. optimistic and full of dreams, with no idea of what’s to come.” You could say that about the show’s creators, too. Prince and Sondheim were pretty young back then, and a string of Broadway hits  —   Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd  —   had not prepared them for what was about to happen with Merrily. Oh, it started out like a song  —   nothing but excitement in rehearsals, these gods of Broadway working with kids who idolized them. One youngster, Jason Alexander, remembers what it was like the first time there was an audience out front: ”I don’t think anything will ever top being behind the curtain just before the overture started at the first preview,” he recalls. (And that’s saying something  —   this is the guy who later played George on Seinfeld, after all.) But halfway through the first act, it all started coming apart. This going backwards thing, and kids playing adults . .. the audience didn’t get it. One cast member remembers whole rows getting up and leaving. Another remembers singing to the backs of people walking out, which she terms ”not a subtle cue” that the show had problems. This first part of Best Worst Thing will be absolute catnip for Sondheim fans  —   the ecstasy and the agony, as it were. And then, in the documentary’s second half, director Price does something unexpected. You think he’ll chronicle what happened to the show  —   which is basically that after it flopped, the creators figured out how to fix it so that it gets produced all the time now. Instead, he does what Merrily does: He concentrates on what everything from disappointment to wild success did to the people involved. Their trajectories are riveting, because Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened has all this footage of them when they were starting out  —   including that interview with the young Lonny Price, that the   Lonny Price was watching at the beginning of the film. He plays it again towards the end, and this time, you watch him watching. Couldn’t feel more different."
384,"When Morning Edition host David Greene spoke to DJ Khaled recently, there was simply too much good stuff to fit all of it on the radio. Fortunately, the show passed along to us an extended version of the interview, which opens with David explaining why this was the second time they set up an interview with the musician, producer and social media   . You should listen to the whole thing for yourself, because none of this sounds as intriguing in print as it does when DJ Khaled says it, but here are a few of the things you’ll hear. 1. When David clarifies that the ”keys” he talks about are not literal keys, but keys to success and greatness, Khaled says, ”Yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with having some nice keys that will inspire you on a chain, because I have one . .. it’s to remind me that the keys are so important.” 2. ”If you text me, I’m gonna hit you back with a key. With some type of key.” David asks what he would get back if he texted, ”Hey, what’s up? How’s New York.” Khaled: ”It’s a cold world. Bundle up.” And then he would add a key emoji, because of course he would. 3. If you follow DJ Khaled, you know that he frequently tells you that ”they” don’t want you to do whatever it is he’s telling you that you should do. Who, David asks, are they? ”They are the people that don’t believe in us, that want us to lose . .. that want us broke, that want us finished . .. they are the people that we need to stay away from. I remember, I had somebody actually come up to me and say, ’Khaled, you will be nothing, you know? Stop what you’re doing, you know? You’re just a DJ, you’re going to be local forever. You’re not going to be able to succeed.” 4. Hearing Khaled refer at one point to ”cloth talk,” David Greene of NPR’s Morning Edition asks what cloth talk is. ”Cloth talk is what we’re having right now. We’re having like serious talk.” David Greene: ”You and I are having cloth talk.” Khaled: ”Yeah, we’re having cloth talk, and it’s like having real talk, but authentic. You know? This is it.” 5. A lot of folks are familiar with DJ Khaled’s Snapchatted Jet Ski ”incident,” when he got lost in the dark during a trip to visit Rick Ross. (Take all that in for a moment.) But what you may not know  —   and what you did not hear on Morning Edition  —   is the way Khaled connects getting lost on a Jet Ski with having been at a very difficult moment in his life when he wasn’t sure he should have a baby. (Yes, really.) He also explains being pulled over by the Coast Guard  —   not for the first time. 6. Would you expect that Ed Sheeran helped DJ Khaled develop his Snapchat persona? Well, it’s true. Would you expect that Khaled first came to understand the power of his social media presence at an actual Apple store? He says this is also true. All this, plus a couple of   that you’ll have to listen carefully to even catch, in this Small Batch edition of Pop Culture Happy Hour."
385,"Britain’s prime minister said Tuesday that the United Kingdom will walk away from the European Union’s single market and unified court system, making a sharp break with its largest trading partner. In a speech delivered about six months after voters passed a referendum requiring Britain to leave the EU, Prime Minister Theresa May laid out a plan for what that split would look like, emphasizing limits on migration into the country. ”We will ensure we can control immigration to Britain from Europe,” May said, continuing: ”In the last decade or so, we have seen record levels of net migration in Britain, and that sheer volume has put pressure on public services, like schools, stretched our infrastructure, especially housing, and put a downward pressure on wages for working class people. As home secretary for six years, I know that you cannot control immigration overall when there is free movement to Britain from Europe.” The speech signaled that ”controlling borders and limiting immigration are more important that the benefits of free trade with the EU,” NPR’s Frank Langfitt reported from London. ”That will play well with the 52 percent of voters who backed Brexit last June,” he continued. ”But economists say, in the long run, it will make the U. K. poorer.” Tim Farron, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats, told The Guardian that May’s plan would do ”massive damage” to the economy, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn told the newspaper that ”[May] makes all these optimistic statements, but every economic indicator in Britain is going in the wrong direction.” In arguing for a clean break from the EU, May said that ”no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain” in the complex negotiations necessary to untangle decades of integration with Europe. She explained that her plan was not based on ”partial membership of the European Union, associate membership of the European Union or anything that leaves us    . We do not seek to adopt a model already enjoyed by other countries. We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave. ”No, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union,” she said. ”And my job is to get the right deal for Britain as we do.” Exactly what that deal could look like is still unclear. ”I do want us to have a customs agreement with the EU” that would govern trade with the European bloc, May said, but she added that when it comes to the details of such an agreement, ”I hold no preconceived position. I have an open mind on how we do it. It is not the means that matter, but the ends.” As The   has reported, the first step toward leaving the EU is for the U. K. to formally notify the European Union of its decision to exit, by invoking a provision known as Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and instigating negotiation on the details of the exit that could last up to two years. May previously said she plans to begin the process by March. But before any plan moves forward, the U. K.’s Parliament must approve it, as we have reported, along with the other 27 EU member nations and the EU Parliament. ”Unless May does a complete   from here, any hope of full single market access for   Britain is more or less out of the question,” Kallum Pickering, senior Britain economist at Berenberg Bank in London, told The New York Times."
386,"The abortion rate in the United States fell to its lowest level since the historic Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion nationwide, a new report finds. The report by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports legalized abortion, puts the rate at 14. 6 abortions per 1, 000 women of childbearing age (ages  ) in 2014. That’s the lowest recorded rate since the Roe decision in 1973. The abortion rate has been declining for decades  —   down from a peak of 29. 3 in 1980 and 1981. The report also finds that in 2013, the total number of abortions nationwide fell below 1 million for the first time since the  . In 2014  —   the most recent year with data available  —   the number fell a bit more, to 926, 200. The overall number had peaked at more than 1. 6 million abortions in 1990, according to Guttmacher. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the longstanding controversy around abortion policy, the meaning of the report is somewhat in dispute. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said efforts to help women get better access to contraception are paying off. She points in particular to recent improvements in the rate of unintended pregnancies, and a historically low teen pregnancy rate.  ”It shows that we’re finally doing a better job of helping women get access to birth control that’s affordable and that’s ” Richards said. As   Donald Trump prepares to take office, Richards is gearing up for a fight over federal funding for women’s health services provided by Planned Parenthood. Republican leaders in Congress have vowed to work with Trump to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which requires contraceptive coverage for many women. ”We shouldn’t go backwards on access to birth control,” Richards said. Some   groups, meanwhile, argue the Guttmacher report shows new state restrictions on abortion are working. Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, said she has her doubts about the Guttmacher report  —   since the data come from surveys of abortion providers  —   but accepts the overall conclusion. She emphasized the impact of new regulations on clinics and laws requiring women seeking abortions to get an ultrasound, which she said are having a ”real, measurable impact on abortion.” ”These have been   and we see the abortion rate dropping in response,” Hamrick said. Hamrick said she believes abortion numbers are also falling in part because public sentiment is turning against abortion  —   although surveys by the Pew Research Center show opinions on abortion have been largely stable over the past two decades. The Gallup polling firm has found Americans largely divided on abortion in recent decades, with a majority labeling themselves ” ” in a 2015 survey. The Guttmacher report says abortion restrictions do appear to be a factor in the declining numbers in some states. But principal research scientist Rachel Jones, lead author of the report, said that’s not the whole story. She noted that abortion declined in almost every state, and ”having fewer clinics didn’t always translate into having fewer abortions.” A more important driver of the declining abortion rate, Jones said, appears to be improved access to contraception, particularly   birth control options like IUDs. She noted that women in the United States have been using the highly effective devices in growing numbers for more than a decade, and said the declining birthrate suggests more women are preventing unwanted pregnancies. ”Abortion is going down, and births aren’t going up,” Jones said.  Chuck Donovan, president of the   Charlotte Lozier Institute, called the drop in the abortion rate ”good news,” regardless of one’s political point of view. He said there are likely a number of factors behind the decline. ”By and large, this is encouraging for a country that obviously remains deeply divided and discomfited about the benefits of abortion to the public,” Donovan said. But when it comes to abortion, common ground is hard to find. The Guttmacher Institute’s Jones said the data may signal that some women who want abortions can’t get access. ”If there are women in these highly restrictive states who want abortions but can’t get them because there aren’t any clinics that they can get to, and that’s why abortion’s going down, that’s not a good thing,” Jones said. ”But we think the story that’s going on in a lot of situations, in a lot of states, is that fewer women are having unintended pregnancies and in turn fewer abortions, and that is actually a good story.”"
387,"A Nigerian military strike on a camp for internally displaced persons in northeast Nigeria has killed dozens of people, according to Doctors Without Borders. Teams from the organization, also known as Médecins sans frontières, said in a statement that they’ve counted 52 dead and 120 wounded as a result of the strike on the camp in Rann. They’re treating the injured and preparing to evacuate patients from the camp. The bombing was accidental and happened during an air force mission targeting Boko Haram insurgents in restive Borno State, according to tweets from Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari. ”This   attack on vulnerable people who have already fled from extreme violence is shocking and unacceptable,” Dr.   Cabrol, MSF director of operations, said in a statement. ”The safety of civilians must be respected. We are urgently calling on all parties to ensure the facilitation of medical evacuations by air or road for survivors who are in need of emergency care.” Photos from the camp released by MSF show rows of newly dug graves and   injured civilians waiting for treatment. Other civilians survey the damage and look through   ruins. The organization adds that its teams are ”in shock following the event.” The Nigerian air force has been intensively targeting the extremist organization in the northern area of the country. As NPR’s Ofeibea   has reported, up to 2. 5 million people have been displaced from the fighting. ”This is the first time during Nigeria’s   campaign against Boko Haram that the military has acknowledged a large number of civilians killed in a mistaken bombardment,” according to The Washington Post. ”It remains unclear how the military could have mistaken a camp with 25, 000 displaced people for a terrorist enclave.” Buhari pledged the federal government’s support ”in dealing with the situation and attending the victims.”"
388,"In an article last month on state goals for 2017, China’s Xinhua news agency reported, ”China has lifted 700 million people out of poverty through more than 30 years of reform and ” while aiming to ”lift” 10 million more in the coming year. For some, the verb choice conjures an image of the giant hands of a powerful and magnanimous government carefully extracting villagers from their rundown   homes and then delicately depositing them inside new urban apartments with modern amenities. Others, though, don’t give the expression much thought. The term has been used by China’s   media for more than a decade, long enough for Western media like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters (among others) to parrot it with regularity whenever China’s poverty alleviation goals reach a new high. But who’s really doing the lifting? Is it China’s government through policies that have created jobs, alleviated poverty in the countryside and provided social welfare to hundreds of millions? Or, as has been pointed out by skeptics, did Chinese people lift themselves out of poverty once Mao and his horrific political campaigns expired, allowing China’s leaders to replace terror and madness with rational economic policies that ensured people’s hard work is rewarded with capital? The question has inspired many a debate about the role of government policy versus the will of the individual in China, but whoever deserves credit (experts would argue both) credit is certainly due. What China  —   its government and its people  —   have achieved is unprecedented in human history: Around 700 million Chinese have worked their way above the poverty line since 1980, accounting for   of global poverty reduction during that period. (According to the World Bank more than 500 million Chinese lifted themselves out of poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6. 5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on less than $1. 90 a day). I’ve refrained from using the term ”lifted out of poverty” in the previous sentence, and what’s curious is that China’s state media does the same when reporting this news in Chinese to its own people. While China’s largest   news organizations routinely boast about China lifting its people out of poverty in their   editions, these same news organizations avoid the term in their native language. The Chinese name of the government’s   campaign is ”fupin kaifa” (扶贫开发) literally translated ”assist the poor and develop,” and   reports about poverty alleviation in the   media are peppered with terms like ”tuopin” (脱贫) ”shake off poverty,” ”jianpin” (减贫) ”reduce poverty,” ”xiaochu pinkun” (消除贫困) ”eliminate impoverishment” and ”zhaiqu pinkunmao” (摘去贫困帽) ”taking off the poverty hat.” ”Lifting” people out of poverty is nowhere to be seen. The term seems reserved exclusively for state media’s English language publications aimed at foreign readers. Why? One likely answer is a government bent on cleaning up its human rights record to the   developed countries of the West. Each year, China’s State Council releases a white paper on the country’s human rights progress, and poverty alleviation is usually    in the report. An editorial in the People’s Daily earlier this year complained that ”certain countries” don’t consider China’s poverty alleviation to be an achievement in human rights, writing that human rights have ”various manifestations due to different circumstances in different countries. In China, poverty alleviation, health care and social security are proof of the country’s progress in human rights.” It’s a point that’s hard to argue with, whoever is responsible for the heavy lifting."
389,"In a major speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Chinese President Xi Jinping positioned himself as a defender of globalization and free trade. It was the first time a Chinese head of state has appeared at the annual meeting of political and financial powerhouses, and the speech was one that would have been ”unthinkable” from former Chinese leaders, The Guardian reports. U. S.   Donald Trump, days away from his inauguration, was not in attendance at Davos, and Xi never uttered his name. But many of the Chinese president’s statements were clearly responding to rhetoric from Trump and his supporters, who have sharply rejected globalization and many existing trade deals. ”No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” Xi said at Davos, according to a Reuters translation. He compared protectionism to ”locking oneself in a dark room,” keeping out ”light and air” as well as any potential dangers. Xi said there’s ”no point” in blaming economic globalization for the world’s problems, many of which have nothing to do with global trade, The Telegraph reports. And even though some problems are linked to globalization, that’s ”no justification to write it off altogether,” the Chinese president said. He called for countries to maintain their commitments under the Paris climate accord Trump, during his campaign, promised that the U. S. would drop out of the pact. Overall, the speech ”underscored Beijing’s desire to play a greater global role as the United States turns inward,” Reuters writes. Other observers drew the same conclusion. Ambrose   of the Telegraph said Xi was ”throwing down the gauntlet” as Trump’s inauguration approaches. One expert told The Washington Post this could be seen as a turning point where China moved toward filling a ”global leadership role” that the U. S. has played for a century and now might be abandoning. While the speech was   by the crowd at Davos, according to The Guardian, there’s also a healthy dose of skepticism about China’s actual commitment to global free trade  —   let alone concerns over human rights or censorship. In The Wall Street Journal, before Xi’s speech, Andrew Browne anticipated that Xi would present himself as ”globalization’s great defender.” But he wrote that Xi’s vision of globalization is different than the cosmopolitan vision of many Davos attendees. Xi values national,   identity over multiculturalism, and ”insists on absolute state sovereignty,” Browne writes. Browne argues that Xi’s plan to invest in global trade infrastructure is intended not ”so much to collapse national boundaries as to pull neighboring countries into China’s geopolitical orbit.” In Fortune, Scott Cendrowski described Xi as idealizing ”a troubled China,” noting that while he presented China as being open for global trade, businesses that work in China express concerns over ”unfair regulations, unclear laws and Chinese protectionism.”"
390,"In a presidential campaign marked by harsh rhetoric, Donald Trump directed some of his strongest words toward China. He called the Chinese government a currency manipulator, threatened to impose tariffs on goods imported from one of America’s leading trade partners and repeatedly vowed to get tough on China. Now, as   Trump is sounding the same notes. He caused a veritable earthquake in U. S.  relations just by taking a call from Taiwan’s President Tsai  . This challenged the bedrock of U. S. relations, the ”One China” policy, under which the U. S. officially recognizes only the government in Beijing, though it also conducts business with Taipei. And at his confirmation hearing last week, Trump’s choice for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, unleashed another salvo. Though it was just one line in a   hearing, he suggested a Trump administration would be willing to wage a showdown over China’s recent island building in the South China Sea. ”We’re going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island building stops,” Tillerson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ”And second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.” Since 2013, China has built seven islands in the South China Sea. An international tribunal last year rejected China’s claims to those artificial islands  —   and its claims to much of the South China Sea. In the meantime, China has also militarized the islands by building airstrips and installing   guns on them. Since Trump is not yet in office, and Tillerson hasn’t yet been confirmed, it remains unclear whether Tillerson’s statement was a genuine policy position or just   rhetoric as Trump and his team prepare to assume power. A number of Asia analysts believe Tillerson likely misspoke or overstated the positions a Trump administration will take. ”What I think he meant was that we will not let the Chinese use these new airbases on these reclaimed islands to establish dominance” in the South China Sea, says Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Green, a former National Security Council senior director for Asia, says the Trump administration could increase the U. S. Navy’s presence in the South China Sea and the frequency of patrols  —   strategies the Obama administration pursued, but only to a limited degree. ”My guess is that [Tillerson] was referring to options such as that  —   but not stating that the U. S. would blockade or interdict Chinese ships approaching those islands,” says Green. Green says the lack of clarity may be due to the lack of seasoned policy makers in the Trump transition team and the limited input from the State Department. ”I think the process has been less conducive to a careful and thorough consideration of exact wording than in the past,” he says. The Chinese media was less charitable in its assessment. The China Daily called Tillerson’s remarks ”a   of naivety, shortsightedness,   prejudices, and unrealistic political fantasies.” So was David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. ”This is insane and totally unenforceable, not to mention very     probably not logistically feasible, and highly provocative and ” he says of Tillerson’s comments. Taken at face value, the remarks call for a Cuban Missile   blockade that would prevent the Chinese from accessing the islands they claim in the South China Sea. Doing that would be no easy task for the U. S. Navy. China’s Navy has been rapidly modernizing in recent years and while it is ”not going to be able to defeat the U. S. necessarily, they will certainly be able to punish U. S. forces in the region in a way they couldn’t before,” says Avery Goldstein, director of Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. The danger is that a small incident in the South China Sea could quickly escalate into a major conflict. There is another way to look at Trump’s approach so far. Almost every recent U. S. president has said on the campaign trail that he would take a tougher stance with China. That list includes Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. ”This approach is not unprecedented,” says CSIS’s Green. ”Typically, what happens in every case is that within a few months or a year or two, the policy calibrates and they go back to the norm.” Goldstein, of the University of Pennsylvania, says Trump might be using tactics he learned in the business world, where you often stake out your toughest positions in the beginning. ”Perhaps this is just an attempt to gain bargaining leverage so that at some point, you make a deal that is better than the one you would’ve gotten if you’d been flexible at the beginning,” he says. It might work. Or backfire. China has come a long way in recent years and is increasingly assertive in the international arena. President Xi Jinping is no one’s idea of a pushover. ”The devil,” says Goldstein, ”is in the details. All we have so far are comments and tweets. Until they take office and formulate and implement policy, we can’t be sure.” Nishant Dahiya is NPR’s Asia editor."
391,"The first time I tasted chamoy was in the Mexican border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. At a street cart vendor, chamoy apples sat alongside elotes and tamales. The tart Granny Smith was rolled in a thick paste that was sweet, salty, spicy and sour all at once. As I took the first bite, I thought: ”There is no way this is gonna work.” But it did, and after that, the mere thought of chamoy made me salivate like a Pavlovian dog. I had to learn more about it. In Mexico, chamoy comes in many forms. Originally, it was a salted dried fruit (saladito) traditionally made from prunus mume, more commonly known as an ume plum (even though it’s technically a small, sour apricot). But other fruits like sour green mangoes or tamarind pods are common. Chamoy also comes as a sauce and seasoning powder, both spiked with Mexican chiles, as well as a golosina, or Mexican candy. It can be sprinkled on fruits and vegetables or drizzled on chips (especially tostilocos, tortilla chips topped with a variety of condiments). It can come as a    paleta (Mexican popsicle) or raspado (shaved ice). But this Mexican snack actually started off as a Chinese one, and took hundreds of years to work its way into popular Mexican culture. Rachel Laudan, the first food historian to track chamoy’s journey, explains that it is ”a Mexican rendering of see mui,” a salty, dried apricot common in China, as well as the inspiration for Japanese umeboshi, a pickled, salted apricot. Laudan isn’t sure when see mui came to Mexico, but says that Asians have been migrating to the country since the 1560s in Spanish ships that traded Chinese silk and spices for silver. Laudan only figured out chamoy’s Chinese heritage because she had lived in Hawaii, where she encountered crack seed, which is essentially chamoy’s sister. Crack seed is a salted, preserved   apricot that is cracked so the exposed seed will impart flavor. She learned that the Cantonese name for crack seed is see mui, and it came to Hawaii with Chinese plantation workers in the 19th century. See mui is pronounced ”see moy,” which sounds like ”chamoy.” Mexico reinvented chamoy as a sauce and candy with chiles, while Hawaii launched entire stores dedicated to crack seed made from different types of fruit. ”I moved to Mexico in the ” Laudan says, ”and all of my Mexican friends agree that chamoy . .. really wasn’t around [nationally] until 1990.” It spread in large part thanks to the major Mexican confectionery company Dulces Miguelito, which began   chamoy in the 1970s. ”It’s a very important flavor for Mexicans, especially if you grew up in Mexico,” chef Gabriela Camara says. She owns Cala and Tacos Cala in San Francisco, as well as several Mexico City restaurants. Camara grew up in both Mexico City and Tepoztlan, Morelos. She remembers eating Miguelitos chamoy on top of Cazares, spicy corn chips. Dominica Salomon, chef and owner of Cosecha in Oakland, Calif. agrees that ”It’s typical of the Mexican palate  —   they want all of the different taste buds going off at the same time. And chamoy ties all of that in.” Salomon grew up in Los Angeles, and her first taste of chamoy was saladitos. ”From as far back as I can remember, I always had a saladito in my mouth,” she shares. ”You’d have to keep it in your mouth a long time until it softened up so you could eat the dried fruit off of the seed.” But not all chefs like chamoy, especially because much of it is heavily processed. Silvana Salcido Esparza, owner of the Bario Cafe in Phoenix, has strong feelings against it. ”Ha, chamoy. I love to hate it,” she says. ”Sabritas [chips] is king in Mexico, and together with chamoy is making Mexico the most diabetic country in the world. And it’s nothing that can’t be produced naturally.” She teaches children to make chamoy from plum or apricot marmalade, ground chile de arbol, lime juice and sea salt. Norma Listman, a private chef and writer currently living in San Francisco, Nayarit, Mexico, agrees. She grew up eating chamoy candy and sauce on fruit, but as an adult feels it is ”processed . .. so I wanted to make my own.” Using tips from working in a Japanese restaurant that makes its own umeboshi, she blends   underripe ume plum with hibiscus flowers, dried chiles, lime juice, vinegar, honey, salt, water and rose water. It’s fitting that she uses an Asian pickle recipe as the base for her chamoy. It’s part of the reason she moved near the Bahía de Banderas, Mexico, a base for international trade. ”It’s full of Asian ingredients,” she says. ”I wanted to come here to study the huge Asian influence of the area.”  Since that first chamoy apple, my interest has grown into a   obsession. I carry a bottle of chamoy sauce in my purse, make Silvana Salcido Esparza’s dip for mandarins and mangoes, and rim tamarind margaritas in Miguelitos chamoy powder. I’ve even found a Japanese farmer that grows ume, so come spring, I will be making my own homemade version. That apple was the first step down the rabbit hole of chamoy, and I’m not looking back. Leena   is a San   food and culture writer. Her work can be found here. "
392,"Several times a month, you can find a doctor in the aisles of Ralph’s market in Huntington Beach, Calif. wearing a white coat and helping people learn about food. On one recent day, this doctor was Daniel Nadeau, wandering the cereal aisle with Allison Scott, giving her some ideas on how to feed kids who studiously avoid anything that tastes healthy. ”Have you thought about trying smoothies in the morning?” he asks her. ”The frozen blueberries and raspberries are a little cheaper, and berries are really good for the brain.” Scott is delighted to get food advice from a physician who is program director of the nearby Mary and Dick Allen Diabetes Center, part of the St. Joseph Hoag Health alliance. The center’s ”Shop with Your Doc” program sends doctors to the grocery store to meet with any patients who sign up for the service, plus any other shoppers who happen by with questions. Nadeau notices the    boxes in Scott’s shopping cart and suggests she switch to whole grain pasta and real cheese. ”So I’d have to make it?” she asks, her enthusiasm waning at the thought of how long that might take, just to have her kids reject it. ”I’m not sure they’d eat it. They just won’t eat it.” Nadeau says sugar and processed foods are big contributors to the rising diabetes rates among children. ”In America, over 50 percent of our food is processed food,” Nadeau tells her. ”And only 5 percent of our food is   food. I think we should try to reverse that.” Scott agrees to try more smoothies for the kids and to make real macaroni and cheese. Rack up one point for the doctor, zero for diabetes. A small revolution brewing, Nadeau is part of a small revolution brewing across California. The    movement has been around for decades, but it’s making inroads as physicians and medical institutions make food a formal part of treatment, rather than relying solely on medications. By prescribing nutritional changes or launching programs such as ”Shop with Your Doc,” they’re trying to prevent, limit or even reverse disease by changing what patients eat. ”There’s no question people can take things a long way toward reversing diabetes, reversing hypertension, even preventing cancer by food choices,” Nadeau says. In the big picture, says Dr. Richard Afable, CEO and president of St. Joseph Hoag Health, medical institutions across the state are starting to make a philosophical switch to becoming a health organization, not just a health care organization. That sentiment echoes the tenets of the Therapeutic Food Pantry program at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which completed its pilot phase and is about to expand on an ongoing basis to five clinic sites throughout the city. The program will offer patients several bags of food prescribed for their condition, along with intensive training in how to cook it. ”We really want to link food and medicine, and not just give away food,” says Dr. Rita Nguyen, the hospital’s medical director of Healthy Food Initiatives. ”We want people to understand what they’re eating, how to prepare it, the role food plays in their lives.” In Southern California, Loma Linda University School of Medicine is offering specialized training for its resident physicians in Lifestyle Medicine  —   that’s a formal subspecialty in using food to treat disease. Research on the power of food to treat or reverse disease is beginning to accumulate, but that doesn’t mean diet alone is always the solution, or that every illness can benefit substantially from dietary changes. Nonetheless, physicians say they look at the cumulative data and a clear picture emerges: that the salt, sugar, fat and processed foods in the American diet contribute to the nation’s high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. According to the World Health Organization, 80 percent of deaths from heart disease and stroke are caused by high blood pressure, tobacco use, elevated cholesterol and low consumption of fruits and vegetables. ”It’s a different paradigm of how to treat disease,” says Dr. Brenda Rea, who helps run the family and preventive medicine residency program at Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Choosing which foods to prescribe, The lifestyle medicine subspecialty is designed to train doctors in how to prevent and treat disease, in part, by changing patients’ nutritional habits. The medical center and school at Loma Linda also has a food pantry and kitchen for patients. Many people don’t know how to cook, Rea says they only know how to heat things up. That means depending on packaged food with high salt and sugar content. So teaching people about which foods are nutritious and how to prepare them, she says, can actually transform a patient’s life. And beyond that, it might transform the health and lives of that patient’s family. ”What people eat can be medicine or poison,” Rea says. ”As a physician, nutrition is one of the most powerful things you can change to reverse the effects of chronic disease.” Studies have explored evidence that dietary changes can slow inflammation, for example, or make the body inhospitable to cancer cells. In general, many lifestyle medicine physicians recommend a   diet  —   particularly for people with diabetes or other inflammatory conditions. ”As what happened with tobacco, this will require a cultural shift, but that can happen,” says Nguyen. ”In the same way physicians used to smoke, and then stopped smoking and were able to talk to patients about it, I think physicians can have a bigger voice in it.” This story originally appeared on the website of member station KQED in California."
393,"There’s the heroic,   medical care that saves us from crises. And then there’s the    incremental medical attention that doctors provide for weeks, months, years, even decades in the attempt to heal complex conditions. As a surgeon, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande practices the heroic type of medicine. In his new article, ”Tell Me Where It Hurts,” Gawande examines the quieter side of health care. Chronic diseases including heart disease, cancer, Type 2 diabetes and arthritis have become the leading causes of death and disability in the U. S. Gawande argues that it’s time for the health care system to discover the heroism of ”the incremental.” Gawande discusses his article with NPR’s Robert Siegel, touching on the status of incremental medicine and what a shift in healthcare might mean for primary care in upcoming years. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Interview Highlights, On a case that shows the importance of incremental medicine, ”I start out the story with a man who has the worst chronic migraine headaches imaginable. He has suffered for decades with headaches on almost a daily basis: More days of the month with a terrible headache than not, to the point of throwing up. It’s hard to keep your job, hard to make things work. He’d seen all kinds of doctors who offered all kind of fixes, and nothing ever worked. But then he found a physician who saw him regularly over three years. Dr. Elizabeth Loder, whose career has been built on paying enormous attention to ’Let’s try a little something now, see what happens, tweak it again, tweak it again.’ The problem in our existing health care system is that it’s not made to put great value in opportunities that take time to pay off. What [the migraine patient] would have received in an emergency room would be a shot of morphine, a CT scan. ..and be sent on his way. Cured for an hour or two only to have it come back again later. But after three years [of working with Dr. Loder,] at the age of 62, his headaches were cured. And that’s the opportunity we’re missing.” On who decided emergency care should be most valuable, ”We all decided it. If you go back to the 1940s or 1950s, medicine was really only able to rescue. It was an amazing thing that we could bring on antibiotics like penicillin to cure bacterial diseases, or do operations to take care of problems like heart conditions. Primary care physicians couldn’t do much. We didn’t know high blood pressure was one of the biggest problems we have, much less how to address it. Fast forward to where we are now. Only half of people [with high blood pressure] have their blood pressure controlled and are receiving adequate treatment for it. And what it takes to control blood pressure is    incremental investment. And we don’t make it. We wait for the heart attack or kidney failure caused by the high blood pressure. It’s too little too late, and at great expense. We raid our commitment to maintenance and prevention to put money into that expensive back end rescue. And that’s what has to shift.” On what a rollback of Obamacare might mean for primary care, ”Obamacare put incentives in [health care] that strengthen and give resources to primary care clinicians to have more team oriented care, and even for people to reach outside the clinic and serve you virtually. Some areas of the country are already doing the majority of their visits by virtual means. [Clinicians] are in touch with you in many different ways. But that’s what we miss, that’s what’s at stake if we repeal legislation without replacement that keeps this kind of direction moving.”"
394,"Kenya is gearing up for what will no doubt be a contentious presidential election this August. That means the major political parties and coalitions have begun their     schemes. The ruling Jubilee Party had fireworks and confetti, and the newly minted opposition coalition, the National Super Alliance or NASA, decided to send supporters knocking on doors in search of millions of new voters. Mishi Mboko, an opposition member of Parliament in the NASA coalition, has a less conventional idea to encourage new voters: Women in areas where the opposition holds sway should refuse to have sex with their spouses unless they register to vote. ”Sex [is] a powerful weapon to make reluctant men rush to register as voters,” the Standard newspaper reports Mboko said. ”Women, this is the strategy you should adopt,” the paper quotes her as saying. ”It is the best. Deny them sex until they show you their voter’s card.” (Her own husband has already registered, Mboko told the paper). Now, the tactic is not new. Back in 2009, women’s rights groups in Kenya called for a weeklong sex strike to try to get   Mwai Kibaki and   Minister Raila Odinga to make peace and save a fragile coalition government. In Liberia, women went on a sex strike in the early 2000s as the country’s civil war came to an end. One of them was 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. Since then, the idea of using a sex strike for political leverage has been tried by women in Colombia in 2006, 2011 and 2013 and in the Philippines in 2011. That same year, a senator in Belgium called a sex strike to force a deadlocked parliament into forming a government. So, does it work? In her 2011 memoir, Gbowee wrote that the Liberian sex strike ”had little or no practical effect.” But it certainly garnered the peace movement media attention and is still, she wrote, the thing everyone asks her about. It’s hard to say what effect the other sex strikes may have had, but the violence in Colombia receded, a government formed months later in Belgium and Kenya’s coalition survived. As for Kenya’s opposition voter registration drive, more publicity doesn’t sound  ."
395,"In the early morning hours of Nov. 10, not long after Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, Phillip Atiba Goff, the head of the Center for Policing Equity in New York, fired off an email meant to encourage his colleagues, who worried that their work was about to be sidelined. They had spent several years working with police departments, examining the use of force by officers and the role race plays in such cases. Their research had gained fresh attention and urgency as issues of race and policing moved to the forefront of the national conversation. And as people took to the streets to protest the   deaths of unarmed   following encounters with the police, the Obama White House met with organizers from the nascent Movement for Black Lives and convened a national task force on policing. Then Trump, who had run on a ”law and order” platform that was far less sympathetic to calls for police reform than it was to the police themselves, won the election. So Goff told his colleagues that their research into police use of force  —   an area around which there remains a frustrating lack of comprehensive data  —   was likely to matter even more. Policing, he told them, was likely to be the mechanism by which the country dealt with some of its most intractable political problems, like immigration and urban violence and, potentially, the targeted monitoring of certain communities. If newly emboldened law enforcement agencies were going to be involved in more aspects of American life, Goff said, many people  —   activists, researchers, policymakers, communities  —   were going to need as much information as they could get about what they were doing and how. ”I told them that our work was going to be more important than ever,” Goff told me in a phone conversation last month. The national debates over race and policing were rancorous and polarized under the Obama administration, which often strained mightily to validate the concerns of both police and the communities they policed. But in the wake of scathing federal investigations of major police departments, the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama to attorney general, and recent survey data showing stark racial and partisan divides on issues of policing  —   even among officers themselves  —   it seems that those debates are about to become even uglier. The civil rights division of the Obama Justice Department has opened 25 ”pattern and practice” investigations into local law enforcement agencies since 2009 that it said had a stated focus on ”systemic police misconduct rather than isolated instances of wrongdoing.” Some of those investigations ended in federal lawsuits meant to push those police agencies toward reform. (Under Obama, 11 law enforcement agencies entered into consent decrees, compared to just three under President Bush.) But during the confirmation hearing for Sessions, the Alabama senator questioned whether police departments were being treated fairly by the Obama administration’s Justice Department. ”These lawsuits undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness, and we need to be careful before we do that,” Sessions said last week. His intimation that incidents of police misconduct are driven by the behavior of a few bad apples lines up with the responses to a new survey of police officers released last week by the Pew Research Center. The overwhelming majority of the officers who responded to the national survey said that their jobs had become more difficult following several   incidents of police violence against black people. But Pew found some telling racial splits among the respondents: White officers, for example, were much more likely than their black colleagues to see the death of black people at the hands of police as ”isolated incidents rather than signs of a broader problem.” Most white respondents were skeptical of the motives of the protesters, with only about a third saying they felt protesters were demonstrating in order to hold officers accountable. White officers were much, much more likely to say that the country had made the changes necessary to bring about equal rights for black people: 92 percent of white officers felt this way only 29 percent of black cops said the same. But the timing of Sessions’ comments was remarkable, coming the same week that saw Baltimore enter into a consent decree with the DOJ after a federal investigation found that officers had regularly roughed up citizens of the predominantly black city when it wasn’t ignoring their calls for help. That same week, the federal government rushed to release a report highly critical of the police department in Chicago, contending that officers there regularly violated the rights of citizens  —   shooting at the backs of fleeing suspects, using tasers against people who posed no threat, and regularly using force against children. (Our colleague, Camila Domonoske, highlighted some of the most chilling findings from the   report here.) And as unsettling as those details were, they weren’t terribly different from the findings about police departments in cities like Albuquerque, N. M, Newark and Ferguson, Mo. all of which also entered into consent decrees with the federal government. We’ve yet to see whether those federal interventions into local policing will improve the relationships between the police and the policed. As the Washington Post found, consent decrees tend to yield mixed results because cities are so different  —   and it’s still not clear what will happen to the open investigations and consent decrees under the Trump administration. But one effect of these findings has been to corroborate the experiences of the residents in those cities  —   particularly those in communities of color  —   who have complained about the ways the police in their neighborhoods have long operated. If the pendulum of federal action is indeed swinging back to   days, the next Ferguson or Baltimore or Chicago will play out against an even more fractious backdrop in which there is effectively no official acknowledgment that there was a problem to begin with. By itself, removing that official vindication changes  —   maybe even jeopardizes  —   the prospects for police reform in the near term. ”Without the moral weight of the White House . .. behind reform, there is [markedly] less external incentive to change,” Goff told me on Sunday. ”There will still be some momentum. But not the urgency that allowed people to leave the streets and come to the negotiating table.”"
396,"A popular Pakistani musician and actor, Atif Aslam, is being hailed worldwide after he stopped a live performance on Saturday night to rescue a female fan who was allegedly being sexually harassed by a group of men at the concert. Videos of the incident shot by concertgoers are circulating online. Aslam stops his musicians   and in a mix of Urdu and English, begins berating the alleged harassers, who seem to be right in front of the stage. ”Wait a second,” the singer says angrily. ”Have you ever seen a girl? Your mother or sister could be here, too, huh?” He then instructs security to pull the young woman up onto the stage with him, saying: ”I’m going to rescue her.” Many fans are heard cheering the singer’s actions, chanting: ”Atif! Atif! Atif!” Aslam goes on to address the attackers directly again, saying: ”Act like a human being.” The show, in which Aslam was   with Sufi singing legend Abida Parveen, took place at the Institute of Business Administration, a highly ranked university in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. The show was organized by MUNIK, the school’s Model United Nations. Aslam is a household name in Pakistan and is   throughout the South Asian subcontinent. His video for the wildly popular Coke Studios Pakistan series, a tribute to the Sufi singers The Sabri Brothers, has been viewed on YouTube more than 56 million times. He made his acting debut in the 2011 film Bol  —   whose plot involves a family with a transgender daughter and which broke   records in Pakistan. Yesterday, the newspaper The Daily Pakistan reported in the aftermath of Saturday’s show that ”dozens of girls were molested and sexually harassed at the venue,” and citing an anonymous tipster, charged that students at the university who helped organize the show sold thousands of fake tickets to the performance, leading to chaos and lack of security. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn posted a number of social media accounts of what happened. One female concertgoer named Mahnoor Alamgir wrote on Facebook: ”Not a single girl escaped harassment unless she was with a male friend or husband. ..I’m utterly disgusted right now.” Another woman in the audience named Yusra Habib wrote on Facebook: ”You know something is terribly problematic when a singer has to stop in between his performance, spot harassment from within a massive crowd and ask his team to ’rescue the girl.’ You know its [sic] even more uncomfortable when three more girls have to be lifted on stage and taken away safely. It only goes on to prove that no matter how   our awaam [people] gets over this   and so called misogyny at public events, it is what we as a crowd need the most.” In many of the South Asian news accounts of this incident, the harassment and molestation of women is referred to by a common regional euphemism: ” .”"
397,"Last week, physicists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology reported they’d cooled an object to a million times colder than room temperature. It was a record for the   science of  . In this field, researchers inch ever closer to  —   but never reach  —   the state of absolute zero temperature. It’s a science that has some very cool (pun very much intended) applications including   gravity wave detectors for ”hearing” distant black hole mergers. But moving beyond these applications, why is   so hard to begin with? Why can’t we just get to absolute zero degrees and be done with it? The answer to this question drops us straight into one of the quantum universe’s most startling features: The world never rests. To see what this means, let’s remind ourselves about the meaning of ”temperature.” Without getting too technical (we should really be talking about entropy here) temperature for physicists is a measure of random motion. Imagine the gas molecules in the air around you are little cue balls of matter. The higher the air temperature, the faster those little orbs of matter will be ricocheting around the room, bouncing off the walls and each other. So cooling the air means finding some means to slow the molecules down. From this perspective, there there’s no conceptual reason why you shouldn’t be able bring them entirely to a halt. Do that, and the air would have a temperature of ”absolute zero” degrees (as measured in units called Kelvins. In Fahrenheit, this would be  . 67 degrees). But, it turns out, nature doesn’t work that way. The universe doesn’t ”do” zero temperatures because it doesn’t do zero motion. Thinking about matter and motion in the way we described above is what we physicists call ”a classical picture.” In classical physics, matter is made of tiny particles of ”stuff” and motion is just the change in the particles position with time. It all makes intuitive sense based on our experience of the world at the scale of baseballs and boulders. But a hundred years or so ago, physicists began probing the world on the scale of atoms. What they found was the classical, intuitive picture didn’t work well for explaining their experiments. In response, they developed a new kind of physics. In an astonishing burst of creativity, they kept key principles from the classical world  —   like the conservation of energy  —   but added new rules. One of these was the Uncertainty Principle, which essentially told us that reality is fuzzy at its root level. To be exact, certain pairs of properties  —   like motion and position  —   can never be known exactly. The Uncertainty Principle isn’t saying there’s something wrong with our instruments. Instead, it tells us there’s something wrong with our classical intuitions. In particular, when it comes to motion, it tells us it’s impossible to know the position and the motion of a particle exactly. The more you lock in the position of a particle, the wider the range of velocities the particle can have. So what does this have to do with temperature? Absolute zero should mean bringing particles to a halt. But that would imply you knew exactly where they were. You had them perfectly ”localized.” If that’s the case, then the Uncertainty Principle demands there must be some uncertainty in their motion. They can’t be perfectly known to be perfectly at rest. The deeper meaning of this this quantum logic is that the universe can never be at rest. There is a ”floor” to how much things can be slowed down (or cooled). It’s impossible to go below that floor (though scientists do get ever more clever in skirting its edges). The implications of this can get pretty strange. Imagine we put a particle, like an electron, in a box. Now we ask: What’s the lowest energy state of the electron + box system? In classical physics, it would just be the electron sitting there unmoving  —   i. e. zero motion, hence zero energy. But quantum physics won’t allow such a thing as zero energy (because of the Uncertainty Principle). Instead, the system has   ”ground state” energy with the electron bouncing back and forth between the box walls. That’s as low as you can go. The electron can’t be stopped. Take this idea further, and you get to the delicious idea of vacuum energy. There the Uncertainty Principle demands that there can be no pure and perfect vacuum with a state of zero energy. Thus, in quantum physics, the vacuum is not empty but is a seething froth of ”virtual particles” that are never manifested and yet have a verifiable effect on the particles we do see. No vacuum. No zero energy. No zero temperature. No common sense expectation about the world’s behavior. The discovery that the quantum world was the foundation for our   classical experience was a triumph of science. It was a validation of science’s ability to take us beyond our limited senses and limited concepts. There is no way to ”picture” this quantum world with our classical imaginations. Instead, what we found was a new frontier. At its root, quantum physics showed us that this world we inhabit is dynamic to its very core: buzzing, roaring, shuddering and trembling like an infinite Jackson Pollack painting. It is not just richer than we imagined, but stranger and more wonderful than we can imagine. That view, hidden in the impossibility of absolute zero temperature, is a gift that science has given us all. Now what are we to make of it? Adam Frank is a   of the 13. 7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a   ”evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4"
398,"The long arm of the pharmaceutical industry continues to pervade practically every area of medicine, reaching those who write guidelines that shape doctors’ practices, patient advocacy organizations, letter writers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even oncologists on Twitter, according to a series of papers on money and influence published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine. The findings of the papers provide further evidence showing how conflicts of interest help shape health care, a subject ProPublica has explored through its Dollars for Docs series since 2010. (Check whether your physician receives money from drug or device companies through ProPublica’s search tool.) ”The very way we all think about disease —  and the best ways to research, define, prevent, and treat it —  is being subtly distorted because so many of the ostensibly independent players, including patient advocacy groups, are largely singing tunes acceptable to companies seeking to maximize markets for drugs and devices,” researchers Ray Moynihan and Lisa Bero wrote in an accompanying commentary. The papers published in the journal cover a variety of issues. 1) More than   of patient advocacy organizations that responded to a survey indicated that they had received industry funding in their last fiscal year. For most, the money represented a small share of their budget. But 12 percent said they received more than half of their money from industry. Most organizations reported having a conflict of interest policy, but a much smaller percent said that their groups had policies for public disclosure of those relationships. Fewer than 8 percent of respondents said their group ”perceived pressure to conform its positions to the interests of corporate donors or partners” and nearly 14 percent said their group had declined a contribution because of concerns about conflicts of interest. ”Although the amounts and proportions of financial support from industry are modest, the pervasive nature of industry support suggests the need for robust public debate about how to ensure that [these groups] serve the interests of their constituencies,” the authors affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic and other academic medical centers wrote. It called for greater transparency of funding sources by the groups. 2) Organizations that received funding from opioid manufacturers were less supportive of guidelines proposed by the CDC to limit prescribing of the drugs for chronic pain. More than 150 organizations formally submitted comments after the proposed guidelines were released in February 2016, and 80 percent of them were supportive, though some had recommendations for changes. Among the 45 groups that received money from opioid makers, though, the level of support was only 62 percent. And none of those groups disclosed their funding sources in their comments. (The CDC did not ask or require them to do so.) ”More people are dying than ever before from these products, and it’s important to know how the market is shaped by the spending of drug companies,” G. Caleb Alexander,   of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview. 3) Two committees that developed guidelines for the management of high cholesterol and hepatitis C did not fully comply with standards set by the Institute of Medicine in 2011 to limit the number of   panelists. The Institute of Medicine required that fewer than half of guideline writers have commercial ties and that all chairs and   have no conflicts. But in both cases, at least one chairperson received money from industry and, in the case of the hepatitis C guidelines, a substantial majority of panelists also received money. Moreover, the authors noted, when separate committees with no commercial conflicts developed guidelines for cholesterol and hepatitis C, the recommendations were more conservative and called for less expensive   treatments. 4) Nearly 80 percent of U. S.   who use Twitter have financial conflicts of interest. The authors said their results raise questions about how conflicts should be disclosed and managed on social media. It recommended that, at minimum, physicians active on Twitter should disclose their industry funding in their biographies. A preliminary analysis of tweets by these doctors, not yet published, has shown that ”a sizeable percentage are tweeting about drugs that they have specific ties to,” oncologist Vinay Prasad, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health  Science University, said in an interview. ”Not a single one has disclosed so far, but we’ll find out.” A pharmaceutical industry trade group, in a statement, defended the relationships between companies and other organizations. ”Industry engages with stakeholders across the health care system to hear their perspectives and priorities,” said the statement by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. ”We work with many organizations with which we have disagreements on public policy issues, including on prescription medicine costs, but believe engagement and dialogue are critical. ”While we cannot speak for particular organizations, we have heard from many patients who are concerned about the growing    cost burden when trying to access needed health care services and treatments,” PhRMA said. In addition, there is broad recognition by the patient community of the significant unmet medical need that exists for many fighting devastating and debilitating diseases.” Moynihan and Bero, the authors of the JAMA Internal Medicine commentary, wrote that their primary concern is that patient groups actually speak for patients. Recently, when Mylan came under widespread criticism for the price of its EpiPen, patient groups were largely silent. ”To ensure a healthier patient voice in medical research, education, policy and practice, sponsored groups that want to be seen as independent and credible need to decrease their industry sponsorship and ultimately disentangle, gaining in authority what they lose in resources,” they wrote. Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter at ProPublica, an independent nonprofit newsroom based in New York."
399,"The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been suspended after nearly three years of fruitless work. The airplane vanished from radar on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Since then, nothing has been seen of the plane except for pieces of debris that floated far from the original focus. International search crews have examined more than 45, 000 square miles of the Indian Ocean, where experts initially concluded the plane was most likely to be located, to no avail. The search was suspended Tuesday, NPR’s Anthony Kuhn reports. ”The transportation ministers of Malaysia, China and Australia issued a joint statement, saying that despite their best efforts, the search had come up empty,” Anthony says. ”They added that their decision to suspend the search was not made lightly, or without sadness.” The search had been ”painstaking,” The Associated Press reports, with large ships dragging small vessels equipped with sonar through the ocean just above the seabed, and unmanned submarines examining any areas of interest detected by sonar. But more recent analysis suggested that the plane might never have been in the search area at all. A report suggested it may have been located slightly north  —   in a    section of ocean that hasn’t been searched yet. But the governments organizing and funding the search decided that information wasn’t specific enough to justify expanding the search zone, NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel reports. ”It’s hard for victims’ families to accept that the authorities will not enlarge the search to the north, and that their loved ones may never be found,” Anthony says. Voice370, which represents the family members of the flight’s passengers and crew, issued a statement saying the group was ”dismayed” by the decision. ”Commercial planes cannot just be allowed to disappear without a trace,” the group said. ”Stopping at this stage is nothing short of irresponsible.” The search has been suspended unless ”new evidence emerges” that points to the plane’s precise location  —   something beyond the capabilities of current technology, the AP writes. In December, when the report suggesting the plane was farther north was first released, Geoff Brumfiel described what we know about the plane’s fate: ”Fragmentary evidence from military radars and ”pings” from the plane’s own satellite communications system suggested that the Boeing 777 executed a series of turns that eventually led it to the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean. Authorities believe it crashed somewhere along a long arc of ocean, after exhausting its fuel supplies. ”In July 2015, a fragment of the plane washed up on the shores of La Réunion, a small island off the African coast. Since that time, more than 20 other pieces of debris have been recovered along beaches in places like Madagascar, Mauritius, Tanzania and South Africa. It has never been clear why the plane crashed in the first place. ”If the plane is never found, the reasons for its disappearance and crash will probably never be known,” the AP writes, ”though Malaysia has said the plane’s erratic movements after takeoff were consistent with deliberate actions.”"
400,"In a career that spans more than 20 years, Spoon has perfected a kind of ruthlessly airtight efficiency: Every few years, the Austin band returns with a new batch of perfectly compact     songs. As consistent as it is beloved, Spoon never fails to hit its mark  —   delivered forcefully, and with hooks for days. On March 17, Spoon returns with its ninth album, Hot Thoughts  —   and if the title track is any indication, that impeccably chosen palette’s got a few new colors. Thanks in part, no doubt, to Dave Fridmann joining the band as a   ”Hot Thoughts” has a rangy, swirly sparkle to it, portending an album that spreads out for a bit of a journey. 1. Hot Thoughts, 2. WhisperI’lllistentohearit, 3. Do I Have To Talk You Into It, 4. First Caress, 5. Pink Up, 6. Can I Sit Next To You, 7. I Ain’t The One, 8. Tear It Down, 9. Shotgun, 10. Us, Spoon’s Hot Thoughts comes out March 17 via Matador."
401,"Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin told reporters Tuesday morning that the suspect in the attack on the city’s Reina nightclub has confessed. Sahin identified the suspect as Abdulgadir Masharipov, born in 1983, a national of the Central Asian country of Uzbekistan. ”The terrorist has admitted to his crime, and his fingerprints also matched those found on the scene,” Sahin said. Sahin said there are strong indications Masharipov was acting on behalf of the Islamic State and had entered Turkey illegally on its eastern border. ”He’s received training in Afghanistan and speaks four languages,” said Sahin, ”a terrorist that has been well brought up.” The governor described an exhaustive manhunt involving the viewing of some 7, 200 hours of video footage and the use of 2, 000 police officers supported by Turkish intelligence. The search extended to central Anatolia and the Aegean coast. Sahin said 150 raids led to the detention of 50 people, two of whom were arrested and will face charges. There was speculation Marashipov had fled the country, perhaps to Syria. But ultimately he was arrested in an Istanbul suburb Monday night. Four others were taken into custody with him. The attack occurred early New Year’s Day in an upscale nightclub overlooking the Bosporus Strait. A gunman, apparently acting alone, killed 39 people and wounded dozens more. Most of the dead were foreigners. A photograph of Masharipov released by the government after his arrest shows him with an apparently bruised and bloodied face. Officials say Marashipov is being questioned in particular about possible accomplices, as well as any other attacks that may be planned in Turkey."
402,"As long as there has been a music industry, there have been attempts  —   both overt and clandestine  —   to manufacture hits. You can look as far back as the early 20th century, when musicians known as ”song pluggers” were paid to promote sheet music. During radio’s golden age, commercial brands often produced and underwrote live broadcasts, says media historian Cynthia Meyers. ”There were no advertisements during the music program,” Meyers says. ”They hoped that the audience would feel very favorably toward them for financing free radio programming.” Television took off in the ’50s, taking with it sponsors and stars. But radio remained vital thanks to disc jockeys like Alan Freed, who introduced audiences to new music  —   including rock ’n’ roll. As DJs became influential tastemakers, record labels plied them with cash payments and gifts in exchange for airplay. Media reports of these operations eventually led to congressional hearings. Hundreds of DJs were implicated and Freed was eventually fired and fined. In 1960, Congress amended the Federal Communications Act to require that    arrangements be disclosed on the air. But record labels quickly found workarounds, using independent radio promoters as middlemen to covertly fund airplay, contests, and giveaways. ”When you think about it,” Meyers says, ”the music industry was buying airtime just as brands were buying airtime, in order to promote their product, which was music recordings.” Things continued to change in the 1990s, when the consolidation of the radio industry ”corporatized” payola, according to Kevin Erickson of the nonprofit Future of Music Coalition. ”When we talk about payola, people have an image of somebody sliding a briefcase full of cash to a DJ,” Erickson says. ”That Alan Freed model’s not really how it works anymore.” Today, large media companies own most   radio stations. Payola investigations in the   led to   settlements by several major label conglomerates, as well as four of the nation’s largest radio station owners. Now, a new model of brand sponsorship has supplanted   payola. Dr Pepper’s ”One of a Kind Sound” is a series of artist promo spots, designed by the tech   Music Audience Exchange to look and sound like   album teasers. CEO Nathan Hanks says this approach allows major brands to reach specific demographic targets, all while less   bands gain valuable exposure. ”Artists are calling us months in advance, and they’re thinking about these partnerships as the marketing strategy for the single or for the album,” Hanks says. On an even larger scale, Pepsi launched ”The Sound Drop.” It’s a partnership with MTV, Shazam, and iHeartMedia  —   formerly Clear Channel Communications, the country’s largest radio station owner. The Sound Drop spotlights artists who are already on major labels and in rotation on iHeart Radio. ”It’s not a traditional spot,” says Emma Quigley, Pepsi’s head of music. ”It goes deeper because it’s telling you a story.” Sound bites from the artist are woven together with audio clips of the song being pushed, and aired on all of the iHeart stations playing that format. All told, the   spots air from 80, 000 to 110, 000 times over a   period  —   and that’s in addition to regular airplay of the single. ”We work with iHeartRadio at a pivotal time in the cycle of the single,” Quigley says, ”to connect the dots between the single that’s on air and in rotation and the artist themselves.” There is also a longer   for each artist, hosted on Pepsi’s YouTube channel. The only part of the campaign that resembles a conventional commercial is the banner ads Shazam runs on its app. Quigley insists that The Sound Drop isn’t advertising under the guise of entertainment. ”We’re not advertising anything,” she says. ”We are basically amplifying an artist so fans can find out more about that artist. That’s it. There’s no, ’That ad’s running, they have to play the track after the ad,’ or anything like that. It’s very clear that The Sound Drop is a   platform. But the star of that platform is the artist and that song.” The approach seems to be working: Pepsi’s first artist, Lukas Graham, just picked up three Grammy nominations, including song and album of the year."
403,"In some parts of the South, there’s an accent where every conversation sounds like a song. Brent Cobb, a native of the small town of Ellaville, Ga. doesn’t quite whistle through his teeth when he speaks, but he does push more air into his S’s when he sings. When he sings ”Solving Problems,” a song about a   bull session, at the NPR Music offices, the words shimmer like a tall glass of sweet tea in the   sun when he strings together a particularly consonant phrase: ”Conversation covers everything and in between, from Grandpa’s health to marrying good girls.” ”Solving Problems” comes from Shine On Rainy Day, his   debut produced by distant cousin Dave Cobb it’s nearly a decade in the making. Brent Cobb spent those years on Nashville’s Music Row, writing songs for the likes of Luke Bryan, Little Big Town and Miranda Lambert. But where most songwriters write for the performer, Cobb plainly says, ”If I write a song, they’re always for me. If someone wants to record it, I think they should record it.” Cobb is a conversational lyricist who dispenses normal but precisely crafted phrases amid    melodies. He skips from Merle Haggard’s ”Mama Tried” to family to making ”plans to do what we ain’t done yet.” He takes a funny story about his uncle and bends the truth a bit for the quiet holler ”Down In The Gulley.” His songwriting lineage shines through in ”Country Bound,” written by his daddy here, it features a bouncing solo from J Kott, whom Cobb jokingly calls ”our bass   guitarist.” Encouraged by the crowd to play one more song, Cobb closes with the sobering ”Shine On Rainy Day.” While he weaves plenty of wit into his lyrics, Cobb can devastate just as easily: ”Ain’t it funny how a little thunder make a man start to wonder, ’Should I swim or just go under? ’” Just as we struggle to find the silver lining in Cobb’s clouds, the song ends and he asks with a smile, ”What do we do now?” Shine On Rainy Day is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) ”Solving Problems” ”Down In The Gulley” ”Country Bound” Brent Cobb (vocals, guitar) J Kott (vocals, bass) Steve Smith (drums). Producers: Lars Gotrich, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Nicole Boliaux Production Assistant: Anna Marketti Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
404,"President Obama’s final press conference was one of both reflection and subtle rebuke toward incoming   Donald Trump, defending voting rights and a free press, all while reassuring the American people that ”at my core, I think we’re going to be OK.” Obama did show some deference toward Trump  —   sidestepping a question about the more than five dozen Democrats in Congress who are boycotting the inauguration on Friday. ”All I know is I’m going to be there, and so is Michelle,” he said. And striking an upbeat tone at the end, Obama maintained that despite being disappointed that Democrat Hillary Clinton hadn’t won, there shouldn’t be dread ahead. ”The only thing that is the end of the world is the end of the world,” Obama said, quoting advice he had given his own daughters after the election. ”I believe in this country. I believe in the American people. I believe that people are more good than bad,” Obama said. But he did have some advice for his successor, warning Trump not to become isolated in the Oval Office and to rely on his advisers. ”This is a job of such magnitude that you can’t do it by yourself,” the president said. ”You are enormously reliant on a team.” And Obama said that while it was appropriate for the incoming Republican administration to make shifts in policy, he also warned that, ”if you’re going to make big shifts in policy, just make sure you’ve thought it through.” Obama said his   plans including wanting ”to be quiet a little bit and not hear myself talk so darn much.” But he did say there would be issues he wouldn’t hesitate to speak out on after he leaves office, if he believes the country’s ”core values may be at stake.” Obama said that would include ”systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion,” an assault on voting rights, ”institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press” and ”efforts to round up kids who have grown up here and, for all practical purposes, are American kids, and send them someplace else.” Obama greatly defended the rights of a free press, seeming to be directly addressing tensions between the press corps and the incoming administration, which has floated moving reporters out of the White House and denying credentials to some reporters or publications. Obama acknowledged that at times he hasn’t been pleased with some of his coverage, but he told reporters that ”America needs you, and our democracy needs you.” ”You’re not supposed to be sycophants,” Obama said. ”You’re supposed to be skeptics you’re supposed to ask me tough questions.” But the subject on which Obama grew most passionate and the most defensive was the issue of voting rights. ”This whole notion of voting fraud is something that has been constantly disproved,” the president said forcefully. ”This is fake news.” He argued there was a racial component to such efforts  —   ”The reason that we’re the only country that makes it harder to vote is that it traces exactly back to Jim Crow”  —   but did also argue that while racial issues have gotten better during his presidency, ”we’ve got more work to do on race.” Obama also expressed hope that there would be more diverse chief executives to follow him in the White House, along with another black president. ”I think we’re going to see people of merit rise up from every race, faith and corner of the country,” he said. ”We’re going to have a woman president, a Latino president, a Jewish president, a Hindu president.” And he praised the ”transformation” that has taken place over LGBT rights over the past decade and said he was proud that his administration in some places had ”provided a good block downfield to help the movement advance.” Obama said that while he knew there would be challenges, he was hopeful those advancements weren’t ”reversible, because American society has changed [and] the attitudes of young people in particular have changed.” He also defended some of his final moves in office, including the controversial decision on Tuesday to commute Chelsea Manning’s   prison sentence. The president said that the Army private, who was convicted of leaking secret military information to WikiLeaks, had served a ”tough prison sentence” and that 35 years was ”very disproportionate” relative to sentences given to individuals in other similar cases. As for the U. S.’s decision last month to abstain from a U. N. Security Council vote that eventually passed condemning Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Obama said that the status quo in the region was ”unacceptable.” ”I don’t see how this issue gets resolved in a way that maintains Israel as both Jewish and a democracy,” the president said. ”Because if you do not have two states, then in some form or fashion you are extending an occupation functionally, you end up having one state in which millions of people are disenfranchised and operate as   residents.”"
405,"President Obama gave his final press conference at the White House on Wednesday, just two days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. He reflected on his time in office and looked toward the incoming administration, ultimately concluding, ”At my core, I think we’re going to be OK.” NPR’s politics team, with help from editors and reporters across the newsroom, annotated his remarks."
406,"  Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services defended stock transactions he made as a member of Congress as ”above board,” while vowing he would not pull the rug from under any American with health care as result of replacing the Affordable Care Act. Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia, faced the first of two hearings he’ll have as the nominee for HHS secretary. Wednesday’s was before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It will not vote on Price’s nomination that’s up to the Senate Finance Committee. But HELP committee members still asked tough questions of the nominee, focusing on Price and the incoming Trump administration’s plans to replace the ACA and on Price’s stock trades. Price acknowledged purchasing shares in an Australian firm, Innate Immunotherapeutics Inc, which makes experimental drugs, after learning about the company from a fellow GOP member of Congress, Chris Collins of New York. Collins, a member of the Trump transition team, is the company’s largest shareholder. Price told senators he studied the company and then bought his shares last year in a private offering. Price, who was a member of the House Ways and Means Committee at the time, was involved in drafting the 21st Century Cures Act, a provision of which would speed approval of drugs by the FDA. Democratic Sen. Al Franken said that over the past four years, Price traded over $300, 000 in   stocks, ”while at the same time sponsoring, advocating legislation that could affect the performance of those stocks.” But Price denied profiting from inside information, or benefiting from legislation he helped author. ”Everything that we have done,” Price said, ”has been above board, transparent and legal.” Republicans on the committee noted that other senators have invested in health stocks. Sen. Orrin Hatch said he resented the line of questioning, calling it ”hypocritical,” and Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas said Democrats were engaged in ”anger management.” The other major line of questioning was over efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Senators from both parties questioned him on the incoming administration’s plans. The   has vowed that he would provide ”insurance for everybody,” but Price was less sweeping, repeatedly saying that providing access to coverage was his goal. ”Nobody’s interested in pulling the rug out from under anybody,” Price said. But he offered few details about what the incoming administration will propose. Asked by Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders whether he agreed that health care was a right, Price answered, ”We are a compassionate society.” Sanders sharply disagreed. ”No, we’re not,” he said, noting child poverty rates, and how many seniors ”have nothing set aside for retirement.” And Sanders questioned whether Price’s commitment to providing access to health care was sufficient. ”I have access to buying a $10 million home,” Sanders said. ”I don’t have the money to do that.” Price also deferred when asked if he would commit not to cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid, as Trump has. He said the amount of money in the programs was ”the wrong metric” to use for judging the programs. ”What we ought to do,” Price said, ”is put forward the resources in order to take care of the patient.” There was a lighter moment. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said he had asked Price, an orthopedic surgeon, to take a look at a balky knee during a meeting the senator had with the nominee. ”I’ve never shown my knee to any nominee before.” Price asked if Bennet had gotten an MRI yet. ”It’s today,” Bennet said. Price, 62, faces his second round of questioning from the Senate Finance Committee next week."
407,"  Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services is taking heat for his controversial stock holdings in companies affected by laws he has worked on and voted for. But federal records show several senators who will take part in confirmation hearings for Rep. Tom Price, a Georgia Republican, have substantial   holdings as well. At least six members of the two Senate committees tasked with questioning or confirming Price, who was trained as an orthopedic surgeon, hold shares in health care companies. A Kaiser Health News analysis finds that the investments, which include shares in companies such as Merck, Medtronic and Gilead Sciences, have been held by Sens. Thomas Carper,  . Bill Cassidy,  . Susan Collins,   Tim Kaine,  . Mark Warner,  . and Sheldon Whitehouse,  . I. ”This conflict of interest problem is one that members [of Congress] have danced around over a period of years much too lightly,” said former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, who founded the Indiana University Center on Representative Government after spending more than 30 years in Congress. ”And I think it needs to be corrected in order to have confidence in the institution.” KHN examined the most recent annual financial disclosures for the 40 senators who sit on either the Finance Committee the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions or both. The HELP Committee’s courtesy hearing with Price is Wednesday, and the Finance Committee’s more pivotal vote has been scheduled for Jan. 24. About half the senators reported holding stocks in their households, but only six disclosed owning stocks in health and biomedical firms. Of the six, Whitehouse and his family have the most health stocks, split among various IRAs, education savings accounts and other accounts and belonging to Whitehouse, his wife and his children. In all, they disclosed between $402, 000 and $1. 3 million in   holdings in 2015. The disclosures don’t give exact numbers and instead include ranges. Price has been criticized following a Wall Street Journal investigation that found he traded more than $300, 000 in   stocks while serving on a health subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means. Democrats have called for investigations into whether Price made trades based on insider knowledge. Earlier this month, Trump transition spokesman Phillip Blando blasted Democrats’ hypocrisy and singled out Carper, Warner and Whitehouse for owning health stocks, calling for similar questions to be asked about their trades and holdings. He declined last week to comment further on the senators’ stock holdings. Price has told ethics officials he would divest his stock in dozens of publicly traded companies. Owning the stocks is legal, but not everyone agrees on whether it’s fair, said Tim LaPira, a political science professor at James Madison University, adding that the Senate is on average wealthier than the House. ”Of course they can invest their money as they please,” he said. The major concern, political analysts said, is that members of Congress will help pass laws to benefit companies in which they own stock. According to the Senate ethics rules, ”A Member, officer, or employee may not use his or her official position for personal gain.” Although insider trading has been illegal for members of Congress since 2012, it’s nearly impossible to prove, LaPira said. Research studies have shown that members of Congress tend to make higher returns on the stock market than the general public. ”We found that in general, they earn about 12 percent a year more than the average bear,” said Alan Ziobrowski, a retired Georgia State University real estate professor who published a 2004 study of Senate stock performance from 1993 through 1998. He did a similar study of House stock performance in 2011. He said members of Congress could have access to information that can aid in stock picking, including earlier notice that laws are about to change or additional information gathered from industry lobbyists. Ziobrowski said a   study by another researcher in 2013 found that members of Congress ”quit fooling around on the stock market” after his study of the Senate was released, but that no one has repeated his analysis since. Collins, Kaine and Whitehouse serve on the HELP Committee, whose jurisdiction includes measures pertaining to health, ”biomedical research and development.” Carper and Warner are on the Finance Committee, which deals generally with money and taxes. But it also handles ”health programs under the Social Security Act and health programs financed by a specific tax or trust fund.” Cassidy is on both committees. Since 2015, Whitehouse appears to have been an active trader and filed 10 periodic transaction reports in 2016. Annual reports for 2016 aren’t due until   but periodic reports must be filed within 45 days of a trade, according to the 2012 STOCK Act, which stands for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge. Around the time the House released its   version of the 21st Century Cures bill, which was intended to speed the FDA’s drug approval process, Whitehouse’s family purchased more stock in Gilead Sciences, which makes the pricey hepatitis C drugs Sovaldi and Harvoni. The Whitehouses’ Gilead purchases that month ranged from $4, 000 to $60, 000. The family also purchased shares of Amgen and Abbott. Whitehouse later voted in favor of the bill. The Gilead stock decreased in value following these purchases but got a slight bump up just before the bill was signed into law on Dec. 13. Some of the Gilead stock was sold about a week later. ”Senator Whitehouse does not direct his trading and doesn’t control the allocation of investments among different types of assets,” his press secretary, Rich Davidson, said in an email. When asked whether owning stocks could present an ethical conflict that could preclude Whitehouse from asking questions of Price, Davidson said, ”Sen. Whitehouse has no    input into either the management of his investment account or the decisions to trade individual holdings or types of assets. If we told him this, it would be news to him.” The family of Delaware Democrat Carper owned up to $285, 000 in health stocks, though they could total as little as $54, 000 due to the broad ranges in the reports. They are all in his wife’s name, but Hamilton said that’s irrelevant. His wife sold some of her stock in MetLife, a company that sells health and life insurance, on Dec. 15, according to his latest transaction report. In an emailed statement, Carper defended his record and said he believes   Trump’s Cabinet nominees should be scrutinized. ”I have been a public servant for more than three decades and have always submitted thorough financial disclosures about my family’s income and holdings,” he said. ”Any attempt to cast a shadow of impropriety on our financial decisions is inaccurate and unreasonable.” Maine Republican Collins and her family had between $78, 000 and $295, 000 in   stocks in 2015. They were held in her husband’s name. He sold all of his Express Scripts stock on Dec. 16, a few days after the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law. Express Scripts is a manager of prescription benefits. Collins’ office did not reply to requests for comment. According to Lousiana Republican Cassidy’s annual disclosure, his wife owned between $1, 000 and $15, 000 in iShares US Pharmaceuticals, an   fund based on an index of the drug industry. Disclosure forms show that the family bought and sold other health related stock in 2016, including purchases of Johnson  Johnson, Abbott and Novartis shares in March. In October, Cassidy’s wife sold her stock in Johnson  Johnson and bought stock in CVS Health and Amgen. Cassidy’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. KHN compiled a database of assets listed as ”corporate securities stock.” It included all stock owners in the immediate family, including spouses and dependent children. Two of the original 40 senators filed their reports on paper instead of electronically. The paper forms don’t classify assets as ”corporate securities stock,” so those had to be examined individually. Warner, who filed on paper, disclosed that his limited liability company, MRW Biotech Investors, holds between $250, 000 and $500, 000 in shares of Ziopharm Oncology Inc. Warner’s LLC invested in a venture capital fund that invested in Ziopharm before it went public.   percent of the investment company is owned by Warner’s trust. ”Sen. Warner’s investments are managed by an independent trustee, and have been since before he became governor of Virginia in 2002,” said Rachel Cohen, Warner’s press secretary. Kaine is new to the HELP Committee this year. His 2015 disclosure revealed that his children and their cousins collectively owned a trust set up by their grandmother that contained between $51, 000 and $115, 000 in health stocks, most of which were   Squibb. Amy Dudley, communications director for Sen. Kaine, said: ”Over the years, Sen. Kaine’s wife’s mother has placed stock shares from a number of companies into a trust account to help her ten grandchildren with college expenses. Senator Kaine makes no decisions about which stocks are deposited into his trust or how the deposited shares are managed and sold.” Editor’s note: This story was updated Thursday with comment from Sen. Kaine’s office. Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit health newsroom whose stories appear in news outlets nationwide, is an editorially independent part of the Kaiser Family Foundation. KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation."
408,"Former President George H. W. Bush has been placed in intensive care for an acute respiratory problem, his spokesman says, and Barbara Bush has been hospitalized ”as a precaution.” The former president had breathing problems ”stemming from pneumonia,” spokesman Jim McGrath says, and was sedated before a procedure to clear his airway. He is in stable condition, McGrath says. The former first lady was experiencing fatigue and coughing, he says. Bush was brought to a   hospital on Saturday after experiencing shortness of breath. Earlier on Wednesday, McGrath said Bush had ”responded very well to treatments” and expressed hope that he would be released from the hospital soon. Bush, 92, is the oldest living U. S. president. (Jimmy Carter is a little more than three months his junior.) As The Associated Press notes, Bush ”has a form of Parkinson’s disease and uses a motorized scooter or a wheelchair for mobility.” Reuters reports that the elder Bush was hospitalized twice in 2014 and fell and broke a bone in his neck in 2015. His public appearances have been rare over the past two years, although he still attends   sports events (and occasionally throws the first pitch or flips the coin for a kickoff)."
409,"Former President George H. W. Bush wanted to be clear that there was no ill will keeping him from attending Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday. The    had decided to stay home weeks ago because of his advanced age and poor health. Bush is the only former president who will miss the ceremony. His son George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are all expected to attend along with their wives. The elder Bush was admitted to the hospital over the weekend and sent to the intensive care unit at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas on Wednesday as he battles pneumonia. His wife, Barbara, was also admitted to the hospital ”as a precaution” because of fatigue and coughing, her husband’s office said. A week earlier, Bush had written to Trump to express his regret and good wishes. Here’s the letter he sent on Jan. 10: Neither George H. W. Bush nor George W. Bush voted for Trump in November. The   defeated former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the GOP primary race  —   and lobbed consistent insults at him (namely ”  Jeb”). Despite any hard feelings from the 2016 primary, the former presidents are showing support as the new president takes office. Trump later tweeted his thanks and good wishes back at the former president."
410,"Chances are you or somebody you know has recently become the owner of an Instant Pot, the multifunction electric pressure cooker that can produce   pot roasts in less than an hour, as well as brown meat, cook beans without soaking, and even do the job of a rice cooker or crockpot. The Instant Pot   isn’t advertised on TV or in the newspapers, and yet it’s become a viral marketing success story, with owners often describing themselves as ”addicts” or ”cult members.” That’s the kind of    publicity Instant Pot founders dreamed of when they first began designing the countertop appliances. The Instant Pot electric pressure cooker has been around since 2010, but really became the buzz during the last six months of 2016. While the company’s electric pressure cookers are sold at   Target and Kohl’s, the bulk of its sales come from Amazon, driven by social media. Deep discounts on Amazon Prime Day and again on Black Friday, along with the viral online sharing of these sales, turned Instant Pot into a household name. With 215, 000 units sold on Prime Day alone, the Instant Pot Duo is Amazon’s   item in the U. S. market. Not bad for a company that does no TV or print advertising and only recently began the process of hiring a marketing agency. The   Ottawa,   Instant Pot Company was founded by a group of engineers, not chefs, in 2008. The team focused on designing the appliance’s microprocessor and thermal and pressure sensors, which improve safety over earlier stovetop and electric pressure cookers, hoping that the product would speak for itself. ”Cooking is very much a social behavior. If people make good food, they will be raving about it, including the tools used,” says CEO Robert Wang. In order to attract cooks from different cultures, the Instant Pot has preset buttons for making foods such as porridge, beans and yogurt. Instant Pot is savvy enough to know that social media is now part of    advertising. While the company does not sponsor paid content or promotions, it has provided free Instant Pots to 200 bloggers and cookbook authors who represent many styles of cooking, including Chinese, Italian,   and vegan. The company’s website and the booklets that come with the appliance prominently feature blogger recipes. Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta calls this ”sleeper” marketing, which gets a product in front of a small, influential group of people, instead of targeting the masses. This type of marketing is a method that may work for companies that don’t have a big budget to do an advertising blitz when a product first rolls out. ”The company has to have a little bit of patience,” Gupta says. ”Sometimes it catches on really quickly but sometimes it doesn’t. There are a lot of failures that happen with this kind of mechanism. If you are a small player, it’s a good strategy to try.” He notes a similar strategy used by the Blendtec company, which posted a YouTube video showing the company’s CEO using the blender to grind up an iPhone. ”As you can imagine, the video got shared,” says Gupta. ”But, it was consistent with the key value proposition of the product,” meaning that the hype reinforced what the appliance says it will do. Michelle Tam, author of the Nom Nom Paleo blog and cookbook, bought an Instant Pot in 2013 when seeking a faster way to make the bone broths and braised meats that are integral to her diet. ”I put a lot of Instant Pot recipes on my blog just because I use it myself,” she explains. Laura Pazzaglia, author of the cookbook and website Hip Pressure Cooking, has worked as a paid consultant to Instant Pot, producing demo videos, but she also works with other pressure cooker manufacturers. While kitchen appliance giants such as Cuisinart, Breville and Fagor also produce electric pressure cookers, Pazzaglia praises the Instant Pot’s convenient features, particularly the stainless steel inner pot. Of course, a catchy name doesn’t hurt either. ”Like Kleenex came to represent tissues and Xerox photocopiers, Instant Pot is coming to represent electric pressure ” says Pazzaglia. ”It’s both corny and fun and doesn’t come with any of the   and historical fear that the words ’pressure cooker’ bring about.” I’ll admit: I bought one of those Instant Pots on Amazon Prime Day last July. For me, the tipping point was seeing my friend, Lizz Porter, of the blog More Than Thursdays, posting about the $69 sale, a 30 percent markdown from its regular $99 price. Like many bloggers, Porter posts Amazon affiliate links on her website, as well as on her Facebook and Twitter feeds. She says approximately 50 Instant Pots were purchased through her links in the second half of 2016. I asked her if the income from those sales was a factor behind her social sharing. ”It’s all bonus money,” says Porter. ”I’d still share the Instant Pot even if I didn’t get commission, because it’s made that much of a difference for us. With the Instant Pot, I can still get dinner on the table even if I only have frozen meat at 6 p. m. and I don’t have to cook everything in the microwave!” The viral popularity of the Instant Pot even has seasoned digital marketing pros scratching their heads. Jim Lin, senior vice president and creative director of Ketchum Digital oversees social media engagement and influencer programs for the agency’s key clients, and he is surprised by how many parent bloggers are talking about the Instant Pot on social media  —   even when they are not being paid to promote it. ”What I think is the magic of this phenomenon was the fact that the Instant Pot owners have become almost like a club that every parent wants to be a part of,” says Lin. A search of Facebook turns up many Instant Pot community groups, including one run by the company with more than 300, 000 members. Others groups specialize in Whole 30, Weight Watchers, vegan, Kosher or Vietnamese cooking. New pressure cooker owners post questions, while veterans show off their creations, including the   bone broth and cheesecake recipes. ”Instant Pot caught a good wave,” says Lin. ”It could have easily gone the other way with one mishap that people talked about. That could have destroyed the brand reputation.” But Gupta believes consumers are sophisticated enough that a few bad reviews won’t hurt, as long as they are offset by positive ones. ”There’s a large number effect,” he says. ”On the average it will be reasonably close to the truth.” With a new model due to be released in sometime in 2017, the Instant Pot craze shows no signs of cooling off. Grace Hwang Lynch is a San Francisco Bay   journalist with an interest in race and how it affects everything, including food, entertainment and parenting. Her work has been published by PBS, PRI, Library Journal, Salon and xoJane. Follow her on Twitter: @GraceHwangLynch "
411,"Cold and flu season means plenty of parents are trying to figure out whether their kid is too sick to go to child care or school. It’s not always an easy call. Day care centers for younger children often have exclusion policies laying out exactly which symptoms should keep kids at home  —   more on those in a minute. But rules in elementary school and beyond are often looser and less definitive, says Gary Freed, a pediatrician and   of the University of Michigan C. S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health. The poll’s national survey of 1, 442 parents of kids ages 6 to 18 released Monday found that the top factors in a decision to keep a child home are concerns that the illness will get worse or spread to classmates at school. Parents of older kids were also more likely to worry than parents of younger children about students missing tests or class time when making the       decision. Interestingly, only 11 percent said that not wanting to miss work themselves was a ”very important” factor in deciding whether a kid should stay home. Parents were more likely to keep children home for diarrhea, a single episode of vomiting or a slight fever than red, watery eyes or cold symptoms. ”A lot of this is a judgment call,” says Freed. But he says if it doesn’t seem like your kid is going to have a successful day at school, that’s a good starting point for keeping him or her home, even if the illness is not contagious. If your child is in day care, the decision may be made for you  —   and the exclusion criteria are not necessarily based on the best science. Freed’s colleague at the University of Michigan, pediatrician and pediatric emergency medicine physician Andrew Hashikawa, studies child care exclusion policies and says they vary from center to center, county to county and state to state. He has found, for example, that even in a state that endorses the American Academy of Pediatrics’ guidelines for child care illness exclusions, day care policies didn’t reflect those guidelines. And you may be surprised by what those guidelines say. For example, the dreaded pinkeye is not a reason to keep a kid out of day care, according to the pediatricians. ”The vast majority are colds of the eye,” says Hashikawa. Vomiting is a reason to send a child home only if there are two or more episodes in 24 hours. A rash is no reason to keep a child out of day care unless it’s accompanied by behavior change, fever or drainage. And even a   fever in an otherwise   child over 6 months old is not a reason to call Mom or Dad or require a physician visit. But, you might ask, aren’t those kids spreading their germs? It would seem so, since babies and toddlers in child care experience more stomach bugs, colds and ear infections in their first two years compared with those who are cared for at home. ”The science really tells us that most disease is spread before the child gets sick,” says Hashikawa. Instead, the current goal of exclusion recommendations is to help kids recover. If they feel crummy enough that they can’t participate in activities or they require care beyond what child care staff can easily provide without compromising the health and safety of other kids, they should stay home. And temporary exclusion is recommended for some specific symptoms and illnesses, including a sudden change in behavior, such as lethargy or trouble breathing acute diarrhea for children still in diapers strep throat and chickenpox. When faced with a child excluded from care, 75 percent of parents say they’ve had to miss work, according to a poll from NPR, Harvard and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Nearly half said that impacted their job. And when kids are booted from child care unnecessarily, it’s not just a pain for parents. One study by Hashikawa and his colleagues found that 88 percent of parents sought medical care for their kids unable to go to child care, and a third needed a doctor’s note for their child to return. Cutting down on unnecessary exclusions, then, could save everyone time and money. Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer based in Brooklyn, N. Y. She’s on Twitter: @katherinehobson"
412,"After Betsy DeVos’ Senate confirmation hearing yesterday  —   all three hours and change  —   we know a little more about Donald Trump’s pick to be the next education secretary. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor  Pensions, DeVos faced questions on a range of issues, from private school vouchers and charter school oversight to guns in schools. We’ve reported extensively on DeVos’ background, her advocacy in Michigan and on the research behind school choice. Below, we’ve pulled out some of the highlights from her hearing (with a little context where needed): Local Control, ”  Trump and I know it won’t be Washington, D. C. that unlocks our nation’s potential, nor a bigger bureaucracy, tougher mandates or a federal agency. The answer is local control and listening to parents, students, and teachers.” This came from DeVos’ opening remarks, and succinctly captures her education philosophy: Limit the role of government in America’s schools and trust that the free market  —   and parent choice  —   will lead to innovation and improvement. Privatizing Public Schools, DeVos’ faith in the free market led to several tense exchanges, including this one with the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington: Murray: ”Can you commit to us tonight that you will not work to privatize public schools or cut a single penny from public education?” DeVos: ”Senator, thanks for that question. I look forward, if confirmed, to working with you to talk about how we address the needs of all parents and all students. And we acknowledge today that not all schools are working for the students that are assigned to them. And I’m hopeful that we can work together to find common ground and ways that we can solve those issues and empower parents to make choices on behalf of their children that are right for them.” Murray: ”I take that as not being willing to commit to not privatizing public schools or cutting money from education.” DeVos: ”I guess I wouldn’t characterize it in that way.” Murray: ”Well,” she said, laughing, ”OK.” Ideology Meets Legal Reality, The committee’s chairman, Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and former education secretary himself, asked DeVos whether she would try to push school vouchers onto states even though the federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, does not include or allow it. ”No,” she answered. ”I would hope I could convince you all of the merit of that in maybe some future legislation, but certainly not any kind of mandate from within the department.” Qualifications  Former senator  —   and former Democrat  —   Joe Lieberman introduced DeVos at the hearing. He has worked with her as a board member of her school choice advocacy group, The American Federation for Children. DeVos has never taught in, managed or attended a public school. ”I know that some people are questioning her qualifications to be secretary of education,” Lieberman said. ”And too many of those questions, to me, seem to be based on the fact that she doesn’t come from within the education establishment. But honestly I believe that today that’s one of the most important qualifications you could have for this job.” Grizzly Bears, Perhaps the strangest exchange of the evening came in response to this question from Sen. Chris Murphy,  .: ”Do you think that guns have any place in or around schools?” DeVos: ”I think that’s best left to locales and states to decide. If the underlying question is. ..” Murphy: ”You can’t say definitively today that guns shouldn’t be in school?” DeVos: ”Well, I will refer back to Senator Enzi [that’s Mike Enzi,  .] and the school that he was talking about in Wapiti, Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.” It’s important to note that Murphy represents Connecticut where, in 2012, a gunman shot and killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Trump University And Gainful Employment,   Trump’s shuttered Trump University loomed large over this    between DeVos and Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  .: Warren: ”Do you support protecting federal taxpayer dollars from waste, fraud and abuse?” DeVos: ”Absolutely.” Warren: ”Oh good, so do I. Because now we all know that   Trump’s experience with higher education was to create a fake university which resulted in his paying $25 million dollars to students that he cheated. So, I’m curious about how the Trump administration would protect against waste, fraud and abuse at similar   colleges. So here’s my question, How do you plan to protect taxpayer dollars from waste, fraud and abuse by colleges that take in millions of dollars in federal student aid?” DeVos: ”Senator, if confirmed, I will certainly be very vigilant. ..” Warren: ”I’m asking how. You said you were committed. I’m asking how you are going to do that.” DeVos: ”The individuals with whom I work in the department will ensure that federal monies are used properly and appropriately, and I will look forward to working with you.” Warren: ”So you’re going to subcontract in making sure that what happened with universities that cheat students doesn’t happen anymore?” DeVos: ”No, I didn’t say. ..” Warren: ”You’re going to give that to someone else to do? I just want to know what your ideas are for making sure we don’t have problems with waste, fraud and abuse.” DeVos: ”I want to make sure we don’t have problems with that as well. And if confirmed, I will work diligently to ensure that we are addressing any of those issues.” Warren: ”Well, let me make a suggestion on this. It actually turns out that there’s a whole group of rules that are already written and are there and all you have to do is enforce them. So what I want to know is, will you commit to enforcing these rules to ensure that no career college receives federal funds unless they can prove that they are actually preparing their students for gainful employment and not cheating them?” DeVos: ”Senator, I will commit to ensuring that institutions which receive federal funds are actually serving their students well.” Warren: ”And so you will enforce the gainful employment rule to ensure that these career colleges are not cheating students?” DeVos: ”We will certainly review that rule.” Warren: ”You’ll review it? You won’t commit to enforce it?” DeVos: ”And see that it is actually achieving what the intentions are.” Accountability, DeVos has promoted the expansion of charter schools and private school voucher programs nationwide. Which led to this exchange with Sen. Tim Kaine,  .: Kaine: ”Do you think   schools that receive federal funding should meet the same accountability standards, outcome standards?” DeVos: ”All schools that receive public funding should be accountable, yes.” Kaine: ”Should meet the same accountability standards?” DeVos: ”Yes. Although, you have different accountability standards between traditional public schools and charter schools.” Kaine: ”But I’m really interested in this, should everybody be on a level playing field? So public, charter or private   schools, if they receive taxpayer funding, they should meet the same accountability standards?” DeVos: ”Yes, they should be very transparent with the information. And parents should have that information first and foremost.” Kaine: ”And, if confirmed, will you insist upon that equal accountability in any   school or educational program that receives federal funding whether public, public charter or private?” DeVos: ”I support accountability.” Kaine: ”Equal accountability for all schools that receive federal funding.” DeVos: ”I support accountability.” Kaine: ”Okay, is that a yes or a no?” DeVos: ”That’s a, ’I support accountability.’ ” Kaine: ”Do you not want to answer my question?” DeVos: ”I support accountability.” IDEA, If DeVos had a true stumble last night, it came shortly after the exchange above, when Kaine pivoted to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The federal law requires schools to provide students with disabilities the same educational opportunities that they provide students without disabilities. Given the limited resources in many districts, the requirements of IDEA have often strained school budgets, and the law is now at the center of a U. S. Supreme Court case over just how far schools must go to meet the needs of their students with disabilities. DeVos, at least initially, appeared not to understand IDEA or how it works. Kaine: ”Should all   schools that receive taxpayer funding be required to meet the requirements of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act?” DeVos: ”I think that is a matter that’s best left to the states.” Kaine: ”So some states might be good to kids with disabilities, and other states might not be so good. And then, what? People can just move around the country if they don’t like how their kids are being treated?” DeVos: ”I think that’s an issue that’s best left to the states.” Kaine: ”What about the federal requirement? It’s a federal law  —   the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. Let’s limit it to federal funding. If schools receive federal funding should they be required to follow federal law  —   whether they’re public, public charter, or private?” At this point, DeVos attempted to invoke a Florida program that came up earlier in the    but Kaine insisted on a yes or no answer. Ultimately, DeVos answered: ”I think that is certainly worth discussion.” Later, Sen. Maggie Hassan,  . H.  : Hassan: ”Do you stand by your statement a few minutes ago that [IDEA] should be up to the states whether to follow it?” DeVos: ”Federal law must be followed where federal dollars are in play.” Hassan: ”So were you unaware, when I just asked you about the IDEA, that it was a federal law?” DeVos: ”I may have confused it.” Wealth And Political Contributions, Sen. Bernie Sanders,  . wanted to know about DeVos’ personal fortune. Sanders: ”Mrs. DeVos, there is a growing fear I think in this country that we are moving toward what some would call an oligarchic form of society. Where a small number of very, very wealthy billionaires control, to a significant degree, our economic and political life. Would you be so kind as to tell us how much money your family has contributed to the Republican party over the years?” DeVos: ”Senator, first of all, thank you for that question. I, again, was pleased to meet you in your office last week. I wish I could give you that number. I don’t know.” Sanders: ”I have heard the number was 200 million. Does that sound in the ballpark?” DeVos: ”Collectively? Between my entire family?” Sanders: ”Yeah, over the years. Yes.” DeVos: ”That’s possible.” Sanders: ”My question is, and I don’t mean to be rude, but do you think, if you were not a   if your family had not made hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions to the Republican party, that you would be sitting here today?” DeVos: ”Senator, as a matter of fact, I do think that there would be that possibility. I’ve worked very hard on behalf of parents and children for the last almost 30 years to be a voice for parents, voice for students, and to empower parents to make decisions on behalf of their children, primarily   children.” Sanders: ”Thank you.”  "
413,"In a few hours, longtime Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh’s presidential term will expire. But he is clinging to power as troops from regional powers reportedly amass at the border. International and regional powers are demanding that Jammeh step down and make way for his rival, businessman Adama Barrow, who won last month’ s presidential election. The African Union has stated that it will stop recognizing Jammeh as president after his term expires at midnight local time. (Gambia is five hours ahead of the U. S. East Coast.) And ECOWAS, the West African regional bloc, appears to be preparing to enforce the election result by force. The Nigerian air force said in a statement that it has moved ”a contingent of 200 men and air assets” to Senegal’s capital, Dakar, ”from where it is expected to operate into Gambia.” Senegalese forces also are poised to cross the border, army spokesman Col. Abdou Ndiaye tells Reuters. ”We are ready and are awaiting the deadline at midnight. If no political solution is found, we will step in,” Ndiaye said, according to the wire service. ECOWAS had earlier threatened military action if Jammeh refused to leave and is seeking ”the U. N. Security Council’s endorsement of its ’all necessary measures’ to help remove Jammeh from power,” The Associated Press reported. Gambia, ”a country of 1. 9 million people, is estimated to have just 900 troops,” according to the wire service. Jammeh, who has been president since he led a coup 22 years ago, initially accepted the result of the Dec. 1 election  —   but dramatically changed his mind a week later, saying that the results were void because of voting ”irregularities.” And earlier this week, he issued a   state of emergency. Parliament also extended his term for another three months earlier today, according to news reports, though that hasn’t appeared to ease the tension heading into tomorrow’s deadline. Meanwhile, it appears Barrow is preparing to be sworn in as president. It’s unclear where that ceremony would take place, as Barrow is in Senegal for his own protection. ”Our future starts tomorrow,” Barrow said in a tweet. Since Jammeh lost the election, ”Gambian authorities have arbitrarily arrested opposition sympathizers and closed four independent radio stations,” according to Amnesty International. The U. N.’s refugee agency says thousands of Gambians fearing violence have fled across the border to Senegal. Tourists are also evacuating the country and a correspondent with The Guardian is posting pictures of crowded halls in the capital’s airport, saying it is ”absolute chaos.” Tour operator Thomas Cook said it is operating extra flights in order to ”get our UK customers home from the Gambia as quickly as possible.” The company adds that it hopes to transport some 3, 500 people on 16 flights by Friday. The smallest country on the African continent is a popular destination for tourists seeking sandy beaches."
414,"The first results from a major project to measure the reliability of cancer research have highlighted a big problem: Labs trying to repeat published experiments often can’t. That’s not to say that the original studies are wrong. But the results of a review published Thursday, in the   journal eLife, are a sobering reminder that science often fails at one of its most basic requirements  —   an experiment in one lab ought to be reproducible in another one. And the fact that they often aren’t could have big health implications. Many exciting ideas in cancer research never pan out. One reason is that findings from the initial studies don’t stand the test of time. ”Reproducibility is a central feature of how science is supposed to be,” says Brian Nosek, who spearheaded this research at the Center for Open Science. Nosek is also a psychology professor at the University of Virginia. A few years ago, he organized a similar effort to examine research in his field. And his results garnered worldwide attention when   of the original findings in psychology couldn’t be reproduced. Nosek decided to explore the work from cancer biology labs after two   studies, from drugmakers Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced. Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined. ”Those were earthshaking reports, in the sense that the community responded very strongly to these reports of challenges to reproduce some of these core findings,” Nosek says. But scientists at Bayer and Amgen wouldn’t say which experiments they examined, so their work raised many questions but left no way for scientists to answer them. ”The cancer reproducibility project in cancer biology was an attempt to advance that discussion with an open project,” Nosek says. This project is transparent about how it picked the studies to reproduce. It also published methods and study plans in advance. In collaboration with a California company called Science Exchange, the reviewers got grants to replicate key experiments from as many as 50   studies. (They will very likely run out of money before they’re able to complete that work, however.) They’ve now published the results of their first five attempts, in eLife. ”Three of the five show very, very striking differences from the original,” says Timothy Errington, a biologist at the Center for Open Science and collaborator in the project. As for findings from the other two studies, he says, ”I think you’ll get a lot of opinions about whether they replicate or not.” Errington says he was quite surprised by the results. In one case, the original scientists went the extra mile to help the labs doing the   studies reduce potential sources of error. ”The lab gave us the same drug. This is wonderful. Because that could have been a sticking point,” Errington says. ”They gave us the same tumor cells that they used.” Yet the replicating lab didn’t end up with the same results. Scientists have had so much confidence in two of the original studies that drug companies already have sunk millions of dollars into efforts to try the concepts out in people. But the   experiments for one of those didn’t validate the original results. The inevitable question is whether the original science was wrong, or whether the scientists who tried to repeat that work somehow got tripped up. The review project farmed out its actual laboratory work to commercial labs that perform experiments for the pharmaceutical industry, or to university ”core facilities,” such as centralized labs that do a lot of research on mice. Those labs generally work to standards required by the Food and Drug Administration. But research with living systems is never simple, so there are many possible sources of variation in any experiment, ranging from the animals and cells to the details of lab technique. And there isn’t even clear agreement about when a study’s findings can be considered to have been reproduced. Sean Morrison, an editor at eLife and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says that by his count, two studies’ findings were substantially reproduced. The findings of one other were not, he says, and two others have results that simply can’t be interpreted. ”One of the difficulties of the reproducibility project is they have limited time and resources to spend on any one study,” Morrison says. ”As a result, they can’t go back and do these things over and over again when the first results turn out to be uninterpretable.” Errington agrees that the reproducibility project leaves that big question hanging  —   but the scientists don’t plan to answer it. ”As exciting as that is, and as important as that is  —   and we hope someone else will follow up on it  —   we’re more curious about, ’What does that look like when we do this across many, many, many studies.’ ” But Dr. Erkki Ruoslahti, at the nonprofit Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, Calif. is worried that the reproducibility project could do real damage. The reviewers couldn’t reproduce his original study but didn’t follow up to understand why. ”I am really worried about what this will do to our ability to raise funding for our clinical development,” he writes in an email to Shots. ”If we, and the many laboratories who have reproduced our results, are right and the reproducibility study is wrong  —   which I think is the case  —   they will not be doing a favor to cancer patients.” Dr. Irving Weissman, a professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, is also disappointed in how the reproducibility project handled his experiment. His paper reported finding a protein that’s present on all human cancer cells  —   a finding that Weissman says has been replicated many times in other labs. The reproducibility project chose to repeat a peripheral part of Weissman’s paper  —   an experiment involving mice, not human tissues. And, Weissman says, the replicating lab stumbled over an early step in the experiment, but plowed ahead anyway. Weissman says he offered to bring scientists into his lab to train them in the technique, but the Reproducibility Project didn’t do that. (That would undercut one of its goals, which is to see whether scientists working independently can verify published results.) It’s important to replicate important studies, Weissman tells Shots, ”but you can’t do it halfheartedly. You have to be serious about it.” Errington and Nosek hope people who hear about the project’s findings don’t jump to any conclusions about why individual studies came to different conclusions. They’re trying to look at the big picture across dozens of studies, the two scientists say, and they don’t place too much confidence in any single result. The reproducibility project is looking for patterns across cancer research and also trying to identify common reasons that labs might have trouble reproducing one another’s work. Are the directions offered in the methods section of a paper too sketchy? Or maybe experiments frequently work only under unusual conditions. Morrison, who is involved as a journal editor rather than a participant, says the entire reproducibility project is itself one big experiment. ”I think it’s too early for us to know whether this approach is the right approach or the best approach for testing the reproducibility of cancer biology,” he says. ”But it will be a data point, and it will start the conversation.” The conversation is important because the vast majority of treatment ideas that come from the lab fail when they’re tried in people. Cathy   a pharmacologist at the University of California, San Francisco, says scientists often don’t know why those clinical failures occur, ”and so that’s why I think studies like this are really, really important.” Unfortunately, Nosek says, there are few incentives today for scientists to repeat experiments from other labs. The rewards are for publishing new ideas, not the less glamorous, but still critical, work of verifying somebody else’s findings. ”If we’re going to take reproducibility seriously,” Nosek says, experiments that attempt to reproduce the findings of others ”need to be a valued part of scientific contribution.”"
415,"Sotheby’s says a 16th century Italian painting sold by the auction house for $842, 500 in 2012 is actually a modern fake, according to a complaint filed in U. S. District Court in New York on Tuesday. The auction house is suing the collector who consigned the painting, arguing that he must pay back at least the $672, 000 he personally made on the sale. Sotheby’s says its contract with the man, Lionel de Saint   allows the company to rescind the sale if a painting turns out to be a counterfeit. The painting, titled St. Jerome, had previously passed through the hands of an art dealer under investigation for allegedly trafficking multiple forged works. It was displayed at Vienna’s national gallery before it was auctioned off. The gallery identified it as the work of a man known as Parmigianino, an Italian Renaissance master who worked in Parma, Italy, in the early 1500s. By the time Sotheby’s received it in 2011, disputes among art historians had led many to conclude that the painting might have been created by someone close to Parmigianino, but not necessarily by the artist himself. One scholar, the auction noted in its catalog, thought the painting might actually be by another   Italian, Michelangelo Anselmi. But no one disputed the basic origin of the painting. It was more than 400 years old, everyone who examined it agreed. That is, until a man named James Martin turned his attention to St. Jerome. Martin, the investigator behind Sotheby’s complaint, is an art conservator and forensic scientist. One colleague referred to him as ”the ’rock star’ of his field,” in an interview with Art New England magazine. In October 2016, Martin’s art analysis company, Orion Analytics, shocked the art world when it reported a painting attributed to a 17th century Dutch artist appeared to be a forgery. It contained materials that had not been invented until the 20th century. What’s more, the Dutch painting had come from the same art dealer as another suspected fake, signaling a master forger might be at work. The Financial Times reported that the news sent the market for paintings by   Old Masters reeling. Sotheby’s acquired Orion Analytics in December and made Martin the head of its new Scientific Research Department. Meanwhile, the auction house had begun to suspect that St. Jerome might be a fake. It had passed through the hands of an art dealer named Giuliano Ruffini, who the court complaint notes ”is under investigation for selling a considerable number of Old Master Paintings that are considered to be modern forgeries.” Martin took pigment samples from 21 areas of St. Jerome, analyzing the composition of the paint and comparing the chemicals it contained with paints invented at different points in history. ”Each and every one of those samples (none of which were taken from areas of restoration) contained the modern synthetic pigment phthalocyanine green,” the complaint stated. That pigment was ”first used in paints nearly four centuries after Parmigianino died.” ”It’s one of the biggest scandals in my memory,” Richard Feigen, an Old Master art dealer in New York, told Bloomberg after last year’s revelations about forgeries in the market. ”It’s going to make people very wary, extremely careful about things they are offered and the sources of those things.” The St. Jerome complaint only exacerbates that concern. Bob Haboldt, a dealer in Old Master art, told The New York Times that Tuesday’s court complaint was ”a   call.” ”It’ll make people look at what they have on the wall or what’s on consignment or what’s been purchased in the recent past more closely. People are scrutinizing what’s in their collections, and I think that’s an ongoing process.” But, Haboldt told the newspaper, ”I don’t think it’ll shake up the market more than it already has, because if you notice, the sales results at auction and in the market haven’t changed.”"
416,"Leather jacket . .. over superhero tights. Maybe with the jacket sleeves pushed up to the elbows jauntily? Finished off with some leather driving gloves, for precisely no reason? It’s . .. a look. You can’t say it’s not. At least, it was a look, back in the bad old days of the benighted ’90s, when superhero fashion, like skiing, skateboarding, makeovers and underarm deodorant, got extreeeeeme. Sartorially speaking, the   combo doesn’t make any damn sense, it never has. Superhero costumes are supposed to reflect the beings inside them: bold, uncomplicated, iconic  —   design reduced to essential elements and vivid primary colors.   are athletic wear, after all, meant to allow for a full range of movement. They possess, one strongly suspects, wicking technology. Throw a jacket over that, and you just complicate things needlessly. You make superheroes look . .. fussy. Also a little chilly. (”AVENGERS, ASSEMBLE! NOT, YOU KNOW, NOW, BUT SOON! AFTER I’VE GONE BACK TO THE CAR TO GET MY DENIM! ”) Worse still, as I’ve mentioned before, you make them seem like they’re doing a tight five minutes about airline peanuts against the brick wall of a Chuckle Hut in 1991. But that’s how a great many superheroes started to dress in the ’90s, as a booming comics industry fed demand with a swelling roster of extreme! heroes given to    outbursts of violence  —   and sulking. The editorial thinking went: ”These new heroes are more complicated than our classic heroes”  —   (psst: They really, really weren’t, you guys)  —   ”so their look should reflect that. We’ll make them look contemporary, raw,   .” Which translated into: we’ll slap a bomber jacket on ’em and call it a day. (Yesterday I appealed to Twitter to help me remember the various superheroes who’ve rocked this regrettable look, over the years. At this writing, some 24 hours later, the names are still pouring in the count stands at a   47.) But time moved on, and the comics boom of the early ’90s busted, and the fashion for    superhero couture mercifully faded. Many heroes who’d sported that look came to their senses, in much the same way that you, eventually, got rid of your jorts. I’m assuming. But now, one of the ’90s heroes who defined the    era has returned with a vengeance, in a solo   comic in stores today. And, yes, he’s brought the jacket with him. That’s him, and it, right up there at the   of this post. But first, some quick background. Quicker Than A Ray Of Light, There’s been a superhero called ”The Ray” flitting through superhero circles, off and on, since 1940. He was created by writer Will Eisner and artist Lou Fine in the pages of Smash Comics #14, and his design was sleekness itself: glowing yellow skintight bodysuit, with an   fin on his head. Over the long decades since his debut, he’s bounced from one parallel Earth to another, a perennial   with broadly defined ”light powers” who hung out with a team of   heroes whose roster included a guy in a hazmat suit who could make his limbs blow up (the   Human Bomb) and nothing less than the personification of the American Spirit (Uncle Sam  —   not the cigarette  —   complete with soul patch, top hat, blue tails and stripey pants on his bandy legs). In 1992, writer Jack C. Harris and artist Joe Queseda introduced the original Ray’s son in a    . His deal: Young Ray Terrill grew up convinced he had a light allergy, and was kept in the dark  —   literally  —   about his true origins, lest strong sunlight trigger his light powers before he grew old enough to control them. Artist Queseda, awash as he was in the era’s   zeitgeist, added another element to this new Ray’s look. A jacket. And . .. what a jacket. Take a look at this thing. First of all, it’s both   and   in the way precisely no jacket should be. It’s epauletted and   all the way to Sunday in a way that’s meant to evoke a military uniform, although with that    color scheme . .. well. I’ll let my colleague Linda Holmes sum it up: ”If Sergeant Pepper were a character in The Bee Movie.” Also, fingerless gloves. You know, in case his heroic duties should require him to infiltrate the ”Love is a Battlefield” video. Beginning in 1994, this new,     version of The Ray starred in a successful solo series written by Christopher Priest and penciled (initially) by Howard Porter. It was promoted, in a highly unusual move, with a   ad featuring a photograph of a male model in full Ray regalia, which appeared in all of DC’s titles. Behold, 1994 distilled to its     essence! Since then, there have been two other versions of The Ray in DC Comics: Stan Silver, an   reporter, and Lucien Gates, a   lifeguard. Both of these   Rays had the good sense to lose the jacket. Ray, A Drop Of Golden Sun, But today, it’s the       version of The Ray who’s returning in a   comic that boasts the hilariously voluminous title Justice League of America: The Ray: Rebirth #1. Writer Steve Orlando and artist Stephen Byrne reintroduce the character, setting up his inclusion, next month, in the ranks of the Justice League of America. Orlando’s bisexual, and Byrne is gay, and their version of Ray Terrill is a       superhero. Most queer readers will welcome this development, while other readers will balk. Me, I find myself surprisingly conflicted. Don’t get me wrong  —   the issue is an admirable piece of work that retells his origin, sets up his worldview, establishes his New Normal and positions him in the DC Universe with energy and economy. And it leaves you with no small amount of good,   superheroic uplift. And yet, there’s something I couldn’t get past: that retcon. Not that’s he’s gay now I applaud that. But accepting that fact means I now have to force myself to also accept the notion that any   queer kid would design . .. that woeful, woeful jacket. I’ll let it go, eventually. I mean, take a look at the guy, below. HE sure seems happy with it. More’s the pity."
417,"These days, plenty of consulting firms make money peddling advice on cybersecurity. Only one is run by a man designated special adviser to the president of the United States. Earlier this month,   Donald Trump named former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who heads a cybersecurity practice at the   law firm   as his chief adviser on cybersecurity issues. Giuliani’s new title is more than just another notch on his resume. It’s also likely to be good for business. ”The way the world works, if you’re perceived as having proximity to power, that brings certain advantages,” says William Galston, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. Trump also named another longtime friend and supporter, billionaire investor Carl Icahn, his special adviser on regulatory issues. White House titles can be opaque, and ”special adviser” is an especially vague one, meaning whatever the president wants it to mean. ”These are people outside the government who the president trusts and wants to confer with, but who have no formal title and are not hired by the government, not paid by the government, don’t have a formal office, but who do have access to the president, because the president wants to listen to them,” says James P. Pfiiffner, university professor of public policy at George Mason University. Unlike other White House staff positions, ”special advisers” don’t have to comply with federal    laws, which means they can hold onto their day jobs. Icahn, for example, is a longtime investor with big stakes in many major companies that have business before the federal government, including Xerox, AIG and Allergan. ”I think there’s a significant cause for concern there. You have people who are going to be advising the president, apparently in an important way, on issues that directly affect their businesses,” says Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Bookbinder notes that because special advisers aren’t formal government positions, they’re not covered by    laws and the public has no way of knowing what role they’re playing behind the scenes. ”These people don’t need to be officially vetted. They don’t need to be confirmed and their arrangements are not in any official way scrutinized by Congress,” he says. In an interview on CNBC last month, Icahn dismissed concerns about whether it was appropriate to be advising the White House on regulatory hiring when he holds a stake in energy companies. ”I can understand saying that I shouldn’t be involved in owning these if I were making policy,” he responded. But, he went on, ”Is there anything wrong with me saying this guy is the right guy for this job at this time? And it doesn’t mean Donald is going to take my advice necessarily. I’m not the guy saying, ’He’s got the job. ’” Giuliani told Politico his role as Trump adviser would present no    and he said he would never use his White House access to lobby the president. But Politico said Giuliani ”acknowledged that he might have business ties with some of the people he connects to Trump, and that he might be discussing government and private issues with some people.” It quoted Giuliani as saying: ”Probably 95 percent I’ll have no connection with. If I happen to have a business connection with them, obviously I’d make them available also if they’re business leaders. .. We do cybersecurity for many people. We are doing very well, and this gives me a chance to get a lot of new players into the game and put them before the government so they can help the government.” But the question of how much Trump should rely on special advisers with outside business ties is a complex one. Galston, who served in the Clinton White House, says presidents regularly hear from a wide variety of people, many of whom have agendas. ”People give   advice to politicians all the time. If that were a criminal activity I think our jails would be even fuller than they are now,” Galston says. It’s the president’s job to sift through the advice he hears and determine what course of action is in the best interest of the country, he says."
418,"Last year, global warming reached record high temperatures  —   and if that news feels like déjà vu, you’re not going crazy. The planet has now had three consecutive years of   heat. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just released its annual State of the Climate report, which says it’s the hottest it has been since scientists started tracking global temperatures in 1880. A separate analysis, by NASA scientists, came to the same conclusion. The news comes as a confirmation hearing begins for Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt has ardently defended fossil fuels and fought against federal efforts to regulate greenhouse gases that warm the planet.   Donald Trump has professed   about climate change. Still, he once called it a hoax, and scientists have been worried by his picks for his transition team and administration, as well as by the questions asked about climate scientists at the Department of Energy. As the politics swirls around them, climate scientists keep churning out data. ”[Last year] was the warmest year on record, beating 2015 by a few hundredths of a degree, and together those two years really blow away the rest of our record,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the monitoring group at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N. C. He says 2016 was about 1. 7 degrees Fahrenheit above the global average for the 20th century. ”And that doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you take that and you average it all the way around the planet, that’s a big number,” Arndt says. The warming was truly global. ”Some part of every continent, and some part of every major ocean basin was warmest on record,” Arndt says, adding that in the United States, only Georgia and Alaska had   warmth but ”pretty much the entire country was above normal, and well above normal.” This represents   warming along with the   effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon, he explains, predicting that the streak of breaking records will probably end this year as those El Nino effects dissipate. But the   warming trend should continue to go up and, Arndt says, threatens new records almost every year. ”The   warming is driven almost entirely by greenhouse gases,” Arndt says. ”We’ve seen a warming trend related to greenhouse gases for four, five, six decades now.”"
419,"One of the big questions about extensively   tuberculosis is whether this severe form of the disease is on the rise due to a failure of medications or if it’s spreading through the air. A new study of more than 400 patients in South Africa finds, unfortunately, that the answer appears to be the latter. Airborne transmission is the driving force behind a spike in extensively   tuberculosis ( ) in South Africa, according to a report just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. ”The majority of the new cases,   of the cases in fact, were due to    transmission,” says Dr. Sarita Shah, lead author of the study. ”What was surprising is that previously the assumption had been that   resistant TB is primarily caused by failure to treat TB effectively. This [study] really overturns our thinking and provides the evidence that the vast majority of   cases are caused by direct transmission.” This means that if you’re sitting in a doctor’s waiting room next to a person with   who’s coughing and sneezing, you could catch a potentially fatal disease that in a best case scenario takes a year and a half of intense treatment to cure. ”Yeah, for XDR we are looking at 18 to 24 months of treatment,” Shah says. ”Six to 9 of those months are taking an injectable drug. It’s painful. It has side effects. For the remaining months, you’re taking other drugs with really difficult side effects.” These side effects include serious nerve damage, rashes, jaundice, vomiting, even permanent hearing loss. And patients who are treated have only about a 1 in 4 chance of successfully defeating the infection, according to the World Health Organization. The only good news is that the overall number of cases of   globally is still relatively low. WHO estimates that there were roughly 6 million new TB cases in 2015. Of those roughly 600, 000 were drug resistant, and 10 percent of those, or 60, 000, were extensively drug resistant. To be labeled   the tuberculosis bacterium has to be resistant to at least four of the most common antibiotics used against TB. As these bacterium develop more and more resistance to the current drugs, some strains of TB have become essentially untreatable. Which is incredibly worrisome to public health officials when you’re talking about a potentially deadly airborne disease. Dr. Shah, who’s with the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global TB branch. says this new study underscores the need to control tuberculosis early and to put in to place measures to stop airborne transmission, particularly in hospitals and clinics. This means diagnosing cases early and putting in place procedures to block transmission in   settings. Special ultraviolet lights can kill the bacteria, adequate ventilation can make it less likely to linger on a hospital ward. And getting people to wear masks can also reduce the chances of transmission. ”The treatment for   is really difficult, long and not very effective with the drugs we have,” she says. ”So prevention is really the key to stopping this epidemic.”"
420,"Thomas Graham, managing director of the Kissinger Associates consulting firm, doesn’t like to discuss speculation that he may become   Donald Trump’s next ambassador to Moscow. But the former diplomat and adviser on Russia in the George W. Bush administration does like to talk about something else: how to salvage U. S.  relations following accusations that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the November presidential election. For all of Trump’s praise for Putin during the election campaign, there is still no coherent line on how the incoming Republican administration plans to deal with Russia. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick to head the State Department, said last week that Russia ”poses a danger” to the U. S. Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, James Mattis, went further, naming Russia as the first of America’s ”principal threats.”  Nikki Haley, Trump’s U. N.   said during her confirmation hearing Wednesday that Russia was ”trying to show its muscle” and couldn’t be trusted, while Senate Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham support even stiffer sanctions against Russia. ”Punish, punish, punish  —   to what end? What are we trying to accomplish? It seems like a substitute for a thoughtful policy,” Graham told NPR in a phone interview. ”It’s not about business as usual, but opening diplomatic channels and reducing the risk of unwanted confrontation.” Graham has no connection to the Trump transition team, but his views on Russia reconcile the different strands within the Republican Party  —   from the openly conciliatory to the outright hawkish. Graham, 65, is also a business associate of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who maintains frequent contact with Putin  —   and has reportedly met with Trump since the election. ”Normalization doesn’t mean cooperation but reestablishing normal diplomatic channels. It’s not a return to partnership,” Graham said. A downturn in relations, Russia’s relations with the Obama administration soured after Putin, who had sat out one presidential term as prime minister, returned to the Kremlin for an unprecedented third term in 2012. Things got worse when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented an armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine two years later. In response, the White House coordinated sanctions against Russia with the European Union and began rotating U. S. Army troops through NATO countries in eastern Europe. In the absence of decisive U. S. action in Syria’s civil war, Putin intervened militarily on behalf of Syrian President Bashar Assad, catapulting Russia back onto the world stage as a Middle East  . Charges that Putin ordered   to sway the U. S. election only increased the Russian president’s stature. ”The demonization of Putin is a reflection of our declining confidence in our own capabilities. It’s easier to blame Putin,” said Graham. ”He’s pursuing Russian national interests, but he’s not running world affairs.” Graham doesn’t doubt the intelligence community’s conclusion on Russian hacking or the Kremlin’s attempts to create rifts between the United States and Europe. ”Everything that sows disunity in Europe is beneficial to Russia because of the asymmetry in power between Russia and the West,” Graham said. ”At this point, we’re being manipulated by the Russians at very little cost to them. Things pop up, and we go into a frenzy.” Risks of isolating Russia, Western sanctions imposed on the Kremlin in 2014 may very well have forestalled more aggressive Russian action in Ukraine, Graham said. At the same time, he cautioned against further isolating Moscow. ”Simply increasing sanctions won’t resolve the Ukraine crisis. Secondly, it’s not in our strategic interest if the Russian economy is excessively weakened and Russia is driven toward China,” he said. ”We need to look at Russia in a global context.” Here Graham reflects the thinking of Kissinger, who said during his last visit to Moscow in February that ”Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any new global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.” Graham said Kissinger was pointing to the fact that Russia can help balance Chinese power in Central Asia and the Far East. Although Russia’s capabilities are unsustainable without an economic upswing, Graham said, the country will be a fixture in world affairs for the coming decades. ”It has significant military capability, as we’ve seen in the cyber sphere,” Graham said. ”It’s a major power and we have to deal with it. It will be part of a stable world order.” Graham said it was high time for a new Russia policy. ”It’s not the Cold War and it’s not the strategic partnership in the immediate   War period. Neither framework is adequate because the global context is different,” he said. ”The world order is shifting. We need to come to a new equilibrium.”"
421,"Russia is extending the residency permit of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked evidence of the NSA’s bulk data collection program. The Russian government announced the extension via social media, NPR’s Lucian Kim reports from Moscow: ”Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, posted on her Facebook page late Tuesday night. ”She ridiculed former deputy CIA chief Michael Morell for suggesting that returning Snowden to the US would be Russia’s perfect gift to   Donald Trump. ” ’The funniest thing,’ Zakharova said, ’is that Morell doesn’t know that Snowden’s residence permit was just extended by a couple of years.’ ” Snowden, who is under indictment in the U. S. is living in Russia under a grant of asylum, NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports. He has been in Moscow since 2013. This week, President Obama commuted the sentence of another famous leaker of state secrets: Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst who released hundreds of thousands of U. S. documents to Wikileaks. The president notably did not grant a pardon to Snowden, as The Associated Press reports: ”Snowden hasn’t formally applied for clemency, though his supporters have called for it. Yet the White House drew a distinction between the unapologetic Snowden and Manning. Manning, officials noted, has expressed remorse and served several years already for her crime.” Lucian notes that last month, a report by the House of Representatives was declassified and made available to the public. It concluded that Snowden has had contact with Russia’s intelligence surveys. ”Snowden rejected the report as riddled with ’obvious falsehoods,’ ” Lucian reports. Several human rights groups have asked Obama to pardon Snowden, and report they have delivered a petition signed by 1. 1 million people calling for such a pardon. They note that Snowden’s revelations exposed violations of the law, triggering reform."
422,"Last month, as China encountered some of its worst pollution yet, artists in Chengdu did something bold: They put   cotton masks over the faces of statues representing ordinary urbanites that dot a centrally located shopping street. This   act of protest triggered a big response. Riot police moved in to prevent   gatherings in this inland city, and stayed in place for days. Protesters were arrested. A man was detained for spreading rumors. How different things were a decade ago, in the coastal city of Xiamen. Throngs of people blocked central streets in an organized protest against a proposed factory, which local residents feared would pose health risks. Back then, the government did not arrest the protesters and actually gave in to their main demand. It   the project after a period of public consultation and open debate. The plan to build the factory in Xiamen was scrapped. The   Southern Weekly, China’s prime intellectual newspaper, named Xiamen’s citizens ”person of the year” and praised the protests in a story headlined ”With Courage and Ideals, They Light Up Our Future.” This was no isolated event. In other cities, similar big     struggles blocked development projects. In most cases, while movement leaders were eventually punished, the protests were allowed to run their course, local governments often acceded to participants’ immediate demands and there were relatively few arrests. What made the authorities so worried about December’s   Chengdu event? Why the swifter, more draconian reaction than 10 years ago? As China specialists who track environmental issues and protest, respectively, we see two things as particularly worth noting. The first is simply the passage of time. At the start of 2007, the year of the Xiamen demonstrations, China was an authoritarian country but one that was moving, albeit very gradually and sometimes glacially, toward becoming more open. As 2017 starts, by contrast, China is a country heading the other way  —   especially since President Xi Jinping’s rise. From year to year, rights lawyers in China have less room to maneuver, not more. The authorities have been ramping up censorship and tightening the reins on   publications, including Southern Weekly. Some infractions that vexed authorities in the past but were allowed to go on can no longer occur. The authorities have also been issuing more warnings lately about the need to protect the Chinese body politic from destabilizing political ideas, which a Communist Youth League website likened to a ”zombie virus” of the sort portrayed in horror films, delivering ”chaos” to the ”infected” society. This brings to mind official drives decades ago against what was tellingly described in China as ”spiritual pollution.” Contagion fears, The other thing to keep in mind when considering the protest and response in Chengdu is the way both   and   fears of contagion shape politics in today’s China. Despite  —   and sometimes because of  —   how China has been rising, the country has stayed a jittery place due to anxieties about the potential damage that can be done by the spread of things seen as dangerous.   contagion fears stem from the leadership’s sense, initially triggered by events such as the 1989 collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s implosion, that the  ’s endurance is precarious. As striking as its longevity is, those in charge feel that constant vigilance is necessary to guard against two possibilities. One   contagion scenario is of a   domestic movement, similar to those that have upended governments at various points in China’s past. The other, which undergirds the effort to stem the flow of imported ideas, is of a Chinese counterpart to a ”color revolution” like those seen in some   states.   contagion fears can drive very different sorts of protests, whose common denominator is anxiety about dangerous substances  —   like air pollution  —   moving from one place to another. When the focus is on a limited geographical area, the government often lets things run their course. When the potential reach of a struggle is broader, this   contagion fear links to the   worry about movements that spread widely. And the result is more likely to be swift repression. This brings us back to Chengdu. A seemingly mild expression of discontent, the artists’ action nevertheless tapped into widespread anxieties. The masking of statues had a much more encompassing  —   and thus threatening  —   implication than the single   NIMBY marches of the past: that no one is safe from toxic air. It had the potential to resonate with just about everyone in China. The spread of viral tactics, The simplicity of using smog masks to express this point was also important, especially in a country where cotton face filters are cheap and sold everywhere. It was easy for officials to imagine  —   especially with memories fresh of how powerful the ubiquitous umbrella became as a symbol of protest in Hong Kong in 2014  —   the Chengdu act stimulating copycat actions across China. Far from Chengdu, people could soon use smog masks to signal that they’ve had enough of the polluted air and have lost patience with the leadership for failing over decades to tackle it. Memes and symbolically charged poems about pollution can go viral  —   so why not tactics? Mao Zedong famously wrote of the ease with which a ”single spark” can start a wildfire. In more recent memory, the student protest wave of 1989 started on campuses in Beijing, spread throughout the city and encompassed workers and intellectuals alike. It culminated in a movement that rocked scores of urban areas. And in 1999, Chinese leaders were completely surprised when they discovered that a religious sect called Falun Gong had been able to amass supporters completely under their radar. The extent of the spread of what the authorities saw as a particularly dangerous sort of contagion  —   due partly to the group’s admiration for a charismatic leader  —   surfaced when Falun Gong organized a blockade with 10, 000 followers right in the center of Beijing, where all   leaders live. These are instances of contagious activism that China’s leaders dread. The lesson is clear in the minds of those on top: Keep discontent at bay keep it centered on local issues keep it from spreading. Xi’s risky strategy, And so we have a   that fears artists placing smog masks on statues. It is a   that has been trying to address pollution, knowing this a major source of public discontent. And it is a   that understands it needs the public to help its regulation of polluting factories, especially to help put pressure on local governments who have protected   industry. The   walks a tightrope, balancing the need to give sufficient space to citizens to help counter pollution with the compulsion to tightly control any sort of activism that could undermine its power. As Xi has squeezed the space for public expressions of discontent and participation, pollution continues to worsen. Rather than courageously waging a real war on smog, enlisting all citizens in the fight, Xi is betting on the risky strategy of restricting even the   actions  —   even, ironically, as he takes a higher profile symbolic role in the global climate change fight. If, in the end, his administration fails to reduce pollution, Chinese citizens will rightly be angry about their situation at home, no matter what China’s leaders are saying and doing in the global arena. These citizens may get bolder and bolder in pushing back against restrictions that keep them in dangerously polluted villages and cities without any effective means of resistance. Benjamin van Rooij and Jeffrey Wasserstrom are China specialists at the University of California Irvine. Van Rooij is a professor of law and director of the Long   Institute. Wasserstrom is a professor of history who holds a courtesy appointment in the Law School. Van Rooij has published widely on Chinese environmental issues, a subject he wrote about in a New York Times  . Wasserstrom recently edited The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. Follow them on Twitter @jwassers and @benfuzi."
423,"The Spirit Of The Beehive’s new song, ”Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’),” opens abruptly, with a seasick melody that tipsily sways up and down in   motions and forms a hook as dissonant as it is catchy. As Zack Schwartz sings, ”Now I live alone in   walls, just waiting for the call,” he’s backed by   strumming and a crisp electric guitar that imitates each laconic vocal phrase right back at him  —   the way your younger sibling might snottily mimic everything you say from the backseat of the family car. Even amid the rising vocal harmonies and   distortion, that singsongy melody will affix itself to your brain. The song, from The Spirit Of The Beehive’s forthcoming album, Pleasure Suck, is emblematic of what the Philadelphia band does so well. Like the classic 1973 Victor Erice film that shares and likely inspired its name, The Spirit Of The Beehive has a way of juxtaposing the pretty with the messy, making taut songs that feel a little   with sudden,   outbursts that come when you least expect them. It’s an appealing, loose formula that band members Schwartz, Rivka Ravede, Phil Warner and Pat Conaboy explored on their 2015 EP You Are Arrived (But You’ve Been Cheated) and that has been further unleashed on Pleasure Suck. ”Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’)” alternates somewhat obliquely between anxiety and depression (”Ricky caught me tryin’ to get myself well   But I could never”) and listless indecision about the future: ”You don’t need a education, you can write   You don’t need to go to college   It’s only in your mind, just tell us where to sign,” Schwartz sings. In an email to NPR, Schwartz explains that he wrote the song after being approached by a label last year: ”It’s a fictional account of success after signing a record deal and then losing it all, told in reverse, lyrically.” That theme coalesces around the chant ”Maybe the money will save us all,” a foolishly hopeful line   as a shrugging, nihilistic stinger, just before giving way to a coda of sweetly chiming keys and a simple   beat. ”Ricky (Caught Me Trying)” arrives coupled with a music video by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya that fits the The Spirit Of The Beehive’s scrappy M. O. The freaky,   video crosses many aesthetics  —   comic zines and homemade punk posters, Lisa   Trapper Keepers and Molly   GIF art  —   and depicts a grotesque creature with bulging eyes,   hair and a surreal and hilarious mishmash of objects. (Look for the hippo lasers and cell phone rainbows  —   and, wait, are those flying lasagnas?) Amid all the bonkers images flashing on the screen, we actually gain a little sympathy for the character’s isolation  —   and, more than that, an admiration for the The Spirit Of The Beehive’s imaginative melding of lyrics and visuals. Pleasure Suck comes out March 24 via Tiny Engines."
424,"Jake Xerxes Fussell was raised on the traditional music of the   border, joining his folklorist father Fred on his trips to document local bluesmen and   alike. Now an established artist in his own right, the younger Fussell has a deep respect and affinity for the Southern folk vernacular, though he also maintains his childlike awe for it. In recent years, he’s moved from Oxford, Miss. to Durham, N. C. where he found a perfect home in local label Paradise of Bachelors for his   2015 debut. Produced by William Tyler, it yoked together vignettes of Southern life (”Raggy Levy,” ”Rabbit On A Log”) with an   groove that would please scholars and little kids alike  —   Fussell’s burly, winking voice is made for storytelling. From What In The Natural World, Fussell’s forthcoming second album, his cover of Jimmy Lee Williams’ ”Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing On A Sweet Potato Vine?” marks a move into more existential questions about nature. Fussell’s father often worked with the writer and documentarian George Mitchell, who recorded Williams’ work. ”Unfortunately I never met him but I heard George’s recordings of him early on and always liked them,” Fussell explains. ”’Peaches’ stuck with me since the first time I heard it  —   something about the absurdity of the lyrics but also this sort of serene, rhythmic approach to guitar playing. A lot of the blues guitar playing from southwest Georgia has this serene, droning quality. I don’t know how to explain it, really, but it’s very syncopated and can be quite powerful if you can learn how to get it going.” Fussell’s version of ”Have You Ever Seen Peaches” is a hair over six minutes long, but that drone could sustain it for hours. His is softer than Williams’ electric current, running unbroken and buoyant as a shoal of fish darting downriver, and counterbalancing his   picking. He’s tamed his debut’s coltish energy, now less a force of nature than someone keen to sync with its rhythms: When he asks, ”Have you ever seen peaches growing on a sweet potato vine?” a kickier repetition of the track’s chiming refrain seems to answer. At times of national crisis, writers and artists often revert to nature in search of something simpler, steadier  —   though Fussell’s revival of this song offers nothing as pat as answers for our current predicament. The song’s central question may have its origins in Bessie Smith’s ”Sorrowful Blues,” where the promise of illicit fruit acted like sensual, biblical bait to distract a   from pursuing petty crimes. Now, it feels more like a hopeful question about the possibility of surprise, and whether human nature can change. ”I can’t really say what the song is about,” says Fussell. ”I stay fairly faithful to Williams’ lyrics, and my guess is that his lyrics were probably a composite of floating verses from here and there. That’s the way songs work, at least in my experience: Some lyrics go away while others remain, and some only go away for a little while and come back later. Maybe sometimes you’re left with just a little fragment of something that used to be a long, nuanced narrative ballad. But that fragment becomes its own thing and takes on new meaning. The same thing can happen with certain musical elements. Fiddle tunes are like that. Songs develop lives of their own and this one is no exception.” What In The Natural World comes out March 31 on Paradise of Bachelors."
425,"The Obama administration is rushing to tie up loose ends before packing up  —   protecting the rusty patched bumblebee, ending the Cuba ”wet foot, dry foot” immigration policy, settling a fraud case over defective air bags and investigating police in Chicago. But in a series of cramped offices near the White House, a brigade of staff, volunteers and former interns is scrambling to read every letter sent to President Obama  —   especially the letters from children. And they will all get read  —   if not before noon on Friday, when power transfers to the Trump administration, then after, when Obama moves to new digs in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D. C. says Fiona Reeves, director of presidential correspondence. ”We have had a big uptick in kids writing to the president after the election, often in the vein of farewell letters, or reflective letters,” Reeves says. ”Or for older kids, ’I’ve grown up with you.’ ” The office gets about 700 letters a day, Reeves says. The team reads and sorts each by subject and picks out those they think the president should read. Obama gets 10 letters at the end of each weekday he’s at the White House, and each week a few of those are from children. He’ll continue to get those 10 letters until he leaves, Reeves says. ”We are hustling . .. but I think we will actually end up packing up some of the letters that we haven’t read through with the president, and he’ll maintain a small team to work through his correspondence,” she says. Some are personal and give the president a chance to dole out some tough love. Like the girl who wrote to complain that her parents wouldn’t let her get her nose pierced. ”She felt it was her right as an American, land of the free,” Reeves recalls. ”And he wrote back, ’This will be your right some day. This is not your right, at the moment.’ ” In another of Reeves’ favorites, a girl tells Obama she’s having trouble making friends. His response: Be kind and generous, and find an art or sport you like to meet people with common interests. ”But don’t worry,” he wrote. ”You’ll have a lot of friends in your life, and I’m one of them now.” Reeves says Obama has relished the    role. ”There are so many other things to deal with when you’re the president,” Reeves says. ”The idea that this little girl says ’How can I help make a friend,’ and he sits down and says, ’Oh, you know, it’s good you asked . ..’ ” But the president doesn’t always get lofty in his answers, she adds. Sometimes, ”It wasn’t so much, ’Dream big dreams,’ it was, ’Don’t let the bullies get you down.’ ” Many recent letters suggest ways for Obama to spend his retirement. ”He could be their basketball coach, or another one said, ’Come and be my dad’s golf coach’ or ’Come and be my nanny,’ ” says volunteer Patty Shinseki. ”But they all have wonderful advice for the president.” Children also write with their problems, says volunteer Michael R. Moore  —   health issues, homelessness, immigration status or families breaking up. Many are sent to other offices for followup, Moore says. ”You have to be tough” as a reader, he says, because the stories can be heartbreaking. ”Kids are amazing. They deal with stuff that would really bring you down in life, and they’re writing about it to the president.” Reeves and her staff say they get as much from the letters as the writers do from their responses. One boy, for instance, who sent a photo of himself in a shirt embellished in puffy paint, conveyed an inadvertent lesson in citizenship. ”I know it must be hard to leave the White House right now,” Reeves reads from the boy’s letter. ”But you should know there are a lot of kids who think like me, and we’re getting a little older every day.” ”He was saying, ’I’m a part of a country where people like me can help shape the direction we move in,’ ” she explains. ”It’s really cool to see from a little kid who still uses puffy paint.”"
426,"A   lawsuit accusing the Secret Service of discriminating against black agents appears to be coming to an end without a trial. The Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service and more than 100 agents have reached a settlement agreement, the department says. A court still needs to approve the settlement. The Washington Post reports that the agreement calls for the Secret Service to pay $24 million, including lump sum payments as high as $300, 000 per agent, but does not require the agency to admit wrongdoing. In a statement late Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said he was ”pleased that we are able to finally put this chapter of Secret Service history behind us. ”Had the matter gone to trial,” he wrote, ”it would have required that we   things long past, just at a time when the Secret Service is on the mend”  —   a nod toward embarrassing scandals and incidents at the Secret Service over the past few years. This lawsuit has been brewing for a long time. It was initially filed in 2000, on behalf of a handful of agents who said they were routinely and unfairly passed over for promotions while   white agents rose up the ladder. The alleged pattern of discrimination also included racial slurs unfair assignments, bonuses and hiring practices and retaliation against people who spoke up to challenge racial harassment. In 2008, a judge excoriated the Secret Service for making a ”mockery” of the law by refusing to cooperate in the suit. A Secret Service inspector admitted to destroying evidence relevant to the case. Then the case expanded from 10 plaintiffs to scores of them. NPR’s Giles Snyder reports that three years ago, the case was certified as a class action ”covering more than 100 black agents.” Ray Moore, the lead plaintiff in the case, spoke to NPR in 2007. According to court documents, Moore bid for more than 180 promotions between 1999 and 2002. At one point, the suit says, he was assigned to train the white agent who received the promotion he was denied. He told NPR he loved working at the Secret Service and believed in the mission  —   which is why he was continuing to serve as an agent while he was suing his employer. ”But at the same time, you know, I will let people know that the service has some legacy problems, and that is the institutional racism with the promotional and evaluation system,” he said. ”There are problems with that system, and that needs to be fixed.” At the time  —   nearly 10 years ago  —   NPR described the case as ”moving slowly.” Moore said he was in it for the long haul. ”It’s going to be a fight because this is a legacy problem that has been around for a long time,” he said. ”And, you know, people with power never give it up voluntarily.”"
427,"Jeff Sessions donned a ”Make America Great Again” cap and joined the campaign trail as one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters on Capitol Hill. But the proximity of the Alabama Republican to the   has got some Democrats worried about how he’d preside at the Justice Department. Sessions, 70, is in line to control the federal government’s vast law enforcement apparatus: Thousands of FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents dozens of U. S. attorneys across the country and the Office of Legal Counsel, an obscure but critical office that advises the executive branch on where to draw legal boundaries on issues from immigration to treatment of terrorism detainees. ”The office of attorney general is not a normal political office,” Sessions testified at his confirmation hearing last week. ”He or she cannot be a mere rubber stamp.” His colleagues on the other side of the political aisle are trying to hold Sessions to that ideal before they confirm him to the post. In a series of questions and a   letter, Democratic senators have been prodding the attorney general nominee to distance himself from the White House he’d serve. There’s ample precedent for a firewall between the president and prosecutors. Justice Department traditionalists grimaced when former Attorney General Eric Holder called himself President Obama’s ”wingman.” After a scandal in the Bush administration, in December 2007,   General Michael Mukasey imposed guidelines that limit contacts between the White House and the Justice Department about ongoing criminal and civil law enforcement issues. At Sessions’ hearing last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse,  . I. pressed Sessions on the document. ”Will you honor and maintain those procedures at the Department of Justice?” Whitehouse asked. ”I will,” Sessions replied. Later, Whitehouse, a former DOJ official during the Clinton administration, pointed out that Republican veterans of the Justice Department have been advising new leadership there to clean ”filth” out of the department and ”wash out the agency from top to bottom.” He said that conflicted with traditions about honoring the rights of career attorneys to carry out marching orders and act in accordance with their private religious beliefs. ”Does a secular attorney have anything to fear from an Attorney General Sessions at the Department of Justice?” Whitehouse asked. Sessions, who said his 14 years as a federal prosecutor marked the high point of his public service, said no and testified that he had plenty of respect for career professionals in the department. Whitehouse tried again: ”And a secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?” The reply: ”Well, I’m not sure.” Sessions, who is a longtime member of the same Judiciary Committee that will vote on his nomination later this month, is still expected to win confirmation, largely along party lines. And with Democrats in the Senate minority, perhaps the most they can hope for is to pin down the next Attorney General on policies and promises for the next four years."
428,"Confirmation controversies kick off when the Senate Judiciary Committee convenes hearings Tuesday on the nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. Sessions has repeatedly amended the Senate questionnaire he submitted to the committee last month. Among the changes is his answer to a question asking the nominee to list any ”unsuccessful nominations for appointive office.” In his original answer, Sessions failed to list the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination to be a federal judge 30 years ago. Tuesday’s hearing will almost certainly feature two accounts of the 1986 hearings, and oddly enough, both will be true. That’s because there were two sets of hearings  ” one that extended over three days and went so badly that Sessions appeared to be finished and a second a month later, called at the insistence of Sessions’ chief Senate supporter. At the first round of hearings in March 1986, Sessions made a number of damaging admissions. A month later, in April, he changed his testimony. ”Disgrace to his race” vs. ”I did not acknowledge it in any form” In March, for instance, he agreed that he had referred to a white civil rights lawyer as a ”disgrace to his race.” Sessions said that his best recollection was that he’d said, ”Well he’s not that popular around town. I’ve heard him referred to as ’a disgrace to his race.’ ” But a month later, Sessions changed his story. ”I am absolutely convinced that I did not call Mr. Blackshear a disgrace to his race, and I did not acknowledge it in any form,” Sessions declared.   groups ” ” or ”quintessentially American”? In March, Sessions conceded that he had referred to the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, and the ACLU as ” ” and ” .” He admitted that was, as he put it, sometimes ”loose with my tongue.” ”That’s probably something I shouldn’t have said, but I really didn’t mean any harm,” he added. At his second hearing, however, Sessions contradicted his earlier testimony. ”I know what I believe about these organizations,” he said, asserting that ”they are quintessentially American organizations they are not   organizations.” Joe Biden, then a senator on the committee, pressed the point, asking, ”Are you telling us that you, Jeff Sessions, at no time, [have] concluded that the National Council of Churches has engaged in   activities?” ”My opinion is they have not,” Sessions replied. ”They may have taken positions that I consider to be adverse to the security interests of the United States,” but in response to further questions, he said that does not make the organizations or their positions ” .” An incredulous Biden followed up: ”So you can have a position adverse to security interests of the United States and not be   is that what you’re saying?” ”Well, I, if you hold it in good faith, you’re not an   person or an   organization. No sir,” Sessions replied. Sessions tried to explain the reason for some of his changed answers by saying he had been taken by surprise in March. But under examination by Biden, he conceded that he had been informed well in advance about all the controversial areas of questioning. Still, Sessions said, the first round of hearings had left the wrong impression. ”I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create,” he proclaimed, his voice rising. ”I am not a racist I am not insensitive to blacks I supported civil rights activities in my state. I have done my job with integrity, equality, and fairness for all.” It’s a rare thing for the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote down a judicial nomination. Indeed, back in 1986 it was only the second time in nearly a   that the committee had vetoed a federal district court nominee. Two moderate Republicans joined the committee’s Democrats to kill the nomination in committee. But that was 30 years ago. Sessions’ chances for confirmation now are a lot better. After the 1986 rejection, Sessions remained the chief federal prosecutor in Alabama for five more years. Soon after, he was elected state attorney general, and two years later, he was elected to the U. S. Senate, where he was   three times, earned a reputation as one of the body’s most conservative members, and for much of 2016 was the only Republican senator to endorse Donald Trump. Sessions is personally   by colleagues on both sides of the aisle and of various political stripes. Indeed, one of the senators introducing him, and vouching for him on Tuesday, will be Maine’s moderate Republican Susan Collins, who has a voting record far less conservative than his."
429,"Hints have been trickling out since late in 2016, but the official word is here: The latest album from Dirty Projectors is   and due out Feb. 24 on Domino Records. Along with the announcement, which Longstreth made over Twitter, the band released a third song from the album, ”Up In Hudson.” Like the two previously released songs from Dirty Projectors, ”Keep Your Name” and ”Little Bubble,” the new song focuses on Longstreth’s voice in isolation, a stark contrast from the   vocals that have dominated Dirty Projectors albums for the last decade. Full track listing for Dirty Projectors is below."
430,"Two days before the election, Donald Trump stood before a large crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, and called onstage the   governor in U. S. history. ”I think there’s nobody knows more about trade than him,” Trump said of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. ”Boy, you would be our prime candidate to take care of China.” Branstad’s relationship with China goes back to 1985, when he was in his first term as governor and a young agricultural official from Hebei Province named Xi Jinping visited Iowa. The two hit it off. In the ensuing years, Branstad and Xi kept in touch, as the latter slowly ascended to China’s top leadership position and Branstad was elected back into the governor’s office in 2011, managing billions of dollars worth of the state’s pork, soybean and other exports to China. ”I had told Donald Trump on several occasions, ’Don’t say anything bad about China when you’re in Iowa,’” Branstad says, sitting in his Des Moines office. ”We have a great relationship there.” In Muscatine, 150 miles east of the capital, Sarah Lande looks at photos on the wall from Xi Jinping’s 1985 visit to her town as she walks through what’s now dubbed the  . S. Friendship House. It’s a modest, 1960s brick   house where the Chinese president stayed, sleeping in the bedroom of a young Star Trek fan. Two Muscatine residents have purchased the house and hope to make it an attraction for Chinese tourists. It’s already open to the public. Lande was part of the group that organized Xi’s first trip. She says Xi had read Mark Twain and fell in love with the Mississippi River, which borders Muscatine. ”And we found him jolly,” she recalls. ”A great smile.” Lande says Xi did not get a royal treatment in Iowa. ”One of the reasons we had homestays,” she says, was because ”everybody was a volunteer. People in the home, the potluck dinner . .. I think that really appealed to him.” Since then, Xi and Branstad have visited each other several times. Branstand keeps several tokens of their friendship, including artwork and photos, on display in his office. Branstad says he knows promoting Iowa to China is a vastly different job than being an ambassador between the two largest economies in the world. He’s hopeful he can find areas of cooperation. Branstad was a big supporter of the   Partnership, a   trade deal backed by President Obama, but Trump has called it a disaster, promising to back out of it. ”Maybe it can be renegotiated and China could be included,” says Branstad. ”That’s something I think should be looked at. Or the other thing to do would be bilateral agreements, like we’ve done with South Korea.” Before he tackles that, though, Branstad will need to negotiate what has become a very tense relationship between Washington and Beijing. The most recent spat began in early December, when Trump took a call from the president of Taiwan, an island with its own government, but which Beijing considers part of China. In response, China lodged a formal protest with the United States. Five days later, Trump’s appointment of Branstad as ambassador prompted the hint of a smile from a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, who called the Iowa governor ”an old friend of China.” ”This is a common quote in China, which signifies that this is somebody that China feels that they can trust,” says Ken Jarrett, a former U. S. diplomat in China who now heads the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. Branstad’s    relationship with Xi is important, Jarrett says, but as he starts his diplomatic post in Beijing, the more important relationship will be the one Branstad has with his new boss. The challenge, Jarrett says, will be interpreting Trump to the Chinese. ”Everyone is still in the stage of trying to understand how to interpret [Trump’s] tweets. This is not easy for Americans to do and is even more difficult for the Chinese to do,” Jarrett says. Branstad will also have to navigate what has become a complicated ”frenemy” relationship between the world’s two largest economies. ”He’s going to have, of course, major challenges, because the relations between the two countries right now are somewhat tense,” says   lawyer Lester Ross. Diplomatic landmines abound: China’s encroachment into the South and East China Seas. Cybersecurity. North Korean nukes. And now that China’s economy is in trouble, the Communist Party is tightening control over its people, their access to information and exposure to foreign influence. ”China has absorbed and embarked upon a fiercely   policy mix, under which foreign influence is regarded suspiciously no matter where it emanates from, no matter what its contents are,” says Ross. In short, there may be no more challenging time than now to be U. S. ambassador to China. And, says Peking University professor Zha Daojiong, the role of the U. S. ambassador has never been more confusing to China’s leadership. ”What kind of role is he here to play?” asks Zha. ”Is he here to represent a voice from the administration? Or is he going to be functioning as a bridge of sorts?” American ambassadors to China in the 1980s and 1990s were descendants of missionaries in Asia,   ”old China hands” with the ability to see China through the lens of history, philosophy and civilization. Then, around the turn of the century, a more politically savvy batch of top diplomats arrived with close connections to Washington. Zha misses the old days. ”Time has come for the ambassadorship to function as a bridge between the different voices of both societies,” he says. When asked to pass on advice for Branstad, Ross, a   China veteran, doesn’t skip a beat. ”Be prepared to work hard. Be prepared to travel the country to make a physical presence across the country and to accommodate and welcome Chinese cultural influence. Try to make a broad, popular impression on the Chinese people.” In other words, be the face of America to the Chinese people  —   something best done in person, not on Twitter."
431,"When I was a kid, Mom used to say, ”You know you’ve become an infidel when you forget the Fatihah.” The Fatihah is the preamble to the Quran, a prayer Muslims repeat five times a day. Mom used to warn me to be grateful for the practice. That on the Day of Judgment, Allah would call upon me to recite the Fatihah and I would realize that I had forgotten the words and know what it means to be a lost soul. While other kids went to soccer practice on the weekends, I went to a religious Farsi school, where prayer was homework and I heard the Fatihah all the time. They would check to see that I was praying correctly, and that I was emphasizing the right ”qh” and ”ha” sounds, and performing the correct poses and postures. Dad paid particularly close attention to my religious education. ”Don’t say ’God,’ ” he would order, if I was being flip. ”When people say ’God’ they’re thinking of a man god, and that’s as bad as idolatry. We shouldn’t turn people into gods. Say, ’Allah!’ Allah is the everything in the universe!” But a girl can block out only so much cultural influence. Even my Quran used the pronoun ”He” when it translated the Arabic words into English. And, when I imagined Allah, he always took the form of my dad, usually in the clouds, or he looked like some version of Santa. Then, at 12 years old, my preteen impatience hit. Prayer was homework that I had to do five times a day?! I wanted to go out and play. I used to love sitting down to lessons with Dad, but now I couldn’t wait for him to stop talking so I could turn the TV back on. Dad would scold me about rushing through homework, and when that was done he’d scold me for rushing through prayers. In silent protest, I’d sit on my prayer rug and daydream, trying to think of anything but Dad in my head telling me that everything I was doing wasn’t good enough. When Dad realized I was lying about finishing my prayers, I braced myself for a stern lecture. Instead, he told me, ”that is between you and Allah.” When I was in college, Dad saw me in a YouTube clip joking about being a   kind of Muslim he grimaced and said, ”Never put your leftovers in my fridge.” Despite other people’s perceptions of what should or should not be in contradiction with my Muslim identity, I never experienced that discord within myself. But I do get a little sad when anyone asks me if I pray. Truthfully, I just never saw the point of it. I couldn’t connect with the scripture and its archaic English translations. It wasn’t until recently, when I found myself in a mindfulness training class, that I sat for what felt like . .. prayer. I took the class with a couple of friends, hoping that it would help me manage stress and improve my communication with  . My friends and I carpooled there every Sunday night and learned about mantras, those mental scripts that can be used to protect your brain from itself. Words to recite in the times we feel impatient, to slow life down and remind ourselves that we don’t have control of everything. The practice helped. I left every class feeling calmer and more resolute. But at the same time, I found myself annoyed. The teacher kept telling us how wonderfully secular the program was, but I kept thinking about what it really meant: it had taken a religion  —   Buddhism  —   stripped it of its complex cultural ties and painful political history, appropriated it, commodified it and put it on   mugs and calendars, served back to us in easy ”secular” doses. And then the election happened. When people asked me if I thought the Trump administration would keep its promises to register Muslims, I could feel my rib cage constrict with worry, and without thinking I reached for the Fatihah. The words of comfort Dad taught me as a kid, and I couldn’t find them and I remembered Mom’s warning. I felt what it was like to be a lost soul. I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe in being condemned. I don’t see myself as an infidel, but I do see myself as unmoored. I have this feeling of not being connected to my bones. When I needed it most, I reached for the words of the faith that I was raised with: that the universe is unified by a force of compassion. And I looked everywhere in the attic of my mind to find those words. Looking further and further back into memories of practicing prayer with my father before my preteen cool set in, and before years of being the ”  ” kind of Muslim had left me untethered. I closed my eyes, desperate to remember those words of comfort, and they weren’t there. When I heard that Donald Trump was our next president, it was the first time in my life that I understood what prayer was for. This is what I told my father. Then I asked him to teach me how to pray, again."
432,"When he takes the oath of office on Friday, President Trump will inherit a far different country than President Obama did eight years ago. It’s a nation that is far more solid in some ways (economics) and shakier in others (terrorist attacks). We have gathered together dozens of statistics to show how the nation that Trump inherits (and the rest of the world) has changed over time. Over the course of Obama’s presidency, one basic trend was clear across a variety of economic indicators: After he took office, things got worse before they got better. That’s not his fault, of course President Obama took office in the middle of a devastating recession, and he introduced a stimulus bill that helped pull the country out of its plunge. Since then, many areas of the economy have (slowly but surely) recovered nicely. However, many Americans remain permanently scarred by the recession. In addition, many structural problems (inequality, better incomes for men, whites and Asians than for other Americans) remain. One big way that politics has changed under President Obama: His party has lost major ground. A majority in both houses of Congress helped him pass major legislation early in his first term, like the Affordable Care Act and the   financial regulation reform law. But after that, Republicans gained ground, taking away Democrats’ hold on power. Democrats are now at their lowest point of power than at any time in nearly a century. Following an existing trend, violence in the U. S. continued to fall off during Obama’s presidency. However, there are some hints of trouble. There was a slight uptick in violent crime in 2016, especially in some cities, which may or may not simply be a statistical blip. There has also been a recent uptick in the shooting deaths of police officers, though levels are still lower than they were in the 1990s. Trump’s immigration proposals created some of his biggest headlines during the campaign: building a wall along the southern border and a proposed ban on Muslims entering the U. S. made waves as being particularly restrictive policies. In addition, he railed against bringing in more refugees. That means these numbers could change considerably, depending on how much he gets his way on immigration policy. As President Trump takes office, several dynamics from Obama’s presidency remain: Several thousand troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, although far fewer than when Obama came into office. But there are some new dynamics in the world that didn’t exist when Obama took office: The Syrian civil war rages on and North Korea has conducted more nuclear tests and China has acquired or built additional islands in the South China Sea. One more big change, of course, is that the U. S. now has diplomatic relations with Cuba. It’s unclear just yet how Trump will manage that transition. Perhaps the   statistic on the environment  —   the measure of global temperatures  —   remains troubling. Just this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the warmest global temperatures on record, the third   temperature in three years. The big health policy story of Obama’s years was (duh) Obamacare, which helped drive the uninsured rate down to historic lows. Not only that, but the rate of cost growth has slowed down. Still, costs of premiums continue to grow, and to keep costs controlled for customers, companies put a lot more emphasis on   plans. America continues to have some dismal stats in a few health areas. Adult obesity continues to climb, and the opioid epidemic is raging  —   deaths from overdoses grew by an astounding 69 percent between 2008 and 2015. Also potentially troubling, data show life expectancy declined slightly in 2015 (though that may be an aberration from the upward trend). However, there are a few bright spots, particularly among America’s youth: There has been a dramatic drop in smoking among high school seniors drug and alcohol abuse among teens is likewise at relatively low rates and childhood obesity appears to have leveled off. With data contributions from Joe Neel, Jennifer Ludden, Didrik Schanche, Larry Kaplow, Denice Rios, and Richard Gonzales."
433,"Earlier this week, the U. S. Department of Defense announced it had transferred 10 more Guantanamo detainees, this time to Oman. Now, 45 remain at the facility, leaving challenges on what to do with the prisoners for   Donald Trump. Back in 2009, on his third day in office, President Obama ordered the detention facilities at Guantanamo to be closed ”as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” The executive order also called for a review of the 240 detainees then held in Guantanamo. ”We concluded that 126 detainees would be approved for transfer. And that means transfer to another country, with security measures,” says Matt Olsen, the former head of Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force, which compiled and evaluated all the available information on the detainees. The files had never been brought together in one place. But the yearlong review also revealed how complicated the job of closing Guantanamo would be. It still wasn’t clear where to put those who could not be released  —   those who would be tried as war criminals, those considered too dangerous to release but too difficult to prosecute, as well as individuals in more ambiguous categories. In 2011, Congress began placing restrictions on Guantanamo transfers in its yearly defense authorization bill, effectively stopping the president from transferring the detainees to a U. S. facility. Even the detainees cleared for release were stuck in Guantanamo if they couldn’t return home. For example, there were dozens of Yemenis who had been cleared but couldn’t return to a country descending into a civil war. It was up to the U. S. State Department to find a country willing to take the men the U. S. would not. ”Rather than being the worst of the worst, there are some who have the worst luck because they were from Yemen  —   because they were from a country that they cannot go back to,” says Cliff Sloan, who served as special envoy for Guantanamo closure in 2013 and 2014. He was responsible for persuading other countries to accept the detainees. ”It’s a very interesting process talking to foreign governments about their willingness to accept detainees for resettlement . .. the conversations are difficult. There are many things to work out,” he says. The State Department won’t discuss details of the deals between the U. S. and foreign governments to take detainees, but they’ve ended up all over the world, from Kazakhstan to Uruguay. Ambassador Lee Wolosky, the current special envoy for Guantanamo closure, says one of the things that makes it difficult to persuade foreign governments to accept detainees is that old but sticky label, ”worst of the worst.” ”The fact that they have been labeled in a political discourse as the worst of the worst, which some of them are, but some of them aren’t. And the ones we’re moving out are not, but they’re lumped in there,” says Wolosky. ”That certainly makes the task of doing what we do, which is looking at each case and convincing our foreign partners to look at the facts of each case, more difficult, because of the labeling.” The dozens of detainees left in Guantanamo after Monday’s transfer include seven men being tried in military commissions, like Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as well as others whose actual value and danger are contested. Even if Obama had been able to serve a third term, it’s unlikely they’d be anywhere else. ”Until we are able to get a policy, a plan agreed to by a president  —   and by a Congress  —   to deal with the reality of, ’What are you going to do to . .. address that last group of really hardcore people who are down there?’ then this will stay open indefinitely,” says Chuck Hagel, who served as U. S. secretary of defense from 2013 to 2015. Trump has said he intends to start loading up Guantanamo with new war detainees  —   ”bad dudes,” in his words. Hagel says Trump will have plenty of opportunities to do just that. ”The reality is that we are at war. I mean, America is still at war after 15 years. So, as long as that’s the reality, we’re going to be dealing with Guantanamo. And what you do with those that you capture and you pick up, and . .. you have responsibility for.” There are still a handful of detainees who have been cleared for release in Guantanamo, and it’s possible the transfers could continue up until the moment Trump takes office. The new commander in chief has called for the transfers to stop, so any prisoners cleared for release when Trump takes office may end up stuck in Guantanamo indefinitely."
434,"When the Watergate scandal blew up in the 1970s, one of the things to emerge from its shadow was the Office of Government Ethics. And OGE usually works quietly behind the scenes to make sure that people who run the country have no financial ties that could influence their work. At its helm is a man named Walter Shaub Jr. a longtime ethics lawyer, who has been at OGE for a decade. And when you ask people about him, Shaub is described as careful,   even kind of boring  —   a government lawyer. That made it all the more surprising that he was the man who orchestrated a bizarre,   tweetstorm from OGE, saying things like ”Bravo!” and ”Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!”  —   despite Trump’s never promising any such thing. Under scrutiny, ”I was trying to use the vernacular of the  ’s favorite social media platform to encourage him to divest,” Shaub explained last week, in another unexpected situation  —   a   speech, added at the last minute to an event at the Brookings Institution. ”I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today,” he said. ”You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well.” In a steady monotone, Shaub denounced Trump’s plan  —   to keep ownership of his business empire, but shift management to his sons  —   as inadequate and meaningless: ”The plan the   has announced doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the past four decades has met.” This campaign to get Trump to divest his businesses has put Shaub in the Republican crosshairs. House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz has accused him of partisanship and summoned him to a meeting, pointing out that his committee oversees OGE’s budget. Shaub, who declined NPR’s interview request, wrote back to Chaffetz this week, asking for a public meeting. But Chaffetz’s office says the meeting has now been set for Jan. 23  —   and it will be private. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings is slated to attend as well and has urged Chaffetz to open the meeting at least to other members of the committee. Ethics experts and editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times have sided with Shaub. Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush, says Trump should rein in Chaffetz and avoid escalating the matter. ”The worst thing is for Congress to start going after OGE on behalf of the president, make the president look terrible,” says Painter, now a professor at the University of Minnesota. Law vs. practice, Presidents are subject to several ethics rules, including bribery and insider trading laws and restrictions on gifts (emoluments) from foreign officials. But as Trump and his team often point out, legally, presidents are exempt from    rules that apply to their Cabinet members. ”The president, by law, doesn’t have conflicts. I mean, it’s somewhat of a silly discussion,” spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters last week, adding that Trump’s actions were already ”above and beyond” the legal requirements. However, historically, since Watergate, presidents have voluntarily complied with the same standards that apply to their nominees, who have to negotiate an ethics deal with OGE. Such a deal may mean sale of assets, dissolution of a business or recusals from some matters to avoid conflicts between personal interests and those of the nation. The Senate, which confirms presidential nominees, has traditionally reviewed these ethics deals after OGE signs off on them, though this year, OGE has raised concerns that the nomination hearings were moving faster than the agency’s ethics reviews. And fundamentally, ethics experts say OGE doesn’t have enforcement power and doesn’t do investigations. Any potential conflicts of interest would likely fall to Congress, the Justice Department or courts. So getting in a spat with OGE sends the wrong message  —   and any effort to push Shaub out of his job would be worse. ”Firing the head of the Office of Government Ethics is about the dumbest thing the president could do if he wants the public to have confidence in his ethics,” Painter says. Shaub’s term as OGE director runs into 2018. The next time Trump will have to deal with him is likely when the president submits his financial disclosures. OGE has to sign off on them."
435,"If there was going to be a moment of levity during Donald Trump’s Cabinet hearings, leave it to Rick Perry to provide it. The former Texas governor is the  ’s pick to be energy secretary, and he had a relatively smooth hearing with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But it was his humorous exchange with Sen. Al Franken that may be the most memorable of his testimony. The Minnesota Democrat began his questioning by thanking Perry for coming by to chat with him prior to his hearing. ”Thank you so much for coming into my office. Did you enjoy meeting me?” the former Saturday Night Live comedian deadpanned. ”I hope you are as much fun on that dais as you were on your couch,” Perry responded. It took a beat, but both Franken and Perry realized how that could be interpreted. ”May I rephrase that, sir?” Perry quipped, breaking down in laughter, as did the rest of the audience and senators in the usually serious hearing room. ”Well, I think we’ve found our Saturday Night Live sound bite.” It’s not the first time Perry has provided fodder for comics. His first presidential bid in 2012 saw its demise after he infamously forgot the name of the third federal department he would want to eliminate as president. It was the Energy Department  —   the one he is now nominated to run. ”I can’t, the third,” Perry finally conceded after stumbling for several seconds. ”Oops.” SNL had fun with that infamous moment. Perry made a second bid for president this cycle, but his campaign never got off the ground, and he dropped out before the primary voting even began. He did find something to do, though, before Trump offered him this current one  —   as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars. He wasn’t successful in that either, but he did have a lot of fun doing it."
436,"When a solar company wants to test new technology, they bring their panels to the National Renewable Energy Lab near Denver. It’s a place where federal scientists can measure how powerful and   solar panels are, so consumers know what they are buying. ”A lot of times maybe people don’t even know how to evaluate new technologies appropriately. And so we have a lot of insight and knowledge into the market that can help with some of those decisions,” lab engineer Chris Deline explained. It’s just one of the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories, where research is    —   from fossil   energy, to understanding dark matter in the universe. Under the Obama administration, research and development dollars flowed into renewable energy. There is concern over the future of the labs as   Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, takes the hot seat at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday morning. Perry infamously called for the department’s elimination while running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and Trump and Perry have at times questioned climate science. Appearing at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N. H. as a presidential candidate in 2011, Perry said, ”The issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.” Perry doesn’t have a background in science, but Ken Kimmell with the Union of Concerned Scientists said that’s not the issue: ”We do have a concern that a secretary who doesn’t fundamentally accept the science of climate change isn’t necessarily going to direct the assets of the Department of Energy towards advancing that mission.” On the other hand, Kimmell noted that wind energy took off during Rick Perry’s three terms as Texas governor between 2000 and 2015. It was part of Perry’s ”all of the above” energy approach. In one of his last public appearances, outgoing Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz stressed the importance of clean energy research. ”I think we have an innovation edge compared to most,” Moniz said. ”But we can certainly lose it if we don’t keep this focus. And that will lead to lost market share. That will lead to lost jobs.” Then there was that controversial questionnaire  —   the Trump transition team wanted the names of Department of Energy workers who attended climate change meetings. Moniz refused, and Trump’s team backed away. Last week, Moniz announced tougher measures for Department of Energy scientists to protect them from political meddling."
437,"When former Texas Gov. Rick Perry faces the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources for his confirmation hearing on Thursday, his first test could be whether he remembers the name of the agency he’s been picked to head. The Department of Energy (DOE) is one of three agencies Perry proposed eliminating when he was running for president in 2011. During a debate, he successfully listed the Department of Commerce and the Department of Education. But he couldn’t bring to mind the name of the third agency  —   the Energy Department. ”That one moment in time doesn’t negate the fact that he was a successful governor who led a dynamic state,” says Perry’s former Chief of Staff Deirdre Delisi. Perry was the   governor of Texas  —   14 years over three terms. Since energy is such a big part of the Texas economy, supporters say Perry is an obvious choice for the Cabinet position. But the department is about more than energy. It also keeps the country’s nuclear weapons safe and oversees 17 national laboratories. Nuclear security is an area where Perry is likely to get questioned by senators, since he has had little experience with the topic. ”DOE is fundamentally a science, technology and innovation organization,” wrote current Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz in his Cabinet exit memo. Moniz is a nuclear physicist and his predecessor, Steven Chu, was a physicist. Chu shared with several colleagues the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics. Perry does not have a science background. It’s not a requirement  —   previous secretaries who were not scientists have served in the role. Delisi says the way Perry manages will compensate for his lack of scientific knowledge. ”His leadership style is to hire the best people and have them around him. And listen to all points of view and take them in before he makes a decision,” she says. But that doesn’t satisfy Perry’s critics. As a presidential candidate, Perry has questioned the science behind climate change. At one point he accused scientists of manipulating global warming data for financial gain. Among Perry’s critics, few are as colorful as Tom ”Smitty” Smith, director of Public Citizen’s Texas office. Referring to Perry, Smith says, ”He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but he flickers to life when somebody comes up and makes a campaign contribution to him.” Smith has known Perry for much of the former governor’s political career in Texas. When a conflict came down to protecting the environment or helping business, Smith says Perry reliably chose business. ”In Texas we have a saying that, ’You dance with them that brung you,’ ” says Smith. Look at Perry’s campaign contributions, and the oil and gas industry is at the top of the list. After his term as governor, Perry deepened those ties by serving on the board of several pipeline companies. He was a director at Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. Since being nominated, the Austin   reports, Perry has cut those ties. Smith and some environmentalists do have praise for Perry on one topic: wind energy. Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the country. ”When Gov. Perry took office in 2000, there was only 115 megawatts of wind power in his state,” says Jennifer Layke, global director of the World Resources Institute’s Energy Program. Now the state has more than 160 times the wind energy generating capacity  —   18, 531 megawatts, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Smith says that’s because as governor, Perry’s administration pioneered a program to build transmission lines from the windiest parts of Texas to the cities where the electricity is consumed. That encouraged companies to build new wind facilities because they were assured they could sell the electricity generated. Layke hopes that success will inform Perry’s tenure as energy secretary if the Senate confirms his nomination. ”On renewable energy and energy efficiency, we’re looking for a broad view that these technologies will continue to be supported by the federal government,” says Layke. As the hearing gets underway on Thursday, Layke says because of the job creation potential in renewable energy, she thinks that’s something Rick Perry and the Trump administration could get behind."
438,"Updated 5 p. m. ET, West African troops have crossed the border with Gambia in an effort to uphold the result of the country’s presidential election by force. The winner of the Dec. 1 vote, Adama Barrow, was officially sworn in as president at the country’s embassy in neighboring Senegal earlier this afternoon. But Gambia’s longtime leader, Yahya Jammeh, has refused to quit power despite mounting regional and international pressure. The battle for power between two men who both claim to be president of Gambia has plunged Africa’s smallest country into uncertainty. ”A newly sworn in President Barrow appealed to neighboring countries for help,” NPR’s Eyder Peralta reported. ”And now troops from Nigeria, Senegal and other countries have entered Gambia.” U. S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the United States supports the military intervention by ECOWAS, the West African regional bloc. ”We support it because we understand that the purpose is to help stabilize a tense situation and to try to observe the will of the people of the Gambia,” he said. U. S. forces are not involved, Kirby added, and U. S. citizens in Gambia are advised to shelter in place.  In Barrow’s inaugural speech, he emphasized the historic nature of his win: ”This is the first time since The Gambia became independent in 1965 that Gambians have changed their government through the ballot box.” Jammeh initially accepted the result of the Dec. 1 election. But a week later, he dramatically reversed course and claimed that the election results are illegitimate. He later announced a state of emergency, and on Wednesday, the parliament extended his term for three months. ”Exceptional circumstances have compelled me to be sworn here today,” Barrow said at the televised ceremony in Dakar. ”My right as a winner to be sworn in and assume the office of president is constitutionally guaranteed and irreversible. . .. I therefore call on all civilians and military personnel of the state to support my presidency, since it is built on a constitutional foundation.” Barrow, a businessman, vowed to pursue ”comprehensive reforms.” He fled to Senegal for his own protection  —   like thousands of other Gambians in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the U. N. Security Council has backed a resolution in support of the new leader. The council voted unanimously to adopt the resolution, which ”expresses its full support to the ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) in its commitment to ensure, by political means first, the respect of the will of the people of The Gambia as expressed in the results of 1st December elections.” The resolution also stressed that Gambian defense and security forces have a ”duty and obligation to place themselves at the disposal of the democratically elected authorities.” T, The U. N.   said in a statement that he told Barrow he fully supports ”his determination, and ECOWAS’s historic decision, with the unanimous backing of the Security Council, to restore the rule of law in The Gambia so as to honour and respect the will of the Gambian people.” The African Union has stated that its recognition of Jammeh’s authority would end with the end of his term on Wednesday, at the stroke of midnight. On the streets of Gambia, celebrations have erupted in support of the new leader, as Eyder reports. ”I’m just really happy about Gambians celebrating in this fashion. And I really hope this peace and stability continues,” Omar Jallow, a lawyer in Gambia’s capital Banjul, tells Eyder. He adds that he ”knows there could be clashes between the foreign troops and Jammeh supporters.” Jammeh has an abysmal human rights record and has vowed to rule the country for ”a billion years.”"
439,"The months leading up to the 2016 presidential election were filled with   protest songs, most of them directed at eventual winner Donald J. Trump. The months since, as you might imagine, have been no quieter. The occasion of Trump’s inauguration Friday is inspiring weekend demonstrations and benefit concerts across the country, and more protest songs keep rolling out right alongside them. With less than 24 hours to go before Friday’s big event, Arcade Fire is teaming up with Mavis Staples to release a new song titled ”I Give You Power”  —   available only via Tidal, a streaming service in which the band has a financial stake. And, though Trump’s election has no doubt stoked strong opinions among all the musicians involved, this particular song sticks to the bare essentials like throbbing synths, a jittery beat, and a few general phrases that lead to an unmistakable message for all elected officials: ”I give you power   I can take it away.” Listen now, via Tidal: Though ”I Give You Power” appears to be a   single (with all proceeds going to the American Civil Liberties Union) Arcade Fire will also release a DVD of its 2015 documentary film, The Reflektor Tapes, on January 27."
440,"All Things Considered   Ari Shapiro is on a road trip leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20. He is driving through North Carolina and Virginia, on the way to Washington, D. C. These are two swing states that went in opposite directions in November, each by a close margin: North Carolina for Trump Virginia, for Hillary Clinton. As the country faces dramatic changes, we’re asking people what they want from that change  —   and what concerns them. From her desk in Roanoke, Va. Patrice Campbell books appointments for the 15 Planned Parenthood clinics across the region. Right after the election, she noticed a huge increase in calls, many of them asking for the same thing. ”We’ve seen where a lot of patients  —   I would say maybe 50 to 70 percent of patients  —   [are] eager to get in for   contraceptives,” Campbell says. ”So their focus is, I need to get an IUD before Jan. 20 because an IUD can last for five, even 10 years.” Jan. 20, of course, is Inauguration Day. Anne Logan Bass has been a clinician at this Planned Parenthood clinic for eight years. She says the election was tough for the entire staff. ”My mother actually called me, and she was asking how things were going, and I said, ’Mom it’s just, we’re all crying,’ and she said, ’Is everyone worried they’re going to lose their job?’ and I said, ’No, everyone is so worried about our patients,’ ” Bass says. For years, Republicans have tried to end federal funding that gets routed to Planned Parenthood, and they plan to try again after Donald Trump is in office. They object to the fact that the organization provides abortions among other health care services  —   even though federal funds do not cover abortion services. This clinic in Roanoke treats about 2, 800 patients a year. Nationally, Planned Parenthood says it treats 2. 5 million patients a year, and abortions make up 3 percent of the services. At the Sweet Donkey coffee shop in central Roanoke, Laura Rodriguez drinks tea while her    baby girl stares   at the world. Rodriguez describes herself as lower middle class, working as a waitress. She has no health insurance. ”I’m not a big fan of Planned Parenthood. I went there before for health issues, and they were extremely overpriced. I had to pay out of pocket, a lot of money,” Rodriguez says. Planned Parenthood says it uses a sliding scale for fees based on a patient’s annual income. Sarah Law  —   a registered nurse  —   sits in another corner of the cafe. ”I’m pretty conservative myself, and as far as abortions go, that’s a different subject. But as far as women’s health and Planned Parenthood, I think that does a lot of wonderful things for women that don’t have the means to get proper care that they need,” Law says. In other words, even though Law is opposed to abortions, she thinks Planned Parenthood provides important services. To her, the argument that the only way to limit abortions is to strip federal funding for Planned Parenthood ”doesn’t make any sense.” Figures released this week show that the U. S. abortion rate is at its lowest level since Roe v. Wade. And Law fears that without easy access to contraception, those numbers could go back up. As for Bass of Planned Parenthood, her hope for the next four years is to see more patients and increase access. Her greatest fear? ”That misinformation and inaccurate, unreliable information is going to continue to make our job hard.” Use the audio link above to hear the full story."
441,"On Friday, when Donald Trump puts his hand on a Bible and takes the oath of office, ethics experts say he may very well be in violation of a lease on one of his premier hotels. The Trump International Hotel is a grand dame of a building on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a stone’s throw from the White House. It has become something of a tourist destination in Washington  —   and a rallying point for protesters  —   since Trump won the election. This week, they snarled traffic in front of the hotel, and one demonstrator suffered serious burns after trying to set a fire outside the building. By Wednesday, two days before Inauguration Day, security guards stood behind barricades, allowing in only hotel patrons, specially invited guests and Trump himself, who stopped by Wednesday evening for dinner, as NPR’s Tamara Keith reports. An Instagram user who was there posted a video. Everyone else, including journalists, will have to wait until after the inauguration to get inside, guards said. But there’s other trouble for the hotel. Trump has a   lease with the U. S. General Services Administration (GSA) a government agency that owns the building where the hotel is located. The GSA contract explicitly says that no elected official of the government of the United States may hold that lease. Steven Schooner, a procurement specialist at George Washington University, says Trump will be in breach of that contract once he takes office. But he says Trump doesn’t seem to care. ”There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the Trump Organization has made any effort to resolve this problem in advance of the inauguration,” he says. Last week, Trump laid out his plans for restructuring his business empire while he’s in the White House. He said he would hold on to his roughly 500 business enterprises, spanning roughly 20 countries, but hand over    operations to his two adult sons. Trump also stated that he didn’t need to take these steps, as he would be insulated from any conflict of interest laws once he becomes president. While that’s true, he will be subject to the Emoluments Clause in the U. S. Constitution, which bars officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval. Schooner says if the Trump Organization holds on to the hotel lease, it sets up numerous conflicts of interest, even if Trump himself isn’t heading up daily operations. And once he becomes president, Trump will oversee the GSA  —   so he’ll be both landlord and tenant. Schooner says there are other problems, too. ”If foreign states, if lobbyists, special interest groups, pay price premiums at the Trump hotel to host their events, to stay and maybe rub elbows with the president’s children, that’s a problem,” he says. Trump’s lawyer, Sheri Dillon, disagrees. She said at a Jan. 11 press conference that people will not try to curry favor by staying at the hotel. ”Paying for a hotel room is not a gift or a present, and it has nothing to do with an office,” she said. Trump’s spokespeople declined NPR’s requests for comment. The GSA declined an interview. It said in a statement it needed more information from the Trump Organization about its new business structure before making a decision about the hotel lease."
442,"On the day before taking office,   Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D. C. to kick off inaugural festivities. His first stop: a leadership luncheon at his new   hotel, the   Trump International Hotel, blocks from the White House. The hotel has been the center of a debate over conflicts between Trump’s business interests and the presidency. Incoming White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday Trump’s use of the hotel for a reception shouldn’t come as a ”shocker” to anyone, and he even gave his boss’s hotel a plug. ”It’s an absolutely stunning hotel I encourage you to go there if you haven’t been by,” he told the press briefing. Norm Eisen, former special counsel to President Obama for ethics and government reform, quickly tweeted that Spicer’s statement would be considered an ethics violation once Trump is in the White House.   Trump has a   lease with the U. S. General Services Administration, a government agency that owns the building where the hotel is located. The GSA contract says that no ”elected official of the government of the United States” may hold that lease. That provision has raised questions about what will happen to the lease once Trump takes office, but so far, the issue appears unresolved. Ahead of the inauguration, Trump is making good use of his Washington hotel. He also showed up for a quick dinner there Wednesday. At the Thursday luncheon, he praised his surroundings. ”This is a gorgeous room, a total genius must have built this place,” he quipped. The media  —   which have been barred from the hotel during the inauguration weekend  —   were allowed in briefly to cover the event."
443,"A   in downtown Tehran, Iran, caught fire and collapsed on Thursday, killing firefighters who were working inside the building. Reports suggest at least 20 firefighters died, and many more people  —   including firefighters and civilians  —   were injured. The horrifying scene was ”inadvertently shown live on state television,” The Associated Press reports, and left other firefighters and eyewitnesses crying in the streets. More people are believed to be trapped in the rubble, NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports, and rescue operations are ongoing. The   building that collapsed, the Plasco building, is the oldest   in Iran, he says. ”The building was opened more than 50 years ago and housed retail outlets and a large number of textile manufacturing shops, according to several Iranian media,” Peter reports. ”Some of the surrounding buildings were damaged in the collapse.” The AP reports that authorities said they had ”repeatedly warned tenants about blocking stairwells with fabric” that could be flammable and could block escape routes. Here’s more from the wire service: ”Firefighters, soldiers and other emergency responders dug through the debris into the night, looking for survivors. While it was not clear how many people were in the    building, witnesses said many had slipped through a police cordon while the fire burned to go back inside for their belongings. ” ’They asked us . .. using loudspeakers to evacuate the building, but some people went inside again, saying their precious documents, their bank checks, their entire life was in their shops,’ said witness Masoud Hosseini. ’They went inside to fetch those documents. I felt like they cared about their belongings, checks and money more than their lives. ” ’Firefighters went inside to bring them out, and then suddenly the building collapsed,’ Hosseini said.” The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, said the firefighters who died in the collapse were ”martyrs,” Reuters reports. Here’s more from the news service: ”The   Tasnim news agency said troops had been sent to help dig through the ruins. It said one of the first firefighters to be reached had demanded to be let back inside to save his colleagues. ”The agency quoted an official in the Tehran governor’s office as saying an electrical   had caused the fire, but there was no immediate confirmation of this. ”President Hassan Rouhani ordered an immediate investigation and compensation for those affected.” Search dogs were looking for survivors, and the rescue operation could last for more than two days, Reuters says, citing Iranian state TV."
444,"There’s been a lot of   chatter about who is performing at Donald Trump’s inauguration Friday  —   and who has refused, as well as who was or was not ever asked. For critics of the incoming administration, the travails of those trying to book these gigs have been the stuff of comedy and derision for Trump’s team, the stance  —   at least publicly  —   has been that the lineup is exactly what they have always envisioned for this event: an inauguration for the people, not for the stars. ”This is not Woodstock,” the inauguration’s director of communications, Boris Epshteyn, told CNN in December. ”It’s not summer jam. It’s not a concert.” One of the oddest moments of political spin came from Tom Barrack, the head of Trump’s inauguration planning committee. Using a particularly curious turn of phrase, he told a pool of reporters earlier this month: ”What we’ve done instead of trying to surround him with what people consider   is, we are going to surround him with the soft sensuality of the place.” Regardless of how Trump got to his list of eventual performers, a glance at the historical record reveals that tomorrow’s ceremony for the first president to emerge into public consciousness via tabloids and then reality television looks a whole lot like a throwback to inaugurations of an earlier era. Trump’s invitees for the   ceremony include the U. S. Marine Band, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, teen America’s Got Talent   and current classical crossover moppet, Jackie Evancho, and The Rockettes. (The disputes within the Rockettes organization and with James Dolan, the head of their parent company, Madison Square Garden, have become infamous. And the Mormon chorus, which has sung for five other presidents’ inauguration festivities, is weathering some heated internal backlash regarding the Trump performance. At least one member of the ensemble has quit.) In an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett two days ago, Barrack reasserted that the inauguration planners had a specific vision in mind. When Burnett asked why Kanye West, who has expressed support for Trump and met with him in New York in December, wasn’t going to be performing, Barrack responded: ”We haven’t asked him. He’s been great, he considers himself a friend of the   but it’s not the venue. The venue we have for entertainment is filled out, it’s perfect. It’s going to be typically and traditionally American.” By that measure of what’s ”typically” and ”traditionally” American, Trump’s team is reifying certain parameters of what is worth memorializing and celebrating in American culture. The resulting lineup evokes nothing so much as the first inauguration of Richard Nixon, at another tumultuous time in American history. Nixon also invited both the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Marine Band to perform at his 1969 inauguration. Like Nixon, Trump has invited mostly white artists to mark his    —   choices that may have seemed culturally appropriate to the 1960s establishment but strike many observers as alienating and even bewildering nearly half a century later. That’s not to say that the   festivities didn’t have at least one moment of outright weirdness: James Brown sang ”Say It Loud  —   I’m Black And I’m Proud” at the   Gala two nights before Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969. Brown went on to endorse Nixon during his second presidential campaign in 1972, which led to boycotts and protests against his shows. (Over the course of his life, Brown’s political alliances wandered from Lyndon Johnson to Strom Thurmond.) If an event for Nixon could feature an anthem of black power sung by one of the biggest stars of the day, what would it mean if West performed ”Blood On The Leaves” or ”Black Skinhead” at one of the Trump events? The   feel to Trump’s roster feels especially discordant considering how much of the  ’s campaign relied on a populist message. Let’s look back to the Inauguration Day of another   incoming president: Andrew Jackson. The doors of the White House were opened during his inauguration in 1829 to let the public in to celebrate  —   and as legend goes, a mob scene, possibly fueled by alcohol, broke out. According to accounts of the day, the teeming crowd smashed glasses, broke furniture and ruined rugs. Putting the possibly drunken chaos of Jackson’s inauguration aside, there’s a longtime tradition of incoming American presidents inviting amateur ensembles to perform at their inaugurations  —   and the ”of the people” symbolism looms large. The start of Harry Truman’s second term was celebrated by a singing New York City cop turned professional entertainer named Phil Regan, who emceed the occasion and performed ”The   Banner.” Many presidents have invited young and amateur performers from their own communities. In 1977, Jimmy Carter invited students from several historically black colleges in Atlanta to sing ”The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Four years later, at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, an amateur vocalist named Juanita Booker  —   the daughter of a sharecropper  —   performed ”The   Banner.” For many decades, music at the inauguration ceremony was the purview of military bands occasionally, and especially following World War II, incoming presidents have also welcomed accomplished opera singers to usher in their terms in   terms. That trend began with Dwight Eisenhower, who invited the black soprano Dorothy Maynor and the white tenor Eugene Conley to sing at his first inauguration in 1953. While popular musicians have long performed at the inauguration galas and parades, it’s only much more recently that they’ve appeared on Inauguration Day itself. For example, George W. Bush was serenaded by a cavalcade of video stars like Ricky Martin, Jessica Simpson and 98 Degrees, not to mention Destiny’s Child, at his inaugural ball in 2001. Even so, Bush took a more staid road when it came to his   ceremonies, with performers like the Marine Band, the Naval Academy Glee Club and students from the University of Louisville. Similarly, Bill Clinton went for musical selections and performers that telegraphed American heritage: For both of his inaugurations, Clinton, like Carter, invited choirs from historically black colleges as well as opera singers Marilyn Horne and Jessye Norman. The idea of pulling   superstars into the inauguration proper came to its fullest expression with our 44th president, whose first inauguration included Aretha Franklin and   Ma among the performers  —   and then whose second inauguration ceremony included James Taylor, Kelly Clarkson and Beyoncé (who, as previously noted, also performed for George W. Bush as part of Destiny’s Child). Historically speaking, it’s really President Obama who has been the outlier when it comes to adding splash and spangle to the pomp and circumstance of Inauguration Day. Trump’s team has tried to go with bigger   names for a concert Thursday afternoon called ”The Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration,” which will take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s slated to feature country stars Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood, actor Jon Voight and rock act 3 Doors Down, who scored chart hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As of yesterday evening, the artists listed on the official website of the ”MAGA!” show included singer Jennifer Holliday (who in fact announced on Jan. 14 that she would not be performing, after receiving negative feedback from the LGBT community). Two days ago, soul legend Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave) signed onto the ”MAGA!” bill, telling the Associated Press that he requested to perform in Holliday’s place. The ”MAGA!” event also includes The Piano Guys  —   a quartet of YouTube stars. Like other featured performers The Rockettes and Jackie Evancho, who have publicly worked out their feelings about the Trump inauguration invitation, The Piano Guys decided to publish a statement in response to their fans. The Piano Guys are all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of   Saints, and the note refers heavily to their religious beliefs and historical precedent. In the statement (which is unbylined but is written in the first person) a member of The Piano Guys compares the group’s decision to that of the legendary black contralto Marian Anderson, who sang the national anthem at both Eisenhower’s second inauguration in 1957 and at John F. Kennedy’s in 1961. Anderson’s inauguration appearances were particularly resonant with meaning after she was denied a 1939 performance at Washington’s Constitution Hall. She subsequently delivered ”one of the most important musical events of the 20th century,” an   concert for 75, 000 at the Lincoln Memorial that was a watershed in American history. Regardless of the lack of parallels between Anderson’s situation and their status as a mostly white (and completely nonblack) group, the unnamed Piano Guy continues: ”We look to Marian Anderson  —   one of history’s bravest proponents of civil rights  —   an African American woman who sang for two inaugurations in a divided, segregated nation, despite being treated by many in that nation with unthinkable prejudice and baseless hatred. She once said, ’As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.’ ” Given the heavy scrutiny and criticism surrounding the performers who are performing at the Trump inauguration, it’s most interesting to watch these musicians lay out their arguments and calculus for their individual decisions, and grasp at context and meaning for their choices, in such public ways. What’s equally compelling is to see that despite Trump’s gift for stagecraft, talent for creating his own media cycles and proclivity for upending expectations and norms, his choices wound up being just so traditional."
445,"Later today, six people will enter a dome on a volcano in Hawaii that will be their home for the next eight months, as they simulate a future mission to Mars. It is the fifth such experiment run by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. The latest mission on Mauna Loa, which ended in August 2016, lasted a full year. It is known as the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or  . The goal of   is to test what it would be like for people to live on Mars, and what the project designers call ”team performance and cohesion”  —   or how a group of strangers might handle being stuck together for months on end. ”It could be a long trip to Mars despite recent bold assurances of faster rocket ships, or a long stay on the Martian surface,” a summary of the mission states. ”In either case, astronaut crews far from Earth will rely on a social resilience and team cohesion previously untested in deep space.” The new crew is made up of two women and four men  —   five American engineers and scientists and one British researcher  —   who were chosen from a pool of ” ” candidates. Like previous missions, the crew’s assignment is primarily behavioral  —   the team is trying to figure out how to handle social interactions and psychological burdens associated with being isolated with a small group of people. Unlike previous missions, the ability of crew members to make decisions on their own, without direction from ”earth,” will vary over the course of the eight months they spend living in the dome. The   team hopes to study how different amounts of ”control of their daily schedule and planning of crew involvement in mission tasks” affect group cohesion, according to the mission summary. Asked what advice she’d give to future   Mars inhabitants, former crew member and German physicist Christiane Heinicke said, ”Bring something to work on. Something meaningful to work on. One of your biggest enemies is boredom.” ”The other big enemies, of course, are the rest of the crew,” she said, laughing in a video posted to Twitter, as The   reported. As for what she learned about how to cope with living and working with the same five people all the time, Heinicke said emergencies play a surprising role in helping people get along. At one point, for example, the system for gathering and treating water broke. To simulate life on Mars, the team received water and food only every two and four months, respectively. ”Obviously, we need water, so we all needed to work on that as a group,” Heinicke recalled. ”If you had some arguments within the group . .. it really helps to have an emergency to work on together, because everyone has new motivation,” she said."
446,"Updated at 12:10 p. m. ET, An avalanche in central Italy has buried a ski resort, leaving about 30 people missing and prompting a frantic rescue effort. Three bodies have been recovered, The Associated Press reports, but the full extent of the death toll is not yet known. Children are believed to be among the missing. Rescue workers who arrived at the hotel found two survivors outside, but ”no sign of life” in the building, the AP reports. The avalanche appeared to be triggered by four earthquakes that shook the Abruzzo region on Wednesday, says Christopher Livesay, reporting for NPR from Rome. The disaster struck in the same mountainous region where a powerful earthquake last summer killed nearly 300 people. The impact of the avalanche was devastating. A firefighter described the hotel as ”swept away,” the Italian news agency ANSA reports, and some media reports suggest the entire building was shifted downhill by the snow. The Hotel Rigopiano is four stories tall, according to Reuters, but only the peaks of the roof and one row of windows are visible after the avalanche engulfed the building. It’s unclear exactly when the avalanche struck. The AP reports that as early as 5:30 p. m. local time on Wednesday, Giampiero Parete, a chef on vacation at the hotel, had called his employer to report the avalanche. He begged Quinto Marcella to alert rescue crews to save his wife and children, the AP reports: ”Parete had left the hotel briefly to get some medicine for his wife from their car, and survived as a result. ” ’He said the hotel was submerged and to call rescue crews,’ Marcella said, adding that he phoned police and the Pescara prefect’s office, but that no one believed him. ’The prefect’s office said it wasn’t true, because everything was OK at the hotel.’ ”Marcella said he insisted, and called other emergency numbers until someone finally took him seriously and mobilized a rescue, starting at 8 p. m. more than two hours later.” Parete was among the two survivors found outside, the AP reports. NPR had previously reported that the avalanche struck overnight, while residents were sleeping. The first rescuers to reach the hotel traveled on skis, ANSA reports, while more teams followed by helicopter. ”Narrow mountain roads and icy weather are hampering rescue efforts,” Livesay says. Footage of the hotel’s interior showed hallways filled with snow, skylights cracking beneath the weight of the snow above and walls that had been smashed through by the force of the avalanche. Here’s video, via The Guardian: Italian media are reporting that some guests at the Hotel Rigopiano managed to send text messages after the avalanche trapped them inside the hotel. One message, according to local media reports, came from a couple who said, ”Help, we’re dying of cold.” The AP notes that there are other rescue efforts active in the region, which ”has been pummeled by more than a meter (3 feet) of snow in recent days”: ”[Storms] have knocked out power and phone lines and blocked roads, isolating towns and hamlets. ” ’We have been abandoned by everyone!’ marveled one resident from the province of Teramo, Daiana Nguyen, on Sky TG24. ’They talk about sending in the army: Thirty to 40 men came with shovels. We need heavy machinery.’ ”Nguyen said people have been stuck in their homes for days.” Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has urged the authorities to ”multiply their efforts” and work to reach trapped people  —   both in the hotel and in the neighboring hamlets  —   as quickly as possible. This is a breaking news story. As often happens in situations like these, some information reported early may turn out to be inaccurate. We’ll move quickly to correct the record and we’ll only point to the best information we have at the time."
447,"Updated at 12:15 p. m. ET, U. S.   stealth bombers struck two ISIS training camps in the Libyan desert Wednesday night, the Pentagon said. U. S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the camps housed ISIS fighters, many of whom had escaped the group’s former stronghold in Sirte, on Libya’s central coast. He added that officials are still working to assess the impact of the strikes, but they believe more than 80 ISIS fighters were killed. ”Importantly, these strikes were directed against some of ISIL’s external plotters, who were actively planning operations against our allies in Europe,” Carter told reporters Thursday. He added that the targets ”may also have been connected with some attacks that have already occurred in Europe.” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the precision strikes 45 kilometers southwest of Sirte were part of a mission that lasted more than 30 hours. As NPR’s Philip Ewing reports, the Pentagon picked stealth bombers that took off from Missouri ”as opposed to American units already in Europe  —   because they had so many targets to hit, and wanted to strike them all at once.” The mission was requested by Libya’s Government of National Accord, Cook added. The GNA is recognized by the United Nations and is one of several rival governments hoping to rule Libya. Cook played surveillance video of individuals that he described as ISIS members moving   grenades and shells in the targeted area. ”This certainly dealt a significant blow to ISIL’s presence in Libya,” Cook said. ”Was it a death knell for them in Libya? We’ll have to wait and see.” Libya slid into chaos since the ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The disarray has allowed militant groups such as ISIS to gain a foothold in the country. The U. S. military started attacking ISIS targets in Sirte last August at the request of the U. N.  government, as The   reported. The U. S. launched 495 precision airstrikes during the nearly   operation, dubbed Odyssey Lighting, according to the U. S. African Command. Cook referred to this mission as an extension of that operation."
448,"If you think that you wouldn’t be touched by a Republican overhaul of Obamacare because you get health insurance through your job at a big company, think again. Several of the law’s provisions apply to plans offered by large employers, too (with some exceptions for plans that were in place before the law passed in March 2010). It’s not yet clear how   Donald Trump and congressional Republicans plan to revamp the federal health law, known as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. They have not agreed on a plan, and they do not have enough votes in the Senate to fully repeal the current statute. So they are planning to use a budgeting rule to disassemble part of the law, which will limit what they can change. But they also may seek revisions in important regulations and guidance that have determined how the law is implemented. Nonetheless, as tensions grow in Washington over the future of the health law, it is important to understand some of its effects on   plans. No copays for preventive services, The health insurance offered by big companies is typically pretty comprehensive, the better to attract and keep good employees. But Obamacare broadened some coverage requirements. Under the law, insurers and employers have to cover many preventive services without charging people anything for them. The services that are required with no    payments include dozens of screenings and tests, including mammograms and colonoscopies that are recommended by the U. S. Preventive Services Task Force routine immunizations endorsed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and a range of services that are recommended specifically for children and for women by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. The change that affects the most people on an ongoing basis is likely the requirement that plans cover without cost sharing all methods of contraception approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (There are limited exceptions for religious employers.) ”In terms of sustained costs, birth control is probably the biggest,” said Caroline Pearson, a senior vice president at Avalere Health. No annual or lifetime limits on coverage, Even the most generous plans often had lifetime maximum coverage limits of a few million dollars before the health law passed, and some plans also imposed annual coverage limits. The health law eliminated those dollar coverage limits. Annual cap on    payments for covered services, The health law set limits on how much people can be required to pay in deductibles, copayments or coinsurance every year for covered care they receive from providers in their network. In 2017, the limit is $7, 150 for individuals and $14, 300 for families. ”Many employers often had an    limit anyway, but this guarantees protection for people with high needs,” said JoAnn Volk, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, who has written on this issue. Adult kids’ coverage expanded, The law allowed workers to keep their children on their plans until they reach age 26, even if they’re married, financially independent and live in another state. Republicans have said they may keep this popular provision in place if they dismantle the law. Guaranteed external appeal rights, Consumers who disagree with a health plan’s decision to deny benefits or payment for services can appeal the decision to an independent review panel. The provision applies to all new health plans including those offered by   companies that pay their workers’ claims directly and who were previously exempt from appeals requirements. No waiting periods to join a plan  Employers used to be able to make new employees wait indefinitely before they were eligible for coverage under the company plan. No more. Now the waiting time for coverage can be no more than 90 days. No waiting periods for coverage of   conditions  Prior to the ACA, employers could delay covering workers’ chronic and other health conditions for up to a year after they became eligible for a plan. Under the ACA, that’s no longer allowed. As a practical matter, though, coverage of   conditions was rarely an issue in   plans, say some health insurance analysts. Repeal could reopen the door to that prohibited practice, however. Standardized plan descriptions, The law requires all plans to provide a ”summary of benefits and coverage” in a standard format that allows consumers to understand their coverage and make    plan comparisons.  Basic coverage standards for   plans, The health law isn’t as prescriptive with   plans about the specific benefits that have to be offered. They aren’t required to cover the 10 essential health benefits that individual and   plans have to include, for example. But the law does require that big companies offer plans that meet a ” ” standard, paying at least 60 percent of the cost of covered services, on average. Those that don’t could face a fine. Initially, the online calculator that the federal Department of Health and Human Services provided to help large employers gauge compliance with the minimum value standard gave the green light to plans that didn’t cover hospitalization services or more than a few doctor visits a year. Now plans must provide at least that coverage to meet federal standards. The result: Large employers generally no longer offer   ” ” policies with very skimpy benefits. If the health law is repealed, that could change. In some industries with   workers and smaller profit margins, ”they might begin to offer them again, and employees might demand it” to help make the premiums more affordable, said Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy at the National Business Group on Health, a membership organization representing large employers. Although the law strengthened coverage for people in   plans in several ways, consumer advocates have complained about shortcomings. It aimed to ensure that coverage is affordable by requiring that individuals be responsible for paying no more than 9. 69 percent of their household income for individual employer coverage, for example. If their insurance costs more than that, workers can shop for coverage on the marketplaces set up by the health law and be eligible for premium tax credits  —   if their income is less than 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $47, 000). But the standard does not take into consideration any additional costs for family coverage. Consumer advocates also point to the wellness regulations as a problematic area of the law. The health law increased the financial incentives that employers can offer workers for participating in workplace wellness programs to 30 percent of the cost of individual coverage, up from 20 percent. Such incentives can effectively coerce people into participating and sharing private medical information, critics charge, and unfairly penalize sick people. ”It potentially allows [plans] to discriminate against people with medical conditions, which the ACA is supposed to eliminate,” said Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Follow Michelle Andrews on Twitter: @mandrews110."
449,"In a tense hearing Thursday morning, the new administration’s Treasury secretary nominee, Steven Mnuchin, faced scrutiny from Democratic senators concerned about him profiting handsomely off homeowners who lost their homes during the housing crisis. Mnuchin, whose career includes a   stint at Goldman Sachs and Hollywood movie production, got early praise from Republicans. But stiff questioning followed from Democrats for his role as CEO of a company that took over IndyMac Bank, now known as OneWest, which failed because of its bad home loans and later pushed through many controversial foreclosures, ultimately yielding massive profits for Mnuchin. Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance, called his practices ”predatory,” saying the bank foreclosed on 35, 000 homeowners. ”While Mr. Mnuchin was CEO, the bank proved it could put more people on the street faster than just about anybody else around,” Wyden said in his opening statement, referring to OneWest borrowers who came forward with stories of the bank refusing to modify loan terms that might have allowed thousands more troubled borrowers to remain in their homes. Wyden added, ”Treasury secretary ought to be somebody who works on behalf of all Americans, including those who still wait for the economic recovery to show up in their communities. When I look at Mr. Mnuchin’s background, it’s a real stretch to find hard evidence that he would be that kind of Treasury secretary.” Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, rushed to Mnuchin’s defense early, accusing the Democrats of obstructionism. ”Objectively speaking, I don’t think anyone can argue that Mr. Mnuchin is unqualified for this position, so I hope we don’t have those type of stupid arguments,” Hatch said. There is no evidence that any laws were broken in Mnuchin’s management of OneWest bank, he added. Given the press around OneWest leading up to the hearing, Mnuchin was prepared for this attack, saying he welcomed the opportunity to set the record straight. ”Let me be clear: My group had nothing to do with the creation of risky loans in the IndyMac loan portfolios,” he said, pinning blame on the previous leadership. Mnuchin said in many cases where loan modifications were not possible, it was because of bank, government or other rules that did not give him the flexibility to do so. As Treasury secretary, he said, he would work to change some of those rules. Mnuchin added that his investor group invested $1. 6 billion in the bank, in part to help increase modifications. ”We renamed the business OneWest bank and saved thousands of jobs.” Mnuchin’s group originally purchased IndyMac for $1. 55 billion from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2009, then ultimately sold OneWest to CIT Group in 2015 for $3. 4 billion. Mnuchin, 54, a divorced father of three children, followed his father’s footsteps to Goldman Sachs, where he worked for 17 years.   records show Mnuchin contributed to the political campaigns of many Democrats, though he was an early supporter of Donald Trump, having met him about 15 years ago, after Mnuchin left Goldman Sachs and started a hedge fund that later invested in at least two Trump real estate projects. More recently, he has been a money man in Hollywood, with a production company that produced The Lego Movie, American Sniper and Suicide Squad. Mnuchin’s appointment was controversial in part because it departed from Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign. As a presidential candidate, Trump vilified Wall Street bankers, arguing they were part of an establishment more allied with Hillary Clinton. One television ad featured video of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein appearing as Trump says in a   ”it’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” On several key issues, Mnuchin seemed to differ from some of his party colleagues: During the hearing, Senate Democrats kept returning to how OneWest handled its portfolio of troubled mortgages. In one heated exchange, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown told Mnuchin, ”you’ve been rather defensive, probably for good reason, about this.” Mnuchin shot back: ”It’s not that I’m being defensive I’m proud.”"
450,"Noor Salman, the wife of the man who killed 49 people last June at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla. has pleaded not guilty to two federal charges. Salman was arrested earlier this week and charged with providing material support to a terrorist and obstruction of justice for allegedly knowing about Omar Mateen’s plan to slaughter people at the nightclub. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U. S. history. Mateen was killed by police. Salman married Mateen in 2011, as The   has reported. She grew up in California and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after her husband’s death. She entered her plea of not guilty before a federal judge in Oakland. ”[Salman] was represented by a local attorney for Wednesday’s hearing but eventually will hire Charles Swift, a Texas lawyer from the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America,” reported the Orlando Sentinel. ”[Swift] must first get permission to practice law in California.” In November, Salman told The New York Times she was ”unaware of everything,” saying, ”I don’t condone what he has done. I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people.” She also told the Times that Mateen had abused her. Salman’s childhood neighbors, described her to The Associated Press as ”a sweet, pretty California girl with Palestinian roots” who grew up in the suburbs and met Mateen online, as we have reported. In the days after the attack, the information Salman told investigators sometimes seemed contradictory. NPR’s Dina   reported Salman ”said she didn’t know that the attack was coming, but also told authorities that she tried to talk [Mateen] out of the attack.” Dina also reported that Salman told investigators she was with Mateen when he bought ammunition the week before the massacre, and joined her husband at the Pulse club before the attack. But Dina pointed out ”it’s possible she didn’t know that he was there to case the place.”"
451,"On Sunday morning, a gunman at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Fla. perpetrated the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. He killed 49 people and injured more than 50. The city of Orlando has released the names of the identified victims, after notifying their next of kin. ”Our City is working tirelessly to get as much information out to the families so they can begin the grieving process,” reads the city’s statement. ”Please keep the following individuals in your thoughts and prayers.” This post will be updated with further information about the victims as we learn more. Edward Sotomayor Jr. 34, Sarasota, Fla. According to multiple social media profiles, Sotomayor worked as the national brand manager for Al and Chuck Travel, which describes itself as ”part of America’s largest gay owned travel company.” In an interview with The Associated Press, David Sotomayor, who identified himself as Sotomayor’s cousin, said Edward was a ”caring, energetic man.” Christina Copelli, who lives in Vienna, was on three cruises with Sotomayor. ”He was a lovely, kind guy who touched everyone who had the pleasure of meeting him,” she told NPR. ”I can’t believe he’s gone.” Stanley Almodovar III, 23, Clermont, Fla. Almodovar worked as a pharmacy technician, according to his Facebook profile. ”He made me feel like it was perfectly fine being who I was,” Almodovar’s friend Haze Ramirez told The  . She says they met at Pulse and ”clicked instantly.” ”You would know when Stanley entered a room,” she said. ”He can turn my mood by a conversation.” Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22, Guerrero, who had recently begun attending the University of Central Florida, had only recently come out to his family as gay, according to The Associated Press. In a conversation with the news service, his cousin Robert Guerrero said he opened up to his family just before the start of the year. ”He was always this amazing person [and] he was like a big brother to me,” Robert Guerrero told the AP. ”He was never the type to go out to parties, would rather stay home and care for his niece and nephew.” Eric Ivan   36, Orlando, Fla.   was the man everyone in his family asked for design advice, his cousin Orlando Gonzalez told The New York Times. ”He was very artistic,” Gonzalez told the Times. ”He was all about interior design.” The paper reports that the    ”goofball”  —   Gonzalez’s words  —   lived in downtown Orlando with his husband. Luis S. Vielma, 22, Sanford, Fla. ”Luis was by far the best person I knew,” his friend Will Randle told the Miami Herald. ”He inherently made us all better people by simply existing around us. Part of him will always live on in every good decision I make.” According to his Facebook page, Vielma worked at Universal Studios in Orlando, including on the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling mourned him on Twitter. Peter O.   22, Peter Ommy   went by ”Ommy,” his aunt told The Associated Press. ”Peter makes a difference everywhere he goes. He was a happy person,” Sonia Cruz told the paper. ”If Peter is not at the party, no one wants to go.”   went to Pulse with his best friend, Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, she said. Menendez also died in the attack. Luis Omar   20, Omar Capo was a passionate dancer, according to remembrances being left for him online. ”May the only time you rest,” Tamandra Diaz wrote, be after you ”make some kick ass choreo up in paradise.” His friend Julius Ortiz was with him at Pulse, but left shortly before the shooting. Ortiz told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that after the shooting began, he sent Capo text after text after text, trying to reach him. He also remembered Capo helping him out when he was in need. ”When I was in a very hard situation  —   because with my dad, I was staying with him and he kicked me out  —   he actually took me in for a little,” Ortiz said. Kimberly Morris, 37, Kimberly ”KJ” Morris was a bouncer at Pulse. She moved to Orlando this spring, from Hawaii, in order to help her mother and grandmother, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Before that, she played basketball at Post University in Connecticut and worked as a drag king and bouncer at a gay club in Massachusetts, NBC Connecticut reports. Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, 30, Eddie Justice was an accountant, living in downtown Orlando, who loved to eat and work out, The Associated Press reports. He woke his mother up shortly after 2 a. m. Sunday, with a text message: ”Mommy I love you.” Then: ”In club they shooting.” Mina Justice and her son exchanged messages for nearly an hour, the AP reports. Eddie Justice was trapped in a bathroom at Pulse as the hostage situation began. He asked his mother to call the police, telling her a man was shooting, lots of people were wounded. ”He has us,” he told her. ”He’s in the bathroom with us.” ”He’s a terror.” His death was announced Monday. Darryl Roman Burt II, 29, Burt was a financial aid officer at Keiser University in Jacksonville, the Florida   reports. ”He always had a smile on his face and was a very nice guy. He definitely leaves an impression and had a big personality, and he is missed,” campus President Lisamarie Winslow told the newspaper. Burt was a member of the Jacksonville Jaycees, a young professionals’ organization. ”Both socially and professionally he was always interested in making positive impact on people’s lives and in the community,” president Shawn DeVries said in a statement to NPR. ”If someone needed anything he’d usually just ask . .. where, when and what are the deadlines.” Burt was known for his colorful bowties, reporter Jenna Bourne has tweeted. Deonka Deidra Drayton, 32, A woman who identified herself as Drayton’s aunt posted on Facebook that Drayton had been at work when she was shot. Melody Maia Monet, a nightclub photographer, posted a photo of Drayton (center) taken on Friday, a day before the shooting. Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, 25, Laureanodisla, who studied at the University of the Sacred Heart in San Juan, Puerto Rico, performed in drag as Alanis Laurell. ”It is with deepest sorrow that we report that a member of the Drag community has lost their life due to the shooting at pulse night club in Orlando Florida,” states a Facebook post from the community page Drag Around the World. ”Alanis Laurell was a[n] amazing performer and a beautiful person inside and out.” Originally from Puerto Rico, Laureanodisla studied education at the university, according to a Facebook tribute page. He moved to Orlando three years ago to ”pursue a career as a dancer and choreographer,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. He’d gone dancing at Pulse with his roommates on Saturday, and his family grew alarmed when they didn’t hear from him after he texted them at 2:07 a. m. ET. ”What I have now is a pain beyond repair,” wrote cousin Lucas Daniel Acosta D’oleo. Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, 35  Born in Puerto Rico, Perez had lived in the U. S. since he was a teenager and worked at an Orlando Perfumania store. ”One of the customers Perez charmed at the perfume shop was Luis Daniel   who would become his longtime partner,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. Both were killed in the attack at the Pulse nightclub. Perez ”was a man full of life and joy who loved his friends and family above all things,” says a GoFundMe page set up by family members to raise money for his funeral. Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, 50  Originally from Puerto Rico, Velazquez worked at Forever 21 in Orlando and was a professional Jíbaro folk dancer, according to the Orlando Weekly. A friend told the paper that Velazquez was with friends at Pulse, when ”he and others were pushed up against the wall by [Omar] Mateen, who started shooting at the group.” ”My brother will never die,” his sister wrote on Facebook. ”He will be in my heart.” Amanda Alvear, 25  Alvear had gone to Pulse with her friend Mercedez Marisol Flores, and was among those who took refuge in a bathroom during the attack. Alvear posted a Snapchat video that documented the first moments of gunfire erupting at the club. Both she and Flores were killed. Older brother Brian Alvear told the Orlando Sentinel that his sister had spent the first part of the weekend shopping with his young daughters  —   ”She liked to make them look very good.” Amanda, who wanted to be a nurse, ”wouldn’t want anyone to spread hate for her,” he told the newspaper. ”She’d rather they spread more love, keep friends and family close, and have a good time doing it.” Martin Benitez Torres, 33  Torres, a student at Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez in San Juan, Puerto Rico, had gone to Orlando to spend time with family. He posted Facebook videos and photos sharing scenes from his holiday. The Orlando Sentinel reports that he was among several students from his school who were killed in the Pulse attack. ”I can’t believe it that my cousin is gone too soon. Going to miss that big smile always happy,” wrote Sonia N. Crapps on Facebook. ”I am a good man,” Torres wrote on his Facebook profile page, ”a fighter who gives everything without expecting anything in return, ready to fly high today.” Luis Daniel   37,   who grew up in Puerto Rico, had gone to Pulse with his partner, Jean Carlos Mendez Perez. Both were shot and killed at the club. The two had met a decade ago, when Perez sold   Cartier perfume at a Perfumania shop, according to the Orlando Sentinel. They fell in love soon thereafter. A friend in Pennsylvania, Daniel   paid tribute to   on Facebook as ”a wonderful young man full of life, who endured countless days of bullying while growing up, by cruel people calling him all sorts of horrendous homophobic slurs. He was the first person on this earth I came out to, and he always protected and loved his friends. His strength and character was always an inspiration to all of us.” Mercedez Marisol Flores, 26  Originally from Queens, N. Y. Flores studied literature at Orlando’s Valencia Community College and worked at Target, according to her Facebook memorial page. She’d gone to the Pulse club with her friend Amanda Alvear. Both were killed in the attack. ”I forgive the boy because I cannot take that hate in my life. My life is more important than hate,” Flores’ father, Cesar Flores, told reporters in Orlando. His daughter ”had so many dreams,” Flores said. ”We must all come together, we must all be at peace, we must all love each other, because this hatred cannot continue for the rest of our lives.” Xavier Emmanuel Serrano Rosado, 35  Xavier E. Serrano was a professional dancer and performed in shows for Disney Live! Matt Molandes, a friend of Serrano’s, tells NPR that Serrano helped Molandes accept himself as a gay person. ”Coming from a place where I was ashamed to be gay, watching . .. performers like Xavier helped me come out of my shell,” he says. ”Xavier lived in his truth, he was always happy even on days he wasn’t.” Serrano leaves behind a young son. Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, 25, Silva Menendez, originally from Puerto Rico, had moved to Orlando and was working for Speedway convenience stores while he studied health care management at Ana G. Mendez University in Orlando. Sonia Cruz, the aunt of another victim, Peter O.   told the Associated Press that Silva Menendez was best friends with her nephew and that the two had gone to the Pulse nightclub together on Saturday. Oscar A   26, Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, 31  Oscar   left, and his partner Simon A. Carrillo, right. Partners Simon Carillo and Oscar Aracena had recently returned from a trip to Niagara Falls, the Orlando Sentinel reports, when they headed to Pulse for a night out on Saturday. Both men died in the attack. According to a friend of both men, Norkis   the two had just purchased a home together. Another friend, Yamil Caraballo, who says he had known Aracena for three years, tells NPR that he was always happy and willing to help others. ”He was a great man and loved the Lord with all his heart,” Carabello recalls. ”He was amazing.” Ivonne Irizarry, who worked with Carillo at McDonald’s, told the Orlando Sentinel he loved to travel and took great pride in the quality of his work. Carillo loved dancing, biking and water skiing, the paper writes. Enrique L. Rios Jr. 25, Rios was on vacation in Orlando from Brooklyn, N. Y. In 2015, he enrolled at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, studying social work. A spokesman for the college, Richard Relkin, said in a press release, ”Sadly, his dreams were cut short by this senseless act of violence. The St. Francis College community mourns the loss of one of our own and offers prayers to his family and friends.” While he was in school, Rios worked at a restaurant at LaGuardia Airport. A   remembered his sense of humor. ”He had so much joy in him and was so funny,” Dorys Gonzalez wrote in a remembrance on Facebook. ”He was such a good person.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio singled out Rios Monday night at the Stonewall Inn vigil in Manhattan. ”We lost a good young man from Brooklyn. A caring and loving young man, he was already serving others. He was attending nursing school while working with our senior citizens as a social worker. This is the kind of good human being we lost in Orlando, someone with a life ahead, making this world a better place,” said de Blasio. Miguel Angel Honorato, 30  Miguel Honorato was married with three children. The family lived in the Orlando suburb of Apopka, Fla. and according to Facebook he and his brother, Jose Honorato, worked together at FajitaMex Mexican Catering. Jose Honorato tells the Orlando Sentinel that his brother had gone to Pulse nightclub with three friends, and that all three of them had made it home safe. Javier   40, Known to his friends as ”Javi” Javier   was originally from Puerto Rico. Jose Diaz, a friend of the victim, tells the Orlando Sentinel that   was a salesman at a Gucci store at a mall in Orlando, and that his outgoing personality made   good at his job. ”He was always positive,” Diaz tells the Sentinel. ”He was very humble. He was a lovely friend.” Jason Benjamin Josaphat, 19, Josaphat, still in his teens, is the   identified victim in the Pulse shooting. ”Like many    Jason Benjamin Josaphat had many interests and was just starting to chart his path in life, according to his family  —   he was computer savvy, loved to work out and had an interest in photography,” the Orlando Sentinel wrote. The Orlando native had recently graduated from high school and started college classes, Josephat’s uncle Christopher Long told the newspaper. ”He was always helpful, always willing to help someone in need,” Josephat’s aunt Josette Desile said. Josephat called his mother from the club after the shooting began, and stayed on the line with her as she called 911. ”She said she heard the shots getting closer,” Desile said. Cory James Connell, 21, Connell, a student at Valencia Community College, hoped to become a firefighter, his father James told CNN. Connell was at Pulse with his girlfriend, who was shot in the attack, but survived. ”Cory’s a good guy,” James Connell told CNN after the attack, before the family had learned of his fate. ”He loves everybody.” On Facebook, Cory Connell’s brother Ryan called him ”the superhero of our family.” ”God just got the best of angels,” he wrote. Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, 37, Luis Daniel Conde, 39, Partners Conde and Velazquez were together at Pulse when they were shot. ”Se fueron juntos como la pareja que son,” Facebook user Pipo Pere wrote  —   meaning ”they left together like the couple that they are.” Another Facebook user, Tulio Lopez, recalled them as ”two extraordinary human beings.” Conde and Velazquez owned a salon and spa together, the Tampa Bay Times reports, and had been business partners for a decade. ”They were both exceptional people,” Conde’s sister Lynette Conde told the paper. ”They were always helping each other.” Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, 24, Jonathan Camuy worked on the show La Voz Kids, produced in Orlando for Telemundo, NBC Miami reports. He was a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, according to president Mekahlo Medina. He’d joined the journalism association as a student in Puerto Rico before moving to Florida. Christopher Andrew Leinonen, 32, Christine Leinonen drove to Pulse at 4 a. m. after she heard there was a shooting, The Associated Press reports. Her son, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, had been at the club  —   and after the attack, his friends had posted online that they didn’t know where he was. She stood on the street, sobbing, begging for word of her son. ”These are nonsensical killings of our children,” she said. ”They’re killing our babies!” Christine’s emotional appeal for news of her son aired on TVs around the nation. She said she was proud of Christopher, she told ABC News, saying he won a humanitarian award for founding the   alliance at his high school. She begged for the world to ”try to get rid of the hatred and the violence, please!” On Monday the confirmation came: Leinonen died in the shooting. Nightclub photographer Melody Maia Monet shared a photo on Instagram of Leinonen and his boyfriend, Juan Ramon Guerrero, who also died in the attack. She took the photo at a different nightclub on Friday, just one day before the shooting. ”I am haunted that I may have taken the last photo of them together,” she wrote. ”They were so beautiful.” Frank Hernandez, 27, His family called him Frankie. Frank Hernandez was at Pulse nightclub in Orlando with his boyfriend when the shooting began. According to the Miami Herald, by the time Hernandez’s teenage sister, Julissa Leal, made the   drive to Orlando from their childhood home in Louisiana, Hernandez was dead. ”I don’t want to say it, I don’t even want to believe it,” Leal writes on Facebook. ”I don’t understand why he had to be one of the many victims who didn’t make it. Why did it have to be him of all people. They took my big brother away from me, they took him away from us.”  Shane Evan Tomlinson, 33, Tomlinson was a lead singer in a cover band called Frequency. Earlier Sunday night, the Orlando Sentinel reports, he was singing at another nightclub, the Blue Martini. He was ”a vibrant and charismatic lead vocalist,” the paper writes. ”Orlando will miss his voice,” friend Jai Saint told People. ”The world will miss his voice.” Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, 49, McCool, a mother of 11 and grandmother of six, loved dancing the salsa and had gone to Pulse with her son Isaiah Henderson, 21. A Brooklyn native, McCool had moved to Orlando from California, according to the New York Daily News. ”A cancer survivor. A stellar mother. A proud and fierce advocate for her LGBT family. .. [She] tore up the dance floor when salsa or anything was playing,” actor Wilson Cruz, a relative, wrote on Facebook. McCool had become a beloved figure at the Pulse nightclub. ”She’s like the mom of Pulse,”   Carlos Rosario told a local news program. ”She supported us and was there with us the whole time.” At 12:04 a. m. Sunday morning, McCool posted a video from Pulse on Facebook  —   music blaring, colored lights flashing, couples dancing. Two hours later, she was still dancing when Omar Mateen began shooting. ”Brenda saw him point the gun,”    Ada Pressley told the Daily News. ”She said, ’Get down,’ to Isaiah and she got in front of him.” Two bullets struck McCool, and her son escaped with his life. ”She was shot dead,” Pressley told the paper. ”That’s how much she loved her kids. If it weren’t for her, he’d have been shot.” Angel L.   28, Angel   had been a Zumba instructor in Chicago until a few months ago, when he moved to Orlando. According to his employer, he was scheduled to start a new job in his new city on June 20th, working as an ophthalmic technician at the Florida Retina Institute.   was originally from Puerto Rico. His aunt, Leticia Padro, tells Univision that her nephew was ”very humble, respectful, [and] studious.” She says the family is making arrangements to transport his body back to Guanica, Puerto Rico for burial. Geraldo A.   25, He went by Drake. Ortiz was an actor, a dancer, and a proud Dominican, who was raised in the US and lived in Puerto Rico. He had studied law, according to his Facebook profile, at Universidad del Este in Carolina, Puerto Rico. After his death was confirmed on Monday, messages poured in over social media. ”God, my brother,” wrote one friend, Gregory Fabian, on Facebook. ”This isn’t fair.” Akyra Monet Murray, 18, Akyra Murray graduated with honors from West Catholic Preparatory High School in Philadelphia last week. Murray and her family were on vacation in Orlando to celebrate her graduation and visit Murray’s brother. ”Akyra was a respectful and   young woman who served as a natural leader to her teammate,” her basketball coach, Beulah Osueke, writes in a statement on the school’s website. ”Losing Akyra is heartbreaking.” Akyra Murray’s mother, Natalie Murray, tells NPR that Akyra called her parents just after 2 a. m. on Sunday. ”She called to tell us she had been shot, and at this point she’s frantic. She’s screaming, she’s crying, she’s [saying] ’Mommy please help me, I’m bleeding so bad. Please call the cops. Please help me, Mommy, please. ’”    Murray died of a gunshot wound to the arm, which severed a major artery. Murray had planned to attend Mercyhurst North East, part of Mercyhurst University in Erie, P. A. on a full basketball scholarship. Paul Terrell Henry, 41, Henry, a Chicago native, loved to dance and was great at pool, his boyfriend tells the Orlando Sentinel. Henry had ”such a loving spirit,” Francisco Hernandez told the paper. ”He wanted the best for me, to succeed and to help me make something of myself. I am definitely going to do that for him.” Facebook user Stephanie Gross, who said she used to work with Henry, posted in a remembrance that he was encouraging and ”always smiling.” ”I remember him for his infectious boisterous personality, pink Polo shirt, and huge belt buckles,” she wrote. Henry had two children, and his daughter had recently graduated from high school, The Orlando Sentinel wrote. Antonio Davon Brown, 29, Brown was a captain in the Army Reserves. The Army Times reports he was in the ROTC program at Florida AM University, where he earned a degree in criminal justice in 2008. Brown was deployed to Kuwait from April 2010 to March 2011, the Orlando Sentinel reports, citing U. S. Army Media Relations. Jane Brookshire worked for the 1st Infantry Division Sustainment Brigade at Fort Riley while Brown was serving there, before he left active duty and joined the Reserves. ”He was the one person who used to come to my office every day and make sure that I was having a good day,” she tells NPR. ”We would just sit there and talk and laugh,” she said. ”He was an amazing officer, friend and an absolute joy to be around,” she wrote. Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24, Sanfeliz lived in Tampa and worked as a personal banker at JP Morgan Chase, the Tampa Bay Times reports. A high school teacher of his told the Times Sanfeliz was ”the most positive guy I’ve ever known.” His family immigrated from Cuba in the ’60s and were very   the paper writes. ”My little brother and the most important person in my life has passed away,” Junior SanFeliz posted on Facebook. ”He was so strong, and was my rock through everything we ever went through. He was the light of my family.” Alejandro Barrios Martinez, 21, Barrios Martinez had immigrated from Cuba to Florida in 2014, according to   news site Café Fuerte. His cousin, journalist Alvaro Alvarez, told Café Fuerte in Spanish that the   family was living in ”rage and anguish.” Alvarez lives in Chile, while Barrios Martinez’s father lives in Orlando and his mother lives in Cuba. Alvarez denounced the attack on the club and defended the right of his cousin and others at the club to ”live without apology.” Rodolfo   33, An employee since 2011 of Florida’s OneBlood blood donation center, Ayala ”had recently been promoted to supervisor of a team coordinating platelet products for patients,” according to People magazine. OneBlood saw many donors in the wake of the attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. ”I can tell you that Rodolfo Ayala was a dedicated person who took pride in the fact that every day he had a chance to help save lives,” OneBlood supervisor Thomas Webster wrote on Facebook. Originally from San German, Puerto Rico, Ayala helped support relatives back home. ”He was a lab technician who moved to Orlando from Puerto Rico in pursuit of happiness,” wrote Yecenia Caban Jimenez, who knew him in high school. Coworkers remember Ayala as a loving and compassionate person, an avid dancer and a great fan of Ricky Martin. ”He was very proud of being a gay man in the community,” Adam Colon told People. ”No one could tell him different.” Tevin Eugene Crosby, 25, Tevin Crosby, originally from Statesville, N. C. owned a marketing firm, Total Entrepreneurs Concepts. He graduated from West Iredell High School in Statesville, and studied business at Strayer University South in Charlotte, N. C. His high school English teacher, Jacqueline Scott, tells the Charlotte Observer that, when he graduated, the staff voted Crosby one of its ”unsung heroes,” for his perseverance. ”I want people to know the laughter and the joy he spread,” she says. Crosby’s brother, Chavis, tells the Orlando Sentinel that Tevin was a great businessman. ”He was very ambitious,” Chavis says. ”Whatever goal he had in mind, he worked hard.” Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, 24, Solivan, who was known as Mary, is survived by her husband and two young boys. She went to Pulse Saturday night with a group including    William Sabad Borges, who was shot twice and survived, and friend Jonathan Camuy, who did not. ”We went there for a night of fun and instead she paid with her life,” sister Natalia Canlan wrote on a GoFundMe page set up for funeral expenses. ”Her smile lit up the room and her laughter brought a smile to your heart!” Borges wrote on Facebook that Camuy had died ”like a hero” while trying to protect Solivan. ”Jonathan’s body was found protecting my  ” he wrote. Borges told CNN that Solivan had favored going to Pulse: ”Let’s go to a gay club,” she told him, ”because they’re killing at the other clubs.” Joel Rayon Paniagua, 32, Paniagua was humble, cheerful and religious, friends and family told The Orlando Sentinel  —   and he loved to dance. ”He was loyal. He was always trying to do stuff to make you feel better,” said his friend Lorena Barragan, who met him in church. Paniagua was originally from Veracruz, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reports. Before news of Paniagua’s death had been announced, his cousin Jose Luis Paniagua spoke to Newsday as he waited for word to send to the rest of the family in Florida and in Mexico. He said they’d never expected something like his  —   not in America. ”We came here for a better life,” he told Newsday. ”We came because here in the United States there are many opportunities . .. and because we were fleeing, because in our country there was a lot of crime, violence and death . .. and we expect it should be more peaceful here.” Juan   25, Juan Chavez Martinez was remembered by a hotel housekeeper he supervised as ”kind and loving,” the Orlando Sentinel reports. ”There was nobody else like him,” Jose Crisantos told the paper. Martinez, who was from the central Mexican state of Hidalgo, was the youngest of six children, Mexican newspaper El Universal reports. ”He was the best brother,” his sister Fidela told El Universal in Spanish. ”He was always cheerful, and he was the one who supported my parents.” ”My heart is still breaking,” friend Tomas Martinez told the Orlando Sentinel. ”He had a lot of friends.” Jerald Arthur Wright, 31, His friends and coworkers knew Jerry Wright as a quiet, kind, and hardworking part of the ”Disney Family,” as many employees at Walt Disney World call the team there. Wright worked in the Emporium Shop at the Orlando theme park. A former coworker, Scott Dickison, tells the Orlando Sentinel that Wright that, ”Jerry was a great guy to work with. He was quiet but really wonderful with all the guests. He always had a smile on his face.” Leroy Valentin Fernandez, 25, Roy Fernandez loved to sing and loved to dance. He described himself on Instagram as a dancer, stylist, and fashion enthusiast, and he frequently shared photos and videos featuring his own designs and choreography. Fernandez is originally from Ponce, Puerto Rico. A friend and manager at the apartment complex in Orlando where Fernandez worked as a leasing agent, Yolanda   tells the Orlando Sentinel that he filled the office with music. ”He sang Adele in the office until we couldn’t take it anymore. It just feels very quiet now.” Jean C. Nieves Rodriguez, 27, ”Just like a big teddy bear,” is how Orlando resident Ivonne Irizarry described her friend to the Orlando Sentinel. ”Whatever you needed, you could count on him.” Originally from Puerto Rico, Nieves Rodriguez loved the beach and cars. He attended Orlando’s Oak Ridge High and was general manager of a   service, according to the paper. ”He wanted to be the best at what he did, and he would work very hard to achieve that,” Irizarry said. ”Love by many Left behind with a broken heart his Mom and Sister and a family,” says a GoFundMe page set up to help cover funeral expenses. ”WE LOVE YOU JEAN. Fly high baby.” Editor’s note: We’ve updated the text to reflect that the Orlando attack represents the deadliest mass shooting in modern U. S. history, rather than in all of U. S. history. You can read more about our thinking here."
452,"Sweet potatoes are undergoing a modern renaissance in this country. While they have always made special appearances on many American tables around the holidays,   demand for the root vegetables has grown. In 2015, farmers produced more sweet potatoes than in any year since World War II. War Effort, ”A lot of things were hard to get during World War II, and potatoes were easier to raise than some of the other vegetables,” my grandmother Joyce Heise tells me. She grew up outside of Philadelphia. Her grandfather farmed potatoes, and their orange sister tubers, sweet potatoes. ”And then some things were rationed so you had to do with what the best you could,” she says. Regular potatoes and sweet potatoes were a staple in American victory gardens and on dining tables. Why? They were cheap and really easy to grow. Back then, we didn’t have sweets like we do now. So sweet potatoes satisfied that sweet tooth at a discount for Americans strapped for sugar and cash. By the end of the war, U. S. farmers were growing more than 3 billion pounds of sweet potatoes. But when soldiers returned home, people went back to work and the economy hummed. ”It became cheaper to buy russet potatoes than, you know, to grow your own sweet potatoes,” April McGreger says. She grew up on a sweet potato farm in Mississippi and wrote about the history of the root vegetable in her book Sweet Potatoes. ”At around the same time, we really had this sort of movement away from small farming families in the U. S. into working people in more industrialized jobs,” she says. ”That means people purchasing more of their food instead of growing it.” Industrialization of farming and the rise of processed foods left sweet potatoes in the dust. U. S. production dropped by a billion pounds within two years after the war and it bottomed out in 1980, with less than 1 billion pounds total, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Fad diets and trendy restaurants,   to the 2000s when the sweet potato began its ascension. One big reason: the fad diet. For anyone on the South Beach Diet, Paleo diet or Atkins diet, the hearty sweet potato was a godsend. Even TV personalities like Dr. Oz highlighted the magic of the vegetable. ”All these diets that have tons and tons of followers are really touting sweet potatoes as being this ’super food,’” McGreger says. As Americans were encouraged to cut sugar intake and eat more fiber and antioxidants, the sweet potato  —   chock full of vitamins  —   began to show up on plates again. With a long growing tradition and a climate suitable for cultivation, sweet potatoes are local to just about every farmer in the U. S. That makes them ripe for diners that care about eating local. Schools started serving them for breakfast and lunch. Top chefs incorporated them as a quintessential Southern food. ”Sweet potatoes are the darling of this local,    eating movement,” McGreger says. ”They’re a local ingredient that can be accessed 12 months out of the year.” Decline Of Tobacco, Global Demand, In 2000, Americans ate about 4 pounds of sweet potatoes per person. Today, it’s nearly double that, at 7. 5 pounds per person. McGreger says farmers noticed  —   especially tobacco farmers. ”Right now, the largest producer of sweet potatoes is North Carolina,” she says. ”Those are tobacco farmers that have switched to sweet potatoes because it’s a relatively good cash crop to replace tobacco.” Outside the country, global demand increased as well. ”In the last 10 years there has been a tremendous increase percentage wise of sweet potato exports,” says David Trinklein, an associate professor of plant sciences at the University of Missouri. ”A lot of them going to Europe.” Trinklein says the majority is going to Northern Europe and Great Britain where it’s too cool to grow sweet potatoes. Today, U. S. sweet potato farmers export about 11 percent of the total supply. Hungry Europeans, hungry Americans,   eaters, local foodies. Add up all of these factors, and U. S. farmers produced 3. 1 billion pounds of sweet potatoes in 2015. And it may not stop there. ”I think if they can develop new ways to market it, to eat it,” Trinklein says, ”there very well could be an increase.” This story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration focused on food and agriculture. "
453,"The U. S. Department of Education has withdrawn a proposal that could have fundamentally changed the flow of federal dollars to schools that serve   students. ”The law is clear that it is unacceptable to systematically underfund   schools and fill the hole with federal resources,” explained Dorie Turner Nolt, a spokeswoman for the education department. ”While we worked tirelessly to put forward a regulation that implements that simple requirement and to incorporate the extensive feedback we received, we ultimately did not have time to publish a strong final regulation that lives up to the promise of the law.” This brings to an end a long and bitter fight between the Education Department, led by Secretary John B. King, Jr. and Sen. Lamar Alexander,   himself a former education secretary and current chairman of the Senate committee that handles education. ”This is an intolerable situation,” Alexander said of the Department’s   ”  ” proposal back in May, in a heated speech on the Senate floor. ”If the regulations are not consistent with the law, I don’t believe [states] should follow them,” he said. ”If the department persists, then the state should go to court to sue the department.” Why was Alexander so angry? The easy answer: Title I. That’s the $15 billion the federal government sends to districts to help schools that serve lots of   students. Alexander and King disagreed on how to enforce the new law governing Title I. It says that, to get federal money, districts have to prove a few things  —   among them, that they’re using state and local dollars to provide roughly the same services to kids in poor and   schools alike. ”Basically, schools within a school district have to be similar,” Liz King said in a May interview. She’s director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. ”The idea here is that if they’re not similar, then these federal dollars are just going to fill in gaps.”  Everyone agrees that Title I dollars are not supposed to  . They’re meant to be extra  —   the technical term is ”supplemental”  —   for   kids who need them most. What the sides don’t agree on is how districts prove they’re not just filling gaps and that state and local resources are being spread fairly. The current system is not fair, King insisted at the time. ”What we see, as we look around the country, is districts where they’re actually spending significantly more in their   I schools than they’re spending in their Title I schools.” The Teacher Salary Gap, Nora Gordon, of Georgetown University, studies Title I and, when interviewed back in May, said much of that spending gap between poor and   schools comes from teacher salaries. ”  schools typically have more teacher turnover,” Gordon said. ”That means they have more novice teachers.” And novice teachers cost less. That matters because, believe it or not, most school budgets are based on staff positions instead of actual teacher salaries. To comply with the law, according to Sen. Alexander, districts have to show that all schools are getting their fair share of jobs, not dollars. As a result, schools may have similar   ratios, but   I schools often end up getting and spending more local and state money to pay for their more experienced teacher corps. The Education Department had hoped to change that. It proposed a way to require that districts prove their actual spending per student in poorer schools is equal to, or greater than, the average spent in   schools. But Alexander wasn’t having it. He insisted that Congress had debated whether to address this   spending gap and chose not to. To him, the law was clear: ”You’ve got to be spending a comparable amount of money in schools that get the [Title I] money and schools that don’t  —   except teacher salaries may not be included in that computation. That is in the law.” A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service appeared to back Alexander, finding that ”a legal argument could be raised that ED exceeded its statutory authority.” In response to the news that King had dropped the regulations, Alexander released this statement: ”I am glad the Education Department has listened to Congress and has chosen not to move forward with its proposed ’  ’ regulation. This proposal would have dictated from Washington how states and school districts should spend nearly all state and local tax dollars on schools in order to receive federal Title I dollars  —   which are only about 3 percent of total national spending on   schools. A regulation like this is not authorized by law in fact, it is specifically prohibited by law.” Unintended Consequences, The Education Department’s plan didn’t just bother Republicans. It worried Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. ”We don’t want to hurt one school to help another school. We have to help all schools,” Weingarten said when we spoke in May. Her concern was that, unless districts and states find new money for their poorer schools (and our School Money series showed how rare that is) their   schools would  —   under the Education Department’s proposal  —   have to make cuts. That could mean losing valuable programs or even transferring some of those more experienced (and expensive) teachers. ”And if you know other kids are gonna get hurt by this, why would you do it?” Weingarten asked. In this way, the Title I fight pitted pragmatism against principle. On one side were Weingarten and many of the nation’s school leaders, who said this attempt to level the playing field was   but would come at too high a cost to other kids and schools. In the opposite corner were the Education Department and advocates who argued: This was about protecting students’ civil rights. ”When is it ever OK to spend less money on the education of poor children than we spend on the education of   children?” Liz King asked. It’s a simple question. The answer is anything but."
454,"The Obama administration has dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all federally funded scientists to get permission from patients before using their cells, blood, tissue or DNA for research. The proposal was eliminated from the final revision of the Common Rule, which was published in the Federal Register Wednesday. The rule is a complex set of regulations designed to make sure federally funded research on human subjects is conducted ethically. The revision to the regulations, set to go into effect in 2018, marks the first time the rule has been updated in 26 years. The initial proposal that researchers be required to get permission before using a patient’s tissue sample for research came out of the desire to avoid repeating what happened to Henrietta Lacks, an American who died of cervical cancer in 1951. Some of the cells from Lacks’ cancer were kept alive for decades, used in research and for commercial purposes without her consent or her family’s knowledge. But scientists have argued that the mandate for consent in the initial Obama proposal was unnecessary and would hinder crucial research. ”That proposal received a lot of criticism,” says Dr. Jerry Menikoff, who heads the Health and Human Services Office of Human Research Protections, which announced the final decision. ”There was concern,” he says, ”that by implementing this new rule it would be harmful to the research enterprise, because it would make it harder to do research that is very, very useful.” The final decision was welcomed by scientists and universities. ”We are very pleased,” said Mary Sue Coleman, a biochemist and president of the Association of American Universities. ”It would have been an unworkable system. Every time you have to get consent, it adds costs and complexity to the system that would have affected millions of samples  —   and, we think, would have limited research.” Still, the decision to drop the requirement raised concern among others. ”We know that trust is a critical factor in folks participating in research,” says Debra Mathews, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University. ”And we’ve seen in recent years the impact of when that trust is breached. In order for the public to trust the scientific community, the scientific community has to demonstrate that it’s trustworthy. And a big part of that is asking permission.” Rebecca Skloot, a journalist and author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a popular 2010 book on Lacks, says the many readers she’s talked to over the years were taken aback by what happened to Lacks and her family. ”One of the most commonly asked questions,” Skloot says, ”is, ’this couldn’t happen today, right? They couldn’t just take cells from people without their knowledge and use it in research?’ My answer to that question is, ’Yes, this happens all the time.’ And people are always shocked by this.” ”Research has been changing in the way it takes place over the last quarter century,” Menikoff says. ”The type of research we do is different.” Big,   studies are much more common now, he says, and that calls for standardizing techniques and practices. ”The notion was: ’Let’s change the way we protect research subjects to fit with the type of research we do now.’ ” Most of the changes included in the revision were welcomed by scientists, including one that would require studies conducted at multiple locations to be overseen by a single, central ethics committee (with certain exceptions). Until now, it’s been common for each location to have a separate oversight panel. ”The bottom line,” Menikoff says, ”is the trial has to be conducted the same way across all those sites to be scientifically valid. Therefore, the ethical analysis of the study should be consistent across all the sites  —   it doesn’t make sense to have a separate ethical analysis at each site.” But that change raised concerns among some. ”The concern is that there may be inadequate protection for the subjects of the research at a particular site,” says Dr. Michael Carome, who heads Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a consumer watchdog group. He and others argue there could be important cultural differences and other factors that vary among research subjects from site to site that require local oversight. ”They might have unique vulnerabilities in terms of their education level,” Carome says. ”Or they might be    subjects. And if there is only an English version of the informed consent form, that could lead to the subject at a particular institution not fully understanding the risks and the benefits.” The growing use of blood and cells to do genetic research also raises the possibility that the identity of the donors of those samples of blood and cells could be revealed inadvertently. The new rules will be phased in over the next several years."
455,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Rock ’n’ roll so often boils down to simple pursuits: the search for love, sex, escape, revenge, satisfaction, or some signifier of freedom and home. But for Brian King and David Prowse of Japandroids, that central pursuit is often majesty itself. Listen to the Vancouver duo’s 2012 masterpiece Celebration Rock  —   one of the most appropriately titled albums of all time  —   and you’ll hear song after song fixated on a   intention to feel more, stay raw, let rip, and ”yell like hell to the heavens.” A natural resistance to aging and decline provides plenty of subtext, but really, the band specializes in anthems about the power and the glory of simply feeling alive. Japandroids’ new album is titled Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, so those themes remain in full effect from the opening drum fills of the title track. But the themes here are a bit more expansive: Released four and a half years after Celebration Rock, these eight songs are clearly the product of reflection, upheaval and the   that so often comes with travel and time off. The concept of home springs up repeatedly in Near To The Wild Heart Of Life’s first two songs, as the title track details a need to leave (”And it got me all fired up   to go far away”) and ”North East West South” paints a lovingly patriotic,   picture of Canada and its gravitational pull. Elsewhere on Near To The Wild Heart Of Life, King and Prowse let their sound meander a bit more than usual, as ”Arc Of Bar” sprawls out for seven and a half minutes, while the   ”True Love And A Free Life Of Free Will” weighs the imagined majesty of the unknown against the   comfort of contentment. If Celebration Rock was two guys’ way of romanticizing the messiness of a dramatic past  —   real and rediscovered  —   then Near To The Wild Heart Of Life is its natural sequel,   youth as a passageway to a new and better place."
456,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Allison Crutchfield is used to leaving things behind. She and her twin sister Katie have been on the road for more than a decade now, first as p. s. eliot, then as Bad Banana. Later, Allison formed the     Swearin’ which would often tour alongside Katie’s established solo project Waxahatchee. Fleeting glimpses of cities,   house venues: These are givens to the naturally rootless DIY crowd for whom touring is a way of life, rather than a break from it. But when Allison’s relationship with one of her Swearin’ bandmates ended, the group went with it, along with a sense of certainty as she passed the midpoint of her 20s. ”I keep confusing love and nostalgia,” she sings in ”I Don’t Ever Wanna Leave California,” a standout track from her solo debut, Tourist In This Town. What’s worth holding on to from a dead relationship? What part of you dies with it  —   particularly when the relationship in question provided a rare constant in an itinerant life? These are the questions Crutchfield, who recently turned 28, attempts to answer on Tourist. She’s a liberated wanderer, dispatching vignettes from faraway cities, though the memories of her relationship snare her back in. ”I can’t enjoy Paris ’cause I can’t get away from you,” she sings in ”Sightseeing.” Back in her hometown of Philadelphia, in the close quarters of a shared group house, she has no space to call her own. ”We sleep in the same bed at opposite times,” she sings in ”Charlie.” In ”Dean’s Room,” she mainlines the euphoria of ”Just Like Heaven” and ”Dancing In The Dark” to celebrate a precarious moment of privacy: ”I dance around in Dean’s room while I have it to myself   But I feel like you’re always watching me.” Punk living arrangements may mean that Crutchfield has no physical space to call her own, but she carves out her own bold lane on Tourist, far from the scrappy   of her formative bands. Opener ”Broad Daylight” is so startling, you might check to see if you hit play on the right record. Singing a cappella, Crutchfield unleashes a regal trill that evokes Neko Case singing gospel, her voice as pure and strong as sunlight beaming through a   window. Her songwriting talents have long been assured here, she establishes herself as a gifted singer. Crutchfield often unleashes warm sighs that wash anxious songs with relief, but she also uses her voice to jarring effect. In ”Charlie,” she recounts how her ex would yell in her face and bite her neck ”’cause you like the way I feel in your teeth” with disquieting sweetness. ”Mile Away” is a brutal    —   ”You were spared rejection and it’s a dangerous thing   Now you wake up confident every single day”  —   where every seethed ”you” hits like a squarely aimed punch. (Here’s hoping Crutchfield one day puts her vivid Southern twang to use in a country record.) Crutchfield’s golden voice balances out the record’s darkly sparkling textures. She recorded with Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, Mary Lattimore) and employed his full arsenal of obscure synthesizers while helping to bring a newfound sense of space to her naturally hooky instincts. ”Broad Daylight” has the bolshie energy of kids bouncing off the walls the middle of the record smooths out into gleaming   while anxious, flinty percussion runs away with the end of the album, which coincides with her tentative  . ”Even after a disaster, some things remain intact,” she realizes amid the     pop of ”Expatriate.” ”And I am worried, yeah, I still worry all the time   The things you used to hate about me are all heightened now   But I love myself, or I’m figuring out how.” In spite of Crutchfield’s admission that she’s constantly mistaking love and nostalgia, Tourist In This Town is sharp, unsparing and never actually sentimental. ”The waiter keeps interrupting you to keep the water glasses full,” she sings in ”Broad Daylight,” in a breakup scene where optimism is in short supply. She seems aghast in that song when her ex suggests she should ”go out and kill some memories,” but in ”. ..California,” she lines empty beer cans up ”as headstones” when she hears he’s gotten back together with an old flame. Rather than wallow, since there are hardly any good memories here to wallow in, she picks over the motives of her younger self: ”Was this based in love or was it based in admiration?   Was it mutual respect or was it the mutual frustration?” Wanderers can’t hold onto unnecessary dead weight  —   ”More than anything, I just wish I didn’t care,” Crutchfield sings in ”Chopsticks On Pots And Pans”  —   but try as she might, there’s no shucking this off just yet."
457,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Amid social and political upheaval, it’s only natural to seek out interpreters who use screams, brush strokes and dance to articulate the intangible. It’s only natural that art responds in kind to its environment and the hostilities it faces. It’s only natural, if flippant and ignorant and unfair, to think that punk only thrives under such circumstances, as if musicians prefer oppression to freedom. But if punk’s natural form is protest, if punk’s rudimentary form is accessible to even the most musically deficient, if punk is the guardian at the gates yelling for truth and justice, then punk is never complacent. If any band has understood this in recent years, it’s Priests  —   born and bred in Washington, D. C. operating under the notion that nothing about American systems or society is natural. Nothing Feels Natural, the band’s first proper album after a couple of tapes, a 7” single and 2014’s Bodies And Control And Money And Power EP, isn’t a direct response to the state of the nation so much as a state of mind. For Priests, the personal has always been political the band recognizes that the self is fluid, and that how we interact with each other is just as vital as how we confront the world. That’s why Nothing Feels Natural, in 10 tracks that embody the spirit of punk  —   while fully embracing the RB, pop and experimental layers that course through the band’s discography  —   presents itself as a broken and abstract view of what it means to live in a broken and abstract society. With a spindly riff doubled down by guitarist G. L. Jaguar and bassist Taylor Mulitz, not to mention Daniele Daniele’s crisp and powerful drums, Katie Alice Greer sings, ”It’s a long movie, a long movie, and you are not you   You are not you,” in ”Appropriate.” It’s a bruising opener that injects space and chaos into Priests’ work  —   particularly in the song’s back half, a doomy Diamanda Galas slice of   skronk played by D. C. jazz musician Luke Stewart. The band is quick to pivot from the loud to the surreal with ”JJ,” a deranged   number that seems transmitted from an alien  . Perry Fustero bangs on an    piano, pulling Priests in and out of rhythmic orbit as Greer makes sense of a fractured relationship in cutaway lines, closing with the damning yet freeing, ”Whoever deserves anything anyway?   What a stupid concept.” This is an important conceit of Priests, and almost as important is the jagged line that gets the band there. Everything the group does feels like part of a concerted effort to deconstruct the binaries of civilization  —          —   and undercut the entitled structures that uphold them. Later on, ”Pink White House”   the binary of the American dream in some of Jaguar’s most scathing guitar work, but the fact that Greer   her way to this conclusion by way of an everyday relationship is by design: The   doesn’t exist. In a record that sees the band significantly step up its musicianship and experiments with songwriting  —   don’t miss the polyrhythmic ESG   of ”Suck”  —   Nothing Feels Natural’s finest moments are the unquiet ones. Guest musician Janel Leppin provides   guitar moans over a frantic rhythm section to set the mood of ”Leila 20” before G. L. Jaguar rips the feedback from a black hole. In that moment, it feels like several songs crashing in on themselves as the band settles into a dark   nightmare. The title track feels timeless  —   a mourning dream that floats like The Cure’s most tender moments. Greer, with a voice that’s evolved from a scream to a nuanced and soulful presence, gives a stirring, vulnerable performance that captures what it’s like to be lost and feel lost. Priests wrote ”Nothing Feels Natural” in the wake of an album that was originally recorded and scrapped in Olympia, Wash. the result captures the frustration of being stuck, not only as a band but as people. ”If I walk a hundred days   Does it mean I get to say you can’t talk to me that way,” Greer sings listlessly. But as she repeats ”that way” amid moody bass, heavily reverbed chords and Daniele’s drums, she begins to shout, regaining power, if only enough to continue: ”This is when I’d give a god a name   But to people in sanctuaries   All I can say is you will not be saved.” Nothing Feels Natural recognizes just that: an unsettled state of mind, and of society. In weeks and years to come, it will be tempting to historically pin the record to the election of a president who stands in direct opposition to the values of the band and many who surround it. Priests’ members were, are and will be vocal, organizing benefits and engaging in meaningful conversation with their fans and opponents. But Nothing Feels Natural moves beyond the trappings of an album that speaks to a specific time: It wants to keep speaking with us."
458,"A   career at Boeing comes to a close in April for engineer Dave Baine of suburban Seattle. Baine was already prepared to retire when Boeing sealed the deal by making him a buyout offer last week. ”It’s better than a gold watch,” he says. The deal is six months’ pay in a lump sum and extended health insurance. ”It’ll help the younger folks that want to stick around and help some of the older folks exit quickly and quietly,” he says. Boeing, the country’s single largest exporter and one of the corporate sponsors of Friday’s inauguration, enters the Donald Trump era with plans for buyouts and layoffs. This comes on top of nearly 11, 000 job cuts across the company last year, according to a union tally. The company’s PR department declined to say whether there’s a specific target number for job cuts this year. Most of the trims are coming from the commercial jetliner workforce in western Washington state. Boeing has a lot of planes on order, but new jet sales are slowing. Plus, Canada, Brazil and China are getting in the game, making for increased competition and pricing pressure. ”We’re not seeing any evidence of a serious downturn, but there’s just a lot more risk of a downturn materializing,” says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group. Aboulafia says Boeing is a prime example of the kind of major manufacturing company that will be in the spotlight under President Trump. He says the incoming administration creates additional risks as well as opportunities. ”Obviously anything that caused any kind of trade ruckus, particularly with China, that would be very bad news,” Aboulafia says. On the other side of the ledger, the prospect of higher military spending could help major defense contractors like Boeing. New fighter jets and a multibillion dollar contract to replace the aging Air Force One jumbo jets spurred a second    meeting between Trump and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who said he left Trump Tower Tuesday feeling ”very encouraged.” ”We’re all on the same page here. Our objective is to provide the best capability for our country most affordably. We want to generate jobs in the U. S.,” Muilenburg said. Trump did not speak with reporters after Tuesday’s meeting. But the   was pretty candid about his strategy of pressing for cost concessions. ”It’s a dance,” is how Trump put it after a Twitter jab and an initial meeting with the Boeing chief right before Christmas."
459,"It took years of heated debate, but the federal government has finally decided just how much living space an organic chicken should have. It’s part of a new set of rules that cover many aspects of animal welfare in the organic food industry. But the biggest impact of the rule will be felt in the organic egg industry. Organic egg producers always were required to let their hens go outside. But the organic rules didn’t define exactly how much space the animals needed. So some organic egg producers built large chicken houses, containing tens of thousands of hens, while allowing those hens access only to a small enclosed porch, rather than pasture. Organic activists, such as the Cornucopia Institute, have accused those   organic egg producers of violating the spirit of the organic rules, and called on the USDA to crack down on them. According to the new rules, farmers must provide at least one square foot of outdoor space for each 2. 25 pounds of poultry in their flock. According to Jesse Laflamme, CEO of Pete and Gerry’s Organic Eggs, that translates to about two square feet per   hen, or about an acre for a flock of 20, 000. Elanor Starmer, who’s in charge of the USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Service Administrator, which runs the National Organic Program, said in a telephone call with reporters that ””this rule will level the playing field and provide clarity to the industry.” Laflamme, who also participated in the call, said that the rule also will help   farmers survive in the industry. ”This is an issue of concentrated organic production versus distributed organic production,” he said. According to a survey of organic egg producers that the USDA cited in its rule, about a quarter of all organic egg production currently comes from farms that don’t meet the new standard. But the USDA is allowing them a lengthy transition period to adapt. According to the new rule they’ll have up to five years to change their operations, building new houses or creating more pasture for their hens, if they want to keep selling certified organic eggs. The Organic Trade Association, which represents many of the largest organic food companies, praised the new rule, calling it ”not only welcome but essential” in order to strengthen consumer confidence in the organic label. But the rule also met some harsh criticism. The Cornucopia Institute, in a statement, called the rule ”(way) too little and (way) too late.” According to Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s senior farm policy analyst, two square feet per hen is ”woefully inadequate” and is far less than organically raised hens in Europe get. On the other side of the debate, the National Pork Producers Council condemned the new rule as an ”unnecessary, unscientific midnight regulation.” Dave Warner, a spokesman for the pork producers, wrote in an email to The Salt that the new rule doesn’t affect many pork producers directly, because little pork is raised organically, but”we oppose the rule on principle and because it sets a bad precedent.” According to the NPPC, the National Organic Program has no authority to issue animal welfare regulations, because animal welfare is outside the scope of the law that established the organic program in the first place. In a statement, NPPC president John Weber said that ”this is precisely the type of executive branch overreach that Congress will reign in through regulatory reform.”"
460,"Among the many things President Obama will be handing off to his successor this week: stubborn wars in three separate countries. Obama came to office eight years ago vowing to end U. S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet   Trump stands to inherit the nation’s longest war ever in Afghanistan, as well as renewed fighting in Iraq that has spread to Syria. The outgoing president was reminded of the persistence of those wars at the   farewell ceremony the Pentagon put on for him him earlier this month at a nearby military base. ”Mr. President, we’ve been at war throughout your tenure,” said Gen. Joesph Dunford, chosen by Obama in 2015 to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ”That’s a period longer than any other American president.” That’s right: Obama is the first president to serve eight years and preside over American wars during every single day of his tenure. That’s not what Obama wanted or expected. But he reminded the troops seeing him off that thanks to a new approach he’s taken to those wars, the number of American forces involved in them has dropped sharply. ”Not by letting our forces get dragged into sectarian conflicts and civil wars, but with smart, sustainable, principled partnerships,” Obama said of the strategy he’s shifted to of training, advising and assisting local forces to do the ground fighting. ”That’s how we brought most of our troops home  —   from nearly 180, 000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan down to 15, 000 today.” Fewer forces, but protracted conflict, Of those remaining in the field, 8, 400 U. S. forces are in Afghanistan. That’s still more than the small residual force Obama had aimed to leave behind. Some of those American forces in Afghanistan are fighting 13 different groups that the U. S. considers terrorists. Others are training and advising Afghan security forces to fight the Taliban, which Washington does not formally consider a terrorist organization. ”When you look at the performance of the Afghan forces this year, it was a tough year,” said Gen. John Nicholson, the top U. S. commander in Afghanistan, at a December news conference held at Bagram Airfield. ”They were tested, but they prevailed.” Others take a dimmer view of the effort to shift the lead in fighting the Taliban to Afghanistan’s security forces. ”It’s basically playing  ” says John Sopko, who since 2012 has been the U. S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. While presenting SIGAR’s latest report at a military think tank in Washington earlier this month, Sopko described the Afghan National Security Forces as hobbled by corruption and poor leadership. ”We’re defining success by the absence of failure,” Sopko said of those forces’ ongoing attempts to retake territory lost to the Taliban. ”At a minimum, they’re playing defense, and are not taking the fight to the Taliban.” What’s more, a war that began with a U. S. invasion 15 years ago in October 2001 appears to have no end in sight. ”The situation in Afghanistan, in the rosiest possible reasonable analysis, is a stalemate,” said Stephen Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and George Washington University. The war, he added ”can only be sustained if the U. S. Congress keeps writing     checks to keep the Afghan National Security Forces in the field.” The rise of ISIS, And then there’s the war Obama has waged since 2014 against the Islamic State, both in Iraq and Syria. ”These terrorists have lost about half of their territory,” Obama told troops at his Pentagon farewell ceremony. ”They are losing their leaders, towns and cities are being liberated, and I have no doubt this barbaric terrorist group will be destroyed  —   because of you.” Last month the top U. S. commander in Iraq, speaking at a fire base just outside Mosul that was held by Islamic State forces as recently as July, defended what many see as a   assault on the Islamic State forces holding that city. ”Any army on the planet, to include the United States Army, would be challenged by this fight,” said Gen. Stephen Townsend. ”The Iraqi army has come back from near defeat two years ago, and now they’re attacking this major city.” In neighboring,   Syria, at least 600 U. S. Special Forces are now on the ground, mainly to train and assist local rebel forces. The ultimate aim is to oust Islamic State fighters from Raqqa, the capital of the group’s   caliphate. Some experts doubt such an approach  —   arming and training an array of Syrians from often competing factions  —   will work. ”We’re losing, they’re winning,” says the Brooking Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon. ”They maybe don’t say it in quite those terms, because they like the fact that we’re still pulling the wool collectively over our own eyes, but the idea of defeating ISIS, replacing (Syrian President Bashar) Assad, and doing all this with a minimal American military investment, does not add up to a logical policy.” As for the incoming president, it’s not clear how he’ll fight these inherited wars. Trump barely mentioned Afghanistan during his campaign. It’s also unclear how he’d handle the   State campaign in Iraq and Syria. One clue may be found in what retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, told NPR last summer. ”Where is the king of Jordan, where’s the emirs of some of these other countries? ,” Flynn asked rhetorically about nations in the region he felt should be doing more to fight the Islamic State. ”They need to actually stand up and, internationally and publicly, condemn this violent form of this ideology that is operating inside of their bloodstream right now  —   and I don’t see it. And that’s where the president of the United States needs to place a different set of demands on these guys.” When Flynn uttered those words, Trump was just the Republican nominee for the White House. The   ’s recommended strategy for fighting the Islamic State had been characteristically blunt. ”I would just bomb those suckers,” Trump told a campaign rally in Iowa shortly before that state’s caucuses a year ago. As president and commander in chief, Trump soon will have the power to do so."
461,"A newly inaugurated Donald J. Trump delivered a fiercely populist and often dark address, promising to transfer power in Washington from political elites to the people and vowing to put ”America first.” Surrounded by members of Congress and the Supreme Court, the nation’s 45th president repeated themes from his historic and divisive campaign message, describing children in poverty, schools in crisis and streets pocked with crime and ”carnage.” ”For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” Trump said. ”Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. The establishment protected itself.” In his   remarks, he criticized an educational system ”flush with cash” that fails to fulfill its mission to students. He lamented factories left to rust while jobs flowed overseas. And he decried crime and gang violence, despite reports from the FBI and criminologists that the U. S. crime rate remains near historic lows. ”This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” Trump said, amid cheers from the crowd. Moments earlier, with his hand on Bibles once used by Abraham Lincoln and his own family, Trump pledged to ”preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” completing an unlikely trajectory from   mogul to the nation’s 45th president. A crowd that stretched along the National Mall assembled under gray Washington skies to witness the ceremony. So did nearly every living former president, from Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush to Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, who was defeated by Trump last November after a costly and bitter campaign. Afterward, dozens of dignitaries walked through light rain into the Capitol for a   lunch program emceed by Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt. The menu included Maine lobster and Gulf shrimp with saffron sauce and peanut crumble, Angus beef with dark chocolate sauce and potato gratin, and chocolate souffle with cherry vanilla ice cream. Trump and his vice president, former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, presided over the parade, which stretched a little under 2 miles from the U. S. Capitol to the White House. School marching bands, the Boy Scouts, veterans groups and 8, 000 members of the military participated. Also lining that route: Protesters representing 99 different groups. In sporadic exchanges at security check points across downtown Washington, protesters shouted: ”No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!” Others carried signs with such slogans as ”Fake 45.” But, so far, skirmishes appeared to be mostly free from violence. Not far from the White House, several hundred protesters clad in black ran through the streets, breaking windows and knocking over trash cans. Police fired pepper spray to subdue demonstrators. The Metropolitan Police Department reported at least 95 arrests, mostly on charges of rioting. Preparations for the event had been under way for months. Around 28, 000 officers are on hand to provide security for the event, including Secret Service, FBI agents, the Coast Guard, police departments and nearly 8, 000 National Guard troops. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said authorities had ”no specific, credible threat” directed at the proceedings. Meanwhile, at the White House, household crews are furiously preparing the mansion for its new occupants. Earlier in the day, camera crews spotted President Obama making one last visit to the Oval Office, slipping a letter in the desk drawer for his successor. Staff members at the residence presented the Obamas with two flags: one that welcomed them to the White House eight years ago another that flew over the building Friday morning, on their last day there. The Obama family headed to Palm Springs, California, Friday for a vacation. The formal   of power is now complete, as the Trump administration only begins to come into focus. Trump, who has had no experience in elective office, now controls a vast federal bureaucracy, including national security, international diplomacy, the economy, the environment and the justice system. He’s painted his governing agenda in broad strokes, promising to ”Make America Great Again” by bringing jobs back to the U. S. and deliver a tough message on the international stage. His remarks from the inaugural platform harked back to his campaign speeches: ”We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth and we will bring back our dreams.” Trump went on to blast ”empty talk” by politicians of the past. ”Now arrives the hour of action,” he said. Flanked by his extended family, his vice president, and congressional leaders, Trump took his first actions: signing papers for his cabinet nominees and proclaiming a national day of patriotism."
462,"Follow our live blog for news of the day, photos and videos from the National Mall and for analysis on what the events mean for the world."
463,Donald Trump is now the 45th president of the United States. NPR reporters and editors across the newsroom have annotated his inaugural address. Follow NPR’s full online coverage with our live blog.
464,"Updated at 7:30 p. m. ET, An inauguration protest in Washington, D. C. turned confrontational on Friday, as several hundred   protesters broke windows and police responded with pepper spray and a concussive device. The interim chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, Peter Newsham, said 217 protesters have been arrested, and 6 officers sustained minor injuries. Newsham, in a late afternoon news conference, said those arrested will be charged with rioting. He added that most of the protestors were peaceful, but that a small group of people seemed intent on creating mayhem. ”They began to destroy property and throw objects at people and through windows. A large percentage of this small group was armed with crowbars and hammers. Vehicles and store fronts were damaged. . .. [It] appeared the activities of this small group were organized and intentional,” he said. Of the 6 officers who were hurt, 3 sustained head injuries. Much of the violence broke out in Northwest D. C. not directly along the parade route. During clashes between police and protesters there, officers have used pepper spray in attempts to contain the protests, reports Patrick Madden of member station WAMU. Patrick says that earlier in the day, protesters were running through streets, breaking windows with hammers and knocking over trash cans. He says police, some wearing riot gear, chased the protesters on motorcycles and used the pepper spray and an unidentified concussive device to subdue the demonstration. At one point, a group of protesters charged and broke the police line, Madden reports. Newsham said officers used pepper spray to protect themselves. Video from the area, posted by veteran protest   Tim Pool, showed police tightly surrounding a group of people coughing from the pepper spray. Several people on the video identified themselves as lawyers who were observing the protest and said they were not participating in the protest when they were caught in the group of people being hemmed in by police. The   lawyers in the group were particularly vocal that their detainment was unjustified. Meanwhile, at checkpoints along the parade route and sites around downtown D. C. supporters of   Donald Trump gathered to celebrate the inauguration, while other   protests continued peacefully. Protests at the Navy Memorial  —   closer to the middle of the parade route  —   are loud but peaceful, according to NPR’s Pam Fessler. She reports that protesters are lined up along the route, across the street from Trump supporters, to ensure their ”voices are heard” when Trump passes by. NPR’s Jessica Taylor described some of the other protests on NPR’s live coverage of the inauguration: ”NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports that there were dozens of protesters chanting ’No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!’ and ’We are united!’ in Spanish just outside the security checkpoint at 12th and E streets NW, a block away from the Trump International Hotel. ’They’re next to people waiting to be screened to enter the parade viewing area. One Trump supporter yelled back in response, ”Go Trump!” ’ Hansi reports. . .. ”Black Lives Matter protesters have positioned themselves outside D. C. police headquarters, according to NPR’s Joe Shapiro. Janaya Khan . .. led a group of about 80 people in a chant saying, ’That is not my president.’ ” At around 11:30 a. m. ET, a Secret Service spokesman said all demonstrations are ”under police control,” NPR’s Brian Naylor reports."
465,"As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th U. S. president, protests, demonstrations  —   and a few celebrations  —   were underway in cities around the world. In London, demonstrators holding   signs gathered outside the U. S. Embassy on Friday evening. Earlier in the day, huge banners saying ”Build Bridges Not Walls” were hung across the city’s bridges, part of a U. K. campaign that that began after Trump was elected in November. In Berlin, protesters gathered outside the headquarters of a   party, the Alternative for Germany, whose leader, Frauke Petry, has been effusive in her praise of Trump. Many Israelis were supportive of Trump, who has nominated a supporter of West Bank settlements as his ambassador. Trump has also spoken out in favor of moving the U. S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a move would be provocative and anger Palestinians  —   who held protests in the West Bank. Demonstrators in the Philippines burned U. S. flags and rallied against Trump outside the U. S. Embassy in Manila. They demanded an end to U. S. troop presence in the Philippines. Trump has praised the Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, whose ongoing   campaign has left more than 5, 000 dead since last June. Elsewhere, Trump’s new role was celebrated. In New Delhi,   Hindu supporters of the new U. S. president celebrated even before the inauguration by draping a garland of marigolds on Trump’s photo on Thursday. In Russia, says NPR’s Lucian Kim, ”People welcome Trump.” But, he notes, ”Russians actually have very little information on Trump, and they hear someone who’s saying the U. S. should just get along with Russia  —   what’s not to like about that?” Trump himself had little to say about the world outside the United States in his inauguration speech. ”We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world  —   but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” Trump said. ”We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones  —   and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.” Saturday will bring more demonstrations, with the Women’s March in D. C. and others like it around the world  —   one is even planned for the Antarctic Peninsula."
466,"As the White House transitions from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, in the   age that means another transition  —   of the @POTUS Twitter account. At 12:01 p. m. as Trump took the oath of office, the official presidential account switched to President Trump from Obama, who was the first president to use Twitter. All tweets from Obama’s term as president are archived under a new account @POTUS44. Twitter will automatically switch all 13 million followers of the   @POTUS account to follow both @POTUS44 and the new @POTUS account for Trump. But because Trump’s presidential twitter account is essentially brand new, the switch will take a little while. Trump will also keep his personal @realDonaldTrump account  —   just as Obama had maintained a personal @BarackObama account, which he will also keep. How Trump and his team will use the official and personal accounts is unclear and will presumably undergo White House protocol and security considerations. Trump’s takeover of the @POTUS account garnered attention on Twitter in part for its startlingly clean slate for the typically   Trump. But several users have pointed out another curious matter: Trump’s team appears to have chosen as the header image for the account a photo from Barack Obama’s inauguration, rather than Trump’s own. Official Twitter accounts of the first lady, vice president and other White House social media elements are similarly shifting over today, as the White House team has described in detail. And the main White House page has been transitioned as well. NPR’s Scott Detrow contributed to this report."
467,"Shortly before Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Friday, Mike Pence will put his hand on Ronald Reagan’s Bible and be sworn in as vice president. It’s a job that has varied in influence from administration to administration. So how will Pence cut his path? It was clear from the day he was introduced as Donald Trump’s pick for vice president that Mike Pence came second. Trump took a full 30 minutes to introduce Pence, but he spent most of that time talking about himself and his Democratic rival, before ending with a story about how Pence endorsed another candidate in the Republican primary. ”So even though he was under pressure, cause I’m so outside of the establishment it was the single best nonendorsement I’ve had in my life,” said Trump. In Washington, D. C. this week, Pence recalled getting invited to join the ticket: ”When the phone call came that night at the Indiana governor’s residence and that familiar voice came across the phone line, and he said, ’Mike, I’ve got an assignment for you and it’s going to be great.’ And I can testify that it has been.” Already they’ve proved to be an odd couple stylistically, with Trump turning to cable news or Twitter to say what he’s thinking, and Pence coming in behind to calm, clarify or just clean up. There was the time Trump tweeted at the ”overrated” cast of Hamilton for delivering a message to Pence at the end of a performance. Meanwhile, Pence was on CBS praising the musical and downplaying the kerfuffle. ”I wasn’t offended by what was said,” Pence said. ”I’ll leave it to others to determine whether it was the appropriate venue to say it.” And recently Trump warned congressional Republicans in a series of tweets to be careful as they moved to repeal Obamacare, moments before Pence met with those very Republicans. In a press conference afterward, Pence seemed to translate Trump’s tweets into congressional speak. ”Step 1 will be to repeal Obamacare,” he said. ”But as the   said today, and I admonished members of the House Republican conference today, it is important that we remind the American people of what they already know about Obamacare, that the promises that were made were all broken.” Republican Congressman Jeb Hensarling became friends with Pence when they served in the House of Representatives together. ”Yeah, he’s a different guy than the ” said Hensarling. ”But it’s very complementary, and they make an excellent partnership.” As Hensarling sees it, Pence has credibility with Trump, and the decision to put Pence in charge of the transition process is one sign of that. Hensarling says Pence also has credibility with Republicans in Congress because of his many years carving a conservative course in the House. ”  Trump has the vision,” he said. ”And what Mike Pence brings to the table as vice   is someone who knows Capitol Hill. So he can take Donald Trump’s vision, help translate into actual policy, legislative language, bill text  —   work it through the process so that it ends up back on Donald Trump’s desk so that he can sign it into law.” Pence plans to serve as the lead emissary between the White House and Congress. But how well that works may depend on the strength and durability of Pence’s bond with Trump, according to vice   and St. Louis University School of Law professor Joel Goldstein. ”A vice president’s usefulness to members of the House and the Senate depends on his or her access to the president,” he said. ”If the vice president’s not getting much face time with the president, or is out of favor with the president, then what’s the point of talking to the vice president?” When asked in a recent interview which vice president he is looking to as a model, Pence said he saw parallels to George H. W. Bush, who served under President Ronald Reagan  —   another    personality who came from outside of Washington promising to shake things up."
468,"For decades, U. S. authorities have been preparing to prosecute one of the world’s most feared drug traffickers, known as El Chapo. Friday, the Justice Department announced charges against Joaquin ”El Chapo” Guzman following his extradition from Mexico to the United States. He landed Thursday evening on Long Island, N. Y. and Friday afternoon entered a plea of not guilty at a federal court in Brooklyn. ”Today marks a milestone in our pursuit of Chapo Guzman,” said Robert Capers, the U. S. attorney in Brooklyn. ”So who is Chapo Guzman? In short, he’s a man known for no other life than a life of crime, violence, death and destruction. And now he’ll have to answer to that. That’s who Chapo Guzman is.” The Associated Press described the scene: ”Holding his unshackled hands behind his back, Guzman appeared calm and collected as he gave yes and no answers, through an interpreter, to a judge’s questions.” In a statement, acting U. S. Attorney General Sally Yates called him the ”alleged leader of a   dollar,   criminal enterprise that funneled drugs onto our streets and violence and misery into our communities.” Prosecutors are seeking life in prison and a $14 billion forfeiture in drug proceeds and illicit profits from the drug trafficking kingpin. The   indictment accuses El Chapo of operating a continuing criminal enterprise that included murder conspiracy, other   crimes including   and use of firearms. ”As part of the extradition process, we had to assure the Mexican government that the death penalty would not be sought,” Capers said. The allegations date to the 1980s. Guzman, 59, is accused of leading the Sinaloa drug cartel, which became the world’s largest drug trafficking organization. The indictment alleges that Guzman ”directed a large scale narcotics transportation network involving the use of land, air and sea transportation assets, shipping   quantities of cocaine from South America, through Central America and Mexico, and finally into the United States.” The billions in profits were then ”laundered back to Mexico,” according to the court documents. Guzman, along with other cartel leaders, allegedly hired hit men ”who carried out hundreds of acts of violence, including murders, assaults, kidnappings, and acts of torture at the direction of the defendants.” The Mexican government has approved the U. S. request to prosecute these charges, which were filed in a federal court in New York, the Justice Department added. As NPR’s Carrie Kahn reports from Mexico City: ”Mexico had at one point said it would not extradite Guzman and would have him stand trial for his crimes at home. That was shortly after a second arrest in 2014. But the government reversed itself after being embarrassed by Guzman’s brazen escape from Mexico’s maximum security prison in the summer of 2015. ”From a hole that began [in the shower floor] in Guzman’s prison cell, the drug lord climbed down a ladder and then rode a rigged motorcycle through a   tunnel to freedom. Guzman remained on the run for nearly six months. During that time, he met secretly with Mexican actress Kate del Castillo and U. S. actor Sean Penn. ”Shortly after, though, and partly due to his meeting with the stars, Mexican officials caught up with Guzman, capturing him in January of last year. This time officials immediately began extradition procedures. Guzman’s lawyers have been fighting it ever since. He lost his final appeal this week.” El Chapo has eluded law enforcement for decades, as William F. Sweeney, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, told reporters. U. S. officials vowed that Guzman won’t escape again. ”He’s about to face American justice. . .. And I assure you, no tunnel will be built leading to his bathroom,” said Angel Melendez, special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in New York City, NPR correspondent Joel Rose in New York contributed to this report."
469,"Set on an apparently tropical island, The Red Turtle (La tortue rouge) exalts the cycle of life and celebrates the beauty of nature. Yet this   animated fable could hardly be more anthropocentric. The man around whom the film revolves is introduced literally at sea, battling to survive the stormy waves of a   ocean. The sketchily drawn,   survivor soon washes up on a remote isle. It’s inhabited mostly by insects and crustaceans  —   the sand crabs provide   comic relief  —   although sometimes a larger creature comes ashore. Water and food are available, and shelter is not an issue, since the climate is warm. Nonetheless, the castaway endeavors to leave, building a succession of rafts that are quickly destroyed by an unseen force. Eventually, the man encounters the creature that’s preventing his escape. It’s a gigantic red turtle. Soon after, somehow, a woman appears. The pretty redhead’s arrival reconciles the exile to remaining on the island, and the couple raises a son. The trio’s existence is the human family in microcosm, without any pesky siblings or  . It could be said, though, that the sea turtles that offer assistance during emergencies are cousins.   Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit spent a decade making The Red Turtle, which is   (mostly on electronic tablets, not paper ones). It’s the first feature from a filmmaker who won an Oscar 17 years ago for Father and Daughter, a short that was also without words. Dudok de Wit was recruited and mentored by Isao Takahata, of Japan’s Studio Ghibli, which is best known for such tales of nature and transformation as Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. The   collaboration’s supervising animator is   Lie, who worked on The Triplets of Belleville. The Japanese influence is apparent in both the movie’s look and its story. The script, by Dudok de Wit and Bird People   Pascale Ferran, features a bamboo forest and a catastrophic tsunami. The latter is one of several sequences that’s suspenseful enough for a   action movie. (Alas, Laurent Perez del Mar’s drippy score also gives off a   vibe.) For a wordless South Seas idyll, the movie is quite eventful. Panicky moments and angry outbursts contrast the leisurely pace of island life and the artfully rendered sea and sky. The animators don’t overplay the loveliness, preferring subdued colors punctuated by the occasional vivid blue. Red rarely appears, and the many dream sequences are as gray as the night from which they emerge. Unless, of course, the entire movie is a dream. After all, things occur here that would be impossible in a   cosmos. But if The Red Turtle is a fantasy, it’s not one in which man achieves concord with nature. Instead, after initially frustrating the castaway, the sea, the island, and their creatures accommodate themselves to him. Although viewers barely get to know the man, they can clearly see he’s the center of this   universe. That seems a curious outlook for movie that’s being released just as climate scientists report that 2016 was the third year in a row to be the hottest ever recorded."
470,"Updated at 12:45 p. m. ET, At least 10 survivors, including children, have been found inside the rubble of a ski hotel in central Italy that was engulfed by an avalanche on Wednesday, according to fire officials  —   and several of them have been safely removed from the remnants of the building. About 30 people had been in the hotel when the disaster struck. Many still remain missing, Christopher Livesay reports for NPR from Rome, while four others have been confirmed dead. The death toll is expected to rise. Tourists staying at the hotel had checked out and were waiting for roads to be cleared when an avalanche, possibly triggered by earthquakes on Wednesday, swept over and into the hotel. Two men had been outside the building when the avalanche began. One of them, Giampiero Parete, had gone to his car to pick up medicine for his wife and soon made frantic calls for help, saying his wife and children were trapped inside the resort. Both men were found alive  —   but until Friday morning, there had been no sign of life inside the   resort. On Friday, rescuers were overheard by The Associated Press saying over the radio that they had found people alive. Luca Cari, the spokesman for Italy’s national firefighting service, told both Reuters and The Associated Press that rescuers found 10 people in the building on Friday. After talking with the trapped people, firefighters and other rescuers began to free them from the snow and debris. The ANSA news agency says rescue operations proceeded in two stages, with six people being extracted  —   including two children  —   and then two more people. The AP, however, says that Cari reports only a ”few” survivors have actually been freed from the building, and rescue operations are ongoing to bring the rest to safety. The wire service reports that the ”incredible” discovery boosted the spirits of rescue crews: ”Video released by rescuers showed a boy, wearing blue snow pants and a matching ski shirt, emerging from the structure and crews mussing his hair in celebration. ”Next was a woman with a long ponytail wearing red snow pants. ’Brava Brava!’ the rescuers cheered. The survivors appeared fully alert and walking on their own. Both were helped down to a stretcher for the helicopter ride out.” The rescue was followed by an emotional reunion, according to Italian media. The woman was reportedly the wife of Giampiero Parete, the man who had stepped out to the car for medicine when the avalanche struck and called for help, and the boy was his son. ”Rescuers said the mother indicated her    daughter Ludovica was also alive amid the debris nearby and rescue workers immediately set to work to find her, too,” the AP reports. ”Italian media said Parete and wife and son hugged at Pescara hospital, where the woman and child were taken, apparently in good condition. From very early on, rescue crews knew that at least some people had survived the initial disaster  —   a few people buried alive sent text messages, according to reports in Italian media on Thursday. ”Italian daily La Repubblica reports that one of those texts read, ’Help, help, we’re freezing to death,’ ” Livesay says. But rescue operations have been challenging. Those inside the hotel were trapped by 17 feet of snow as well as by the rubble, the AP reports. Walls were collapsed by the force of the avalanche, and entire one wing of the hotel was pushed downhill. Transport has also been hampered by the narrow,   roads in the region. The first rescue teams arrived on skis the next wave, by helicopter. Attempts to reach the region by vehicle have been slow, according to the AP, with snow piled 10 feet high and a 5.  stretch of road able to take only   traffic. ”By late Thursday, only 25 vehicles had arrived, along with 135 rescue workers, and civil protection authorities said part of the night was spent trying to widen the road,” the AP writes. Rescuers are also fighting against the clock, Livesay reported earlier. ”Chances of survival are waning amid nightfall and plunging temperatures,” he says. Meanwhile, even as rescue operations are ongoing, Italian media and officials are already considering the question of responsibility. ”State prosecutors have launched an investigation to find out if the disaster could have been averted,” Livesay reports. ”An avalanche warning had already been in effect, so the question is: Why wasn’t the hotel evacuated before the avalanche, when it’s at the base of a snowy mountain in an area that’s prone to earthquakes?”"
471,"A British police watchdog is investigating an incident last Saturday in Bristol in which an officer fired a stun gun at a black man who has served as a   adviser for local law enforcement. Judah Adunbi, 63, was incapacitated after a confrontation with two officers who apparently mistook him for someone wanted by police. In fact, Adunbi has volunteered as a member of an independent advisory group for Avon and Somerset police, a panel established to improve relations between police and the local communities of color. A neighbor recorded the incident on video, shown above. ”Avon  Somerset police officers used the Taser on a    man in Colston Road, Easton at around 9. 10am,” the Independent Police Complaints Commission said in a statement released Friday. ”A complaint from a member of the public who witnessed the aftermath of the incident was voluntarily referred to the IPCC by the force on 19 January.” In the neighbor’s video, two officers are seen stopping Adunbi outside his home as he was walking his dog. They refer to a wanted man they are looking for, and ask him for his name. Adunbi refuses to give his name several times as he attempts to enter his front gate. Like everyone in the U. K. Adunbi has the right to withhold his name when stopped by officers, according to Avon and Somerset Police guidelines. After a break in the footage, the video shows one of the officers apparently pulling Adunbi out of the gate by the arm. Immediately after that scuffle, one of the officers uses her Taser on Adunbi. Once on his back, Adunbi appears to toss his wallet to the ground beside them, telling the officers to look at his ID as they handcuff him. ”You are under arrest for assault,” one of the officers tells him. The charges were later dropped, the BBC reports. ”The way I fell, on the back of my head, I was just paralyzed,” Adunbi later told the British broadcast network ITV. ”I thought that was it. I thought they were taking my life.” He says his fear stemmed partly from a similar confrontation with police. In 2009, ”he won a wrongful arrest case against Avon and Somerset Police and was awarded compensation,” according to the BBC. Since then, Adunbi has been a volunteer with the Bristol IAG, one of several groups that serve ”a vital role in helping us build trust, confidence and better relationships, especially with our diverse communities,” according to the Avon and Somerset police. ”It’s a little distasteful in my mouth,” Adunbi told The Guardian. ”To know that one of the founder members of the independent advisory group, which was created some years ago in order to improve the relationship between the   community and the constabulary, and to be treated like this, it’s difficult.” Chief Superintendent Jon Reilly, Bristol area commander for the Avon and Somerset police, says the force voluntarily referred the complaint about Saturday’s incident to the watchdog IPCC. He said he would like to answer further questions but could not, given the ongoing investigation. According to ITV, he added: ”I want to reassure the community the whole incident was captured on   camera. Both officers were wearing it. ”And we’re determined to understand what happened. That’s why we’ve referred it, voluntarily, to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for them to assess whether an independent review is necessary. ”We work really hard to work positively with all communities and I can see no reason why that should change.” The IPCC has asked members of the Bristol community to come forward if they have any further information. The group said it has not yet spoken to the two officers involved."
472,"All Things Considered   Ari Shapiro is on a road trip leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20. He is driving through North Carolina and Virginia, on the way to Washington, D. C. These are two swing states that went in opposite directions in November, each by a close margin: North Carolina for Trump, Virginia for Hillary Clinton. As the country faces dramatic changes, we’re asking people what they want from that change  —   and what concerns them. A group of about a dozen students from Liberty University gather in a parking lot in Lynchburg, Va. on Thursday, hours before the sun comes up. The students at the conservative Christian school look ready for church: The men wear neckties the women are in high heels. Some of these students were   voters in November one knocked on 10, 000 doors for the Republican Party in Wisconsin. All of them are Donald Trump fans, and they are heading to Washington, D. C. to watch his inauguration. ”I’m just super excited to get involved in politics and see something historical,” says    Andrew Watkins. Kayla Bailey, also 18, says she hopes a Trump administration can bring some relief to West Virginia, her home state. ”We’ve seen a really big decline in our economy, and a lot of people are addicted to drugs and don’t have any hope any more,” she says. ”And so I’d really like to see sort of my home state get better because after eight years it’s been a really hard process to watch people suffer.” They pile into a caravan of cars, and after a   drive from Lynchburg, the Washington monument appears on the horizon. Use the audio link above to hear the full story."
473,"For decades, Donald Trump both toyed with and coyly denied any interest in pursuing the presidency  —   until his   campaign of the 2016 election. But if you go back and watch old clips  —   and by old, we mean    —   you hear a young Donald Trump sounding very much like the current Trump. Common themes include his view that trade wasn’t fair, that the world has long laughed at America and countries have taken advantage of U. S. generosity while refusing to pay their ”fair share” for all the U. S. does globally. Trump does something else in these interviews. Talking to Playboy magazine in 1990, for example, he accurately predicts where his strongest support would come from should he ever decide to run for office  —   the working class. Here’s journalist Glenn Plaskin, who wrote the Playboy story, recalling what Trump said when asked who would support him for the White House: ”When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their window. . .. The working guy would elect me they like me.” Here are six clips of Trump from the 1980s and ’90s that make the point: 1. 1987, CNN’s Larry King: A    Donald Trump said of leadership and trade: ”I was tired, and I think a lot of other people are tired of watching other people ripping off the United States. This is a great country. They laugh at us. Behind our backs, they laugh at us because of our own stupidity. Our leaders  —   what we have, we have a Persian Gulf situation today. . .. Billions and billions are paid getting oil for Japan, and they are paying nothing for it, essentially they’re paying nothing for it.” More: ”I believe it’s very important that you have free trade, but we don’t have free trade right now.” And Trump even leveled a cryptic allegation against former New York Mayor Ed Koch: ”I think, probably, over the next period of time, something’s going to come out where he will not be the mayor of the city of New York hopefully much longer.” The New York Times noted in Koch’s obituary in 2013 that he ”was a bachelor who lived for politics. Perhaps inevitably there were rumors, some promoted by his enemies, that he was gay. But no proof was offered, and, except for two affirmations in radio interviews that he was heterosexual, he responded to the rumors with silence or a rebuke. ’Whether I am straight or gay or bisexual is nobody’s business but mine,’ he wrote in ’Citizen Koch,’ his 1992 autobiography.” Trump told King that he accepted an invitation to appear in New Hampshire, understanding full well what that would imply to his potential desire to run for president. 2. 1988, Oprah: Back then, Trump was critical of Japan, and this criticism echoes the way he talks today about NATO. He told Oprah Winfrey: ”I’d make our allies pay their fair share.” He took a hard line with the Middle East, saying: ”Kuwait, they live like kings. The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings. And yet they’re not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren’t they paying us 25 percent of what they’re making? It’s a joke.” Asked if he’d run for president, Trump said: ”I just probably wouldn’t do it, Oprah. I probably wouldn’t, but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, and if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally, because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not.” More about a presidential run and winning. He even uses his signature ”believe me:” ”I think I’d win. I tell you what, I wouldn’t go in to lose. I’ve never gone in to lose in my life. And if I did decide to do it, I think I would be inclined  —   I would say, I would have a hell of a chance of winning, because I think people  —   I don’t know how your audience feels, but I think people are tired of seeing the United States ripped off. And I can’t promise you everything, but I can tell you one thing, this country would make one hell of a lot of money from those people that for 25 years have taken advantage. It wouldn’t be the way it’s been, believe me.” 3. 1988, Letterman: Here he spoke to Letterman just after the presidential election. He said he thought Bush would win and thinks he’ll do a good job. But he again used Japan as his punching bag in talking about trade deficits and made the U. S. ally into an economic boogeyman: ”We are living in very precarious times. If you look at what certain countries are doing to this country, such as Japan. I mean, they’ve totally taken advantage of the country. . .. I’m talking about the [trade] deficits. They come and they talk about free trade. They dump the cars and the VCRs and everything else. We defend Japan for virtually nothing, which is hard to believe. So when I see all that I get very nervous, but I think George Bush is going to do a great job, and he’s going to straighten  —   hopefully  —   he’ll straighten it out.” Letterman then wondered aloud whether there was ”any way a guy like you could go broke.” The crowd gave a huge laugh, and Trump said he would like to think he could weather any storm. But little did he  —   or Letterman  —   know that just three years later, Trump would file his first of four bankruptcies over two decades. That was for his hotel and casino in Atlantic City, N. J. the Taj Mahal, which Trump touted on the show as a project he was building that he believed would be a ”tremendous success.” Trump continued to flirt with the idea of running for president down the road, despite denying he would. Trump seems to preview a version of what would eventually become his 2016 ”Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. ”I’m not sure you want to see the United States become a winner. Do you want to see the United States become a winner, David?” Letterman shot back: ”The United States is and always has been a winner for my money, Don.” 4. 1990, Playboy magazine: Take a look at this March 1990 Playboy interview. Lots of politics in here, including Trump’s response to a question about how he’d handle an international crisis, perhaps involving nuclear weapons: ”And how would President Trump handle it? ”He would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians he wouldn’t trust our allies he’d have a huge military arsenal, perfect it, understand it. Part of the problem is that we’re defending some of the wealthiest countries in the world for nothing. . .. We’re being laughed at around the world.” In many of these clips, the ”Vintage Trump” is the ”Current Trump.” He’s a future candidate floating a future campaign slogan  —   and maybe an inaugural address. 5. 1999, Larry King: As he came to do during the 2016 campaign, Trump touted the polls. But he also echoed the dichotomy of Trump  —   a frustration with some in the media, but also the understanding that he needs them he used King’s show to break news. First, the frustration: ”All that’s happening now is people are coming out with polls. It was sort of interesting, the one sort of negative poll I had was on Newsweek, and they put me on the cover, so I said, how could you write a poll, how could you do a poll like this, and I’m on the cover of Newsweek? And, you know, it was just one of those things. But the polls have been unbelievable.” But then right after that. .. ”So I am going to form a presidential exploratory committee, I might as well announce that on your show, everyone else does. But I’ll be forming that, effective, I believe, tomorrow, and we’ll see. We’re going to take a very good, strong look at it.” And there was the trademark bombast: ”I have a lot to lose, Larry. I’m the biggest developer in New York, by far. I’m doing more, as you know from being here, a lot. I’m doing more than any  —   I’m building   buildings all over the place, and we’re just doing a lot, and we’re doing great. The city’s the hottest city, and I’m the hottest developer in the hottest city in the world right now.” But also the foundation of an outsider message, critical of politicians: ”Other guys, you know, they run. Pat Buchanan, what is he  —   you know, he’s not giving up anything. What’s he doing? And, politicians when they run, they run from one office to another it’s the same thing, they answer different calls. I’m giving up a lot if I decide to run.” Buchanan was running for the Reform Party nomination  —   the same one Ross Perot had in 1992 and 1996. Trump, master of the insult, showed his ability to go for the low blow against a potential opponent: ”I believe I can get the Reform Party nomination. I don’t even think it would be that tough, it’s going to be Buchanan. And I think he just blew himself up with the book, and his love affair with Adolf Hitler.” Trump said the priority for his exploratory committee was to take a hard look at whether he could actually win the presidency as the Reform Party candidate, not just compete. He never climbed out of single digits in    against George W. Bush and Al Gore, and Trump eventually dropped his bid. Trump also spelled out some of his philosophy with King. He said that, even though he’s a Republican, he’s pretty ”liberal” on social issues, notably health care. He said he believes, in fact, in ”universal health care” and agreed that it was an ”entitlement from birth.” ”I’m quite liberal, and getting much more liberal, on health care and other things. I really say, what’s the purpose of a country if you’re not going to have defense and health care. If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it. It’s all over. I mean, it’s no good. So I’m very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.” Remember when Trump told the Washington Post recently that his goal was ”insurance for everybody?” It’s something other Republicans have been trying to walk back  —   and Trump remains a wild card. Trump also had lots of criticism for both parties: ”I think that nobody’s really hitting it right. The Democrats are too far left. . .. The Republicans are too far right. I don’t think anybody’s hitting the chord. Not the chord that I want to hear and not the chord that other people want to hear.” Trump talked about Ronald Reagan as a president who had a certain ”style and class,” which he called a ”really big part of being president.” But he also hinted at when he thought the country was great  —   under Eisenhower in the 1950s, which happens to be when he was a child: ”Eisenhower, I don’t see him too much on lists of great, great presidents, but it was a nice time in the country. The country had a prestige, and he had a certain, you know, demeanor. He was a quality, class act. There are certain people who have that.” Trump also knocked NAFTA and U. S. trade policies: ”I’m not an isolationist. What I am, though, is  —   I think that you have to be treated fairly by other countries. If other countries aren’t going to treat you fairly, Larry, I think that those countries should be  —   they should suffer the consequences.” Trump argued: ”We could reduce taxes and take care of health care, and it would be beautiful, and you’d have plenty of money left over.” He hinted at his potential constituency later on  —   ”workers:” ”The workers are the ones that really like me. I’ve often said, the rich people hate me, and the workers love me. Now, the rich people that know me, like me, but the rich people that don’t know me, they truly dislike me.” Trump also said he believes in one term as president: ”I do like the concept of one term, I want to run one term, and I want to do the right job  —   straighten out Social Security, get the trade deficits in order and lower taxes.” He has not made that pledge during this campaign. Harking back to that 1988 Oprah Winfrey interview, Trump told King that ”Oprah would be my first choice” for vice president. Not quite Mike Pence, so . .. some things change. 6. 1999, Trump on NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert: Trump echoed some of the same sentiments from his appearance on Larry King, said he was serious about running. But he also addressed dating various women, that his second wife, Marla Maples, came out against him running. And Trump defended his past statements about women and his companies’ bankruptcies. He also   on North Korea, seeming to advocate for preemptive action. Trump said the most important issue facing the country was controlling the ”nuclear problem,” otherwise the economy won’t matter so much. And Trump struck a familiar tone on immigration: ”Too many people are flowing into the country,” he said, ”and we have to take care of our own first.” But Trump has clearly changed on some issues, notably abortion. Back then, he said he was ”very  .”"
474,"Frantic diplomatic efforts are underway to persuade longtime Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh to step down and make way for the newly   and democratically elected president, Adama Barrow. Jammeh is facing a sizable military threat if he refuses to go. West African troops crossed the border into Gambia on Thursday and say they are prepared to remove him by force. NPR’s Eyder Peralta reports that the approximately 7, 000 troops from Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana Togo and Mali stopped before they reached the capital. They encountered no resistance. Jammeh had a midday deadline set by the ECOWAS West African regional bloc  —   but that has come and gone, Eyder adds. Mauritanian President Ould Abdel Aziz and Guinean President Alpha Conde flew in Friday and are making a   attempt to persuade Jammeh to leave peacefully. It’s not clear if there is a new deadline for Jammeh to leave. ”It’s out of the question that he stays in place,” Marcel de Souza, head of an ECOWAS commission, told Reuters. Jammeh, who has ruled the smallest country on the African continent since he led a coup 22 years ago, initially accepted the result of the Dec. 1 election. It appeared Gambia was poised for its first peaceful transition of power since independence. But a week later, Jammeh dramatically reversed course and said the election result was void because of ”irregularities.” He is isolated and faces overwhelming international pressure to quit power. The African Union no longer recognizes his authority. The U. N. Security Council issued a resolution Thursday in support of his rival, Barrow, who was sworn in at the Gambian Embassy in neighboring Senegal. U. S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters the same day that the U. S. supports the military intervention by ECOWAS. ”The streets of Banjul are still empty shops and markets are still closed,” BBC’s Thomas Fessy reports from the capital. ”There’s an anxious wait here though people feel the end of this political crisis is near.” Some 45, 000 people fearing violence have fled from Gambia to Senegal, according to a report by the U. N. refugee agency. It adds that more than 75 percent of those who have fled are children. ”The next few days will be critical and more people may leave the country if the current situation is not resolved peacefully soon,” UNHCR warned."
475,"The Asian Football Confederation says it found out that a dozen   soccer players playing for East Timor were registered using phony birth or baptism certificates. Now, it has booted the East Timor team out of the 2023 Asian Cup. The players involved in the scheme played in 29 matches, which included World Cup qualifying games. The Football Federation   has been ordered to forfeit those matches and was fined $20, 000, with an additional penalty of $56, 000 suspended for a probationary period of two years.  The probe found that documents for 12   players were falsified to show that they had at least one parent born in East Timor. The AFC launched the investigation in June, in collaboration with FIFA, the game’s governing body. It’s not clear whether the players themselves were involved in the document doctoring. ”The investigations made no finding regarding the validity of the   citizenship held by those footballers,” the AFC stated. ”That is a question for the state authorities of  .” ”East Timor has already been eliminated from the current World Cup, and now faces being expelled from 2022 qualifying in a separate FIFA disciplinary case,” according to The Associated Press. East Timor is a tiny country with a population of approximately 1. 2 million people. The players with fake documents ”helped the nation to its first ever win,” the BBC reported. It has had a total of five wins in just under 14 years, the broadcaster added. The East Timor national team is sometimes ”jokingly called the Little Samba Nation for its rapid, and sometimes suspect, naturalization of Brazilian players,” according to The New York Times. Striker Patrick Fabiano, one of the players with fake documents listed today, told the Times in 2015 that he ”received an invitation from them and they say: ’We give the passport, you play for us. ’”"
476,"  Donald Trump takes office on Friday having largely failed to address concerns about the many conflicts of interest posed by his business interests. Although Trump has settled a few of the outstanding legal and regulatory disputes hanging over him, he remains in the unusual position of presiding over countless policy decisions that will affect his own businesses. ”There’s an issue about whether the president and his family will use the presidency for ” says Robert Weissman, president of the advocacy group Public Citizen in an interview with NPR. But, Weissman says, ”The most important part of the problem is how these conflicts will affect  . That is an inescapable and pervasive problem. It doesn’t matter whether or not Donald Trump is operating in good faith. So long as he has these conflicts, he can’t not know what he owns and he also can’t not know how policy decisions will affect his businesses.” Since his election, Trump has settled a   dispute with the National Labor Relations Board over a unionization drive at hotels in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. He also settled a   suit by customers of Trump University for $25 million. The   has also said he wants to close the   Trump Foundation, although he has been blocked from doing so for now by the New York Attorney General’s office, which is investigating the charity. But Trump has indicated he will continue to own his many U. S. and foreign businesses, and has rejected calls to sell them and put the proceeds in a blind trust. Instead he says he will hand them over to his grown sons to manage. ”Don and Eric are going to be running the company. They are going to be running it in a very professional manner. They’re not going to discuss it with me. Again, I don’t have to do this,” he said at a Jan. 11 press conference. But that falls well short of addressing the ethical conundrum he faces, say numerous critics from both major parties. ”Stepping back from running his positions is meaningless from a conflicts of interest perspective. Nothing short of divestiture will resolve these conflicts,” Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics, said earlier this month. Trump has dismissed such concerns, saying presidents are exempt from the federal statute barring White House officials from profiting off their positions. ”First and foremost, I don’t know how many times it can be stated: The president by law doesn’t have conflicts. I mean, it’s somewhat of a silly discussion,” incoming White House spokesman Sean Spicer said at a press conference last week. But critics note that Trump’s business interests pose other legal concerns. For example, Trump owns real estate properties in foreign countries backed in some cases by overseas banks, a potential violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. ”He has enough money. His family has enough money. It’s time to do the job he asked the American people to elect him to do,” Richard Painter, ethics adviser to former President George W. Bush, said in an interview with NPR this month. One big outstanding legal issue involves the considerable debt held by Trump’s businesses, some of which was lent by foreign banks overseen by U. S. regulators. Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien addressed the issue in an interview with NPR this month: ”He owes over a billion dollars to about 150 institutions across Wall Street. He’s going to be regulating all those banks. He plans to push through an aggressive deregulation of the financial services industry. It’s going to be impossible for him to pursue those goals without people questioning whether or not he’s doing them in the service of his own business needs.” Another potential conflict involves the fate of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C. which was built on the site of a former post office. As NPR’s Jackie Northam has reported: ”Trump has a   lease with the General Services Administration, or GSA, which owns the building. The GSA contract explicitly says that no elected official of the government of the United States may hold that lease.” That means Trump will be in violation of the lease as soon as he’s inaugurated, but it remains unclear whether the GSA will challenge his ownership, especially since the agency will have to answer to Trump himself. Spicer shrugged off concerns about the hotel on Thursday, when he was asked by a reporter about Trump’s plan to hold a luncheon at his new Washington hotel on the day before his inauguration. Critics say that by doing so, Trump is lining his pockets by promoting his own property. ”He’s very proud. It’s an absolutely stunning hotel. I encourage you to go there if you haven’t been by. But I don’t think the idea that   Trump is having a reception at the Trump Hotel should be a shocker to anybody,” Spicer said."
477,"  Donald Trump plans to hit the ground running. He could sign his first executive orders within hours of taking the oath of office. ”I’ve asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on Day 1 to restore our laws and bring back our jobs,” Trump said in a videotaped message in November. ”It’s about time.” Vice   Mike Pence echoed that message in a meeting with reporters on Thursday. ”Our job is to be ready on Day 1,” Pence said. ”We are all ready to go to work.” The incoming president has promised to: Trump, who is accustomed to completing projects ”on time and under budget,” will try to bring an unfamiliar business discipline to the nation’s capital. He may find that Washington is not as nimble or responsive to orders from the chief executive as his   business. His first couple of days will also be filled with ceremonial celebrations: the inaugural parade, Friday night balls and a Saturday church service. The real workout for the new president and his pen could start Monday. ”We’ll be doing some pretty good signings on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday,” Trump said during his news conference last week. Trump plans to nominate a new Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia within his first two weeks in office. He’ll also direct military commanders to develop plans for battling the Islamic State and cyberattacks. And he’ll codify his ”swamp draining” restrictions on government officials later going to work as lobbyists. But the new administration’s initial priorities will focus on three areas: 1. Trade, Throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized U. S. trade deals and promised to renegotiate or scrap agreements such as NAFTA. ”We will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores,” he said in his November video. Trump has also warned that companies that move jobs overseas but want to sell products domestically could be hit with a steep import tariff or ”border tax.” Congressional Republicans have shown little support for raising tariffs. Rather than punishing companies that leave the U. S. GOP lawmakers prefer to reward those that stay, with lower corporate tax rates. Still, if Trump is determined to send a signal with targeted tariffs, he has the authority to impose them on his own. ”The president has a lot of power in this country,” said Simon Johnson of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a   think tank in Washington. ”It looks like President Trump wants to use some of that power relative to trade and particularly goods coming into the United States.” Johnson conceded that Trump’s tough talk could be merely a scare tactic, aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturers to stay put. He cautioned if Trump were to follow through on his tariff threat, it would raise prices for U. S. consumers. And other countries could respond with their own tariffs, discouraging U. S. exports. ”We need to have a conversation about how to have better jobs for more people in the United States,” Johnson said. ”But saying we’ll scrap the trading system or saying we’ll slap massive tariffs when we feel like it, that is actually back to the trading system of the 1930s. That did not have good overall economic outcomes either for America as a whole or for most American workers.” Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, agreed that the broad   tariffs of the 1930s were a drag on the U. S. economy and shouldn’t be repeated. Ross took a nuanced position on protectionist measures during his confirmation hearing this week. ”I am not  . I am ” Ross told the Senate Commerce Committee. ”But I am   trade. Not   that is to the disadvantage of the American worker and the American manufacturing community.” 2. Energy regulations, Trump has accused the outgoing Obama administration of stifling development of fossil fuel energy. While oil and natural gas production have surged over the last eight years, Trump insists that has happened despite government roadblocks. ”I will cancel   restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal, creating many millions of   jobs,” Trump said in his November video. ”That’s what we want. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.” The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency hold considerable sway over energy development through access to public lands and environmental regulations. Fossil fuel producers expect Trump’s team to relax some of the restrictions they faced during the Obama years. ”Just as he’s been able to impose additional regulations and burdens on industries, likewise a new administration or a new president can reverse that course or at least make them smart,   regulation and make them so they’re not so unduly burdensome,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute. The incoming Trump administration could also give a green light to energy infrastructure projects that were blocked by executive actions on Obama’s watch. ”Things like Keystone XL pipeline, Dakota Access pipeline,” Gerard said, ”we expect he’ll take some early action on a variety of those fronts to really free us up and allow us to achieve our energy potential.” 3. Affordable Care Act, The incoming administration says repealing and replacing Obamacare will be its ”first order of business.” And the House and Senate have already taken the first steps toward repealing large pieces of the health care law. But while doing away with Obamacare was always a popular applause line at Trump’s campaign rallies, the incoming administration has also promised to move carefully to avoid further disruption in an already fragile insurance market. ”Nobody is interested in pulling the rug out from under anybody,” Trump’s nominee for health secretary, Tom Price, said this week. ”We believe that it is absolutely imperative that individuals that have health coverage be able to keep health coverage.” The need for a viable replacement plan for Obamacare was underscored this week when the Congressional Budget Office warned that partial repeal without replacement would leave tens of millions of people uninsured and cause a spike in insurance premiums. Congressional Republicans are considering a variety of replacement plans and hope to reach a consensus on one at their retreat later this month. Trump, meanwhile, told the Washington Post he has nearly completed work on his own plan to replace Obamacare. He says he is keeping the details under wraps until Price is confirmed."
478,"”The Oath.” It sounds like the name of a book, and indeed, there have been many volumes with that name. But none more relevant this week than The Oath specified in the Constitution for the president of the United States when he takes office. The 35 words in Article II, Section I, of the Constitution read as follows: ”I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The presidential oath is the only one spelled out in the Constitution, and is the shortest. Interestingly, not included in the Constitution are the words used at the end by many presidents: ”So help me God.” For much of this country’s history, it was said that George Washington was the first to use those words, but that may be more fiction than fact. It turns out that the source for that story was a biographer who claimed to have attended the inauguration at age 6 and to have heard Washington say those words. But none of the very detailed contemporaneous accounts of the inauguration mention the first president adding ”so help me God,” and the writer who popularized the notion decades later, Washington Irving, was famous for making things up. Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath on Friday, and the   will use his personal, family Bible and the Lincoln Bible. It appears that swearing on a Bible has not been universal. In 1825, John Quincy Adams took the oath on a law volume containing a copy of the Constitution Theodore Roosevelt used no Bible in taking his first oath of office in 1901 and some sources report that after President Kennedy was assassinated, a Catholic Missal was used to swear in Lyndon Johnson because no Bible could be found for the quickly arranged ceremony on the plane before it took off from Dallas to return to Washington, D. C. On that day, Federal Judge Sarah Hughes swore in Johnson. The Constitution does not specify who will do those honors, though by tradition it is the chief justice, with another justice swearing in the vice president. On Friday, Justice Clarence Thomas will swear in Vice   Mike Pence. The trivia question for the day is: How many presidents were sworn in four times? The answer: Two. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and sworn in four times. And President Obama, through error and fluke, was sworn in four times. The error, in 2008, was the chief justice’s. He had memorized the oath, and in a written copy, marked the places where he would pause, and emailed the marked version to the designated congressional staffer handling these matters. But as Jeffrey Toobin reports in his book, The Oath, the card never made it to Obama’s staff. And at the ceremony things quickly went awry, with Obama interrupting where he thought the first pause would be, whereupon the chief justice, relying on his memory, became flustered and said some of the words in the wrong order. The ensuing blogosphere furor suggesting that Obama was not president provoked the White House counsel, Gregory Craig, into deciding that it would be the better part of valor to do the whole thing over again. So, two days later, Chief Justice Roberts, on his way home from work, stopped at the White House to do just that. Obama’s second inaugural oath was also administered twice because Jan. 20 fell on a Sunday, and by tradition when that happens, the new president has been sworn in privately on Sunday, and again for the public ceremony on Monday."
479,"Just over 10 weeks after the idea was first proposed in a Facebook post, tens of thousands of protesters are heading to the nation’s capital for the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday. Similar marches are planned in more than 600 other cities and towns around the world. But the largest is expected to take place in Washington, D. C. less than 24 hours into the presidency of Donald Trump. Organizers are expecting around 200, 000 marchers to gather on the National Mall. To accommodate the throng of visitors, Washington’s Metro subway system will add trains and open two hours early  —   at 5 a. m.  —   on Saturday. A   rally is expected to kick off the march near the National Museum of the American Indian. It will feature speeches by Angela Davis, Gloria Steinem and the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, as well as musical performances by artists including Janelle Monáe, Maxwell and the Indigo Girls. While the initial idea was formed as a protest of the presidential election results, organizers say the march is not all about Trump. Instead, they say they’re marching to remind the country about the need to expand and protect the rights of all women. Their demands span from paid family leave and affordable access to abortion and birth control to accountability in cases of police brutality and a higher minimum wage. Besides a debate over policy issues, the march has also generated a discussion about race and feminism. ”This march was initially put together by white women, and a lot of women of color felt they weren’t part of the conversation,” explains Carmen Perez, one of the march’s national organizers who has been highlighting challenges specifically facing women of color, including those in the immigrant and LGBT communities. There has been some pushback against the organizers’ emphasis on race, and some participants say they have decided to drop out of the march in protest. But Perez says she and other organizers hope discussing racial inequities will encourage marchers to find common cause with activists of different backgrounds. ”We can’t continue to work in isolation. We can’t continue to be ” she says. ”We have to make sure that we look up, that we begin to really coordinate our efforts.”"
480,"Mars has been on a lot of minds lately. The success of Andy Weir’s science fiction novel The Martian  —   and Ridley Scott’s subsequent film  —   helped rekindle interest in the Red Planet. And now, National Geographic’s TV series Mars is going even further in giving us a plausible look at what a Martian colony in the near future might look like. It’s perfect timing, then, for the publication of Martians Abroad. The novel is the latest from New York Times bestselling author Carrie Vaughn, best known for her Kitty Norville urban fantasy series. But rather than involving werewolves in   America, Martians Abroad sets its sights on the   solar system of tomorrow. That said, most of Martians Abroad  —   as the title states  —   doesn’t take place on Mars at all. The majority of the action takes place on Earth. Polly Newton is a typical teenager  —   that is, a typical teenager living on Mars’ Colony One, where her mother is the director of operations. She sends Polly and her twin brother Charles to Earth to attend Galileo Academy, a prestigious school full of the scions of the most powerful families in the solar system. Polly and Charles are the first Martians to enroll at Galileo, partly because Mars is less wealthy and seen as a bit of a hick planet. (Not that Polly wants to go to Earth in the first place  —   she’s forced to abandon an upcoming internship as a starship pilot, something she desires more than anything.) Polly’s reluctance turns to ambivalence after she and her cliquish classmates  —   with whom she has plenty of friction  —   have to defend themselves against mysterious peril at Galileo. A conspiracy is afoot at the school, and Polly and her peers are the target. It’s a setup familiar to any Harry Potter fan, but Vaughn keeps the intrigue at a leisurely simmer, giving Polly enough space to gradually cope with the travails of a new planet. Born and raised on Mars, her body is thin and frail compared to the muscular Earth kids who are accustomed to three times the gravity she’s used to. And another kind of gravity starts to bear on her: the responsibilities of becoming a good student, a good sister, and ultimately, a good leader. Despite being mostly set on Earth, Martians Abroad offers plenty of particulars about the potential for living on Mars in the future. In lavish, well researched detail, Vaughn paints a vivid portrait of technological advances and pioneering spirit. What she doesn’t do is slather her vision in grit. Countering the current trend of dystopian science fiction, Martians Abroad is hopeful, thoughtful, and fun. Polly’s universe isn’t a perfect one, but neither does Vaughn feel the need to put her into the most miserable situation imaginable the action, like the angst, is predominantly light. Even when Polly dreads going to Earth, which she assumes will be ”old, grubby, crowded, archaic, backward, stifling,” she strives to adapt and make the best of her situation. And the feminist overtones of the story are subtly handled. She’s surrounded by a futuristic society full of confident, capable women  —   whom she desperately wants to emulate. Martians Abroad is a refreshingly optimistic change of pace, but it makes no secret about its precedents. It’s an open homage to Robert Heinlein’s juveniles, as his novels with adolescent protagonists were called  —   and one of those juveniles in particular, 1963’s Podkayne of Mars. The parallels are numerous. Heinlein’s heroine goes by the nickname Poddy. Her brother’s name is Clark. And they’re both sent abroad from their Martian home. It’s this loving,   vibe that helps make Martians Abroad so endearing. Harking back to a more innocent time  —   but without downplaying the tribulations of contemporary adolescence  —   Vaughn has crafted a tribute to the power of science fiction, evoking a giddy sense of wonder and adventure about space exploration, technology, and human ingenuity. And, yes, even about being young."
481,"Two famous ancient structures in the city of Palmyra have been destroyed by ISIS forces, Syria’s antiquities chief says. The Tetrapylon and the facade of the city’s Roman theater have both been almost completely demolished, the official says, according to NPR’s Alison Meuse. ”Activist Khaled   who is from Palmyra, shared satellite imagery to Twitter, which appears to confirm the scale of the damage,” Alison reports. ”The face of the Roman theater is a pile of rubble and only four of the Tetrapylon’s 16 columns appear to be standing.” Alison notes that this is the second time over the course of Syria’s   civil war that the Islamic State has seized control of Palmyra. ISIS first captured the ancient desert city in 2015. The extremist group held it for more than a year before the Syrian government seized it back  —   and then lost it again last month. The first time ISIS claimed Palmyra, they reportedly slaughtered men, women and children in the streets. They beheaded the    scholar who was the director of antiquities in the city. And they devastated the UNESCO World Heritage Site’s antiquities and monuments, unleashing what NPR’s Frank Langfitt called, ”an orgy of demolition.” ”Using dynamite, fire, bulldozers and pickaxes, the wrecking crew targeted      temples, monuments and stone statues,” Frank wrote last year. ISIS often claims it destroys ancient sites because it considers the   art works heretical. But the group reportedly loots antiquities for profit, and as Washington Post reporter Liz Sly told Morning Edition in 2015, ISIS gets ”masses of publicity every time they blow up or destroy something that is valued by the world.” When government troops recaptured Palmyra in 2016, they discovered the extent of the damage. The famed Temple of Bel was blown to pieces. The Temple of Baalshamin was destroyed. Artifacts in the museum were smashed. The iconic Arch of Triumph was in ruins. After the last ISIS occupation of Palmyra, NPR’s Kevin Beesley noted that while the damage to the city’s historical sites was massive, ”some of the major structures remain.” For instance, he said, the ancient Roman theater was still standing  —   but now that, too, has been destroyed."
482,"  women are more likely to be infected with HIV than other women, and many don’t know it. So public health officials and advocates are trying to get the word out about PrEP,   prophylaxis. It’s a daily medication that helps prevent HIV infection. ”This is all about empowering women, especially black women, by giving them sexual health options and also embarking on a path of research,” says Linda Blout, president of Black Women’s Health Imperative, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D. C. The organization is helping to launch the capital’s first citywide program to promote use of PrEP among women. The medication, which is sold under the brand name Truvada, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012 to prevent HIV infection. Research conducted in Africa, where HIV transmission in heterosexual couples is common, found that it is effective in preventing HIV infection when one partner is HIV positive. If the daily pill is taken consistently, it can reduce the risk of HIV infection by up to 92 percent. In the U. S. the first priority was to get Truvada to men who have sex with men, who accounted for 83 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the drug isn’t just for men, says Dr. Eugene McCray, director of the CDC’s Division of   Prevention.   women represent the highest percentage of HIV infections among women, McCray says. ”That is alarming, and we at the CDC are working to address the issue by spreading knowledge. But in order for us to do that, we also need to encourage   women to get tested.” According to the CDC,   women make up 62 percent of women diagnosed with HIV in the U. S. White women account for 18 percent, with Latinas at 14 percent. McCray says the CDC is planning in the upcoming months to produce campaigns targeted at black women that educate them on their risk and how PrEP can be used as a preventive measure. Women in the nation’s capital face a higher risk because about 2 percent of residents are already infected with HIV, making exposure more likely. In addition, Blout says, social issues like incarceration and poverty tend to increase the risk of HIV within the black community. In addition, Blout also says there is a lack of empowerment among black women to ask their partners to either get tested or wear a condom. McCray agrees. ”Many women do not know the status of their partners and they are weary of asking them to get tested,” he says. ”A lot of the issue has to do with misinformation or simply not being informed at all,” says Nancy Mahon, executive director of the MAC AIDS Fund, which is providing financial support for the effort. ”When it comes to PrEP, many people still don’t even know it exists, especially heterosexuals. Many black women we’ve spoken to felt puzzled about why we were addressing how this drug is available to them. A component of the issue is that the drug is hard to obtain without a doctor.” One of the challenges in getting women educated about PrEP is that primary care providers such as   often aren’t aware of it. That problem is compounded with   patients who don’t always get regular doctor visits and preventive care. ”The other problem here is that it generally takes five to 10 years for consumers to become socially acquainted with any drug,” McCray says. ”That’s why we’re trying to push the information associated with PrEP to the communities in dire need of it.” The push includes a D. C. Department of Health ad campaign that says: ”#PrEPforher: Dominate your sex life.” ”Women simply don’t know the drug exists,” Blout said. ”When they eventually do find out about it, they’re angry at their doctors for not telling them about it. It’s really about giving women the agency to protect their health.” That includes information on using condoms or other methods to ensure safe sex, especially among married couples. ”These are all factors that increase the exposure to HIV for black women,” Blout said. According to Blout and Mahon, much of the program’s effort will concentrate on getting health care providers and public health clinics   about the drug. Continuing education will be provided to health officials and providers in D. C. this year. ”That’s the starting point,” Blout says. The program was officially introduced on Dec. 1 by D. C. Mayor Muriel Bowser as part of her     plan for combating the HIV epidemic in the capital. The plan’s name entails having 90 percent of D. C. residents being aware of their status, 90 percent of D. C. residents who are diagnosed with HIV seeking treatment, another 90 percent who are already under treatment achieving viral load suppression and a 50 percent overall decrease in new HIV cases. The program faces its biggest obstacle right as it rolls out, Blout says. ”Stigma is our hardest hurdle.” Mahon agrees. ”This is a problem when it comes to PrEP and women, because it’s highly been stigmatized as a ’gay drug’ or an easy way to promiscuity.” Outreach to women and health care providers will, she hopes, ”get the open conversation going with a group of people who don’t even know they need to have this particular conversation.”"
483,"One of the   overseas successes for Disney is grounded in a   story out of India. The film, released in late December, is called Dangal  —   Hindi for ”wrestling competition.” It follows two sisters born in the highly traditional north Indian state of Haryana  —   a place where women often veil their faces and where in 2015 India’s prime minister launched a campaign against a longstanding practice of terminating a pregnancy because the fetus is female. With the coaching of their father, the girls  —   Geeta and Babita  —   grew up to become   wrestlers. In the past four weeks Dangal has reportedly become the   grossing film in   cinema, earning more than $70 million in ticket sales, according to the Bollywood box office site koimoi. com. The film is being distributed in other locations, including North America, where it’s passed $10 million in revenues. The movie might never have been made had it not been for Divya Rao. Then part of Disney India’s creative team, Rao had a passing familiarity with the wrestling family. An article she saw in a newspaper sports section stuck with her. At her urging, Disney picked up the story, teamed with Indian writer and director Niteshi Tiwari and produced the runaway hit. The star power of one of Bollywood’s most popular actors, Aamir Khan, helps account for the movie’s powerful draw. Khan plays Geeta and Babita’s potbellied father, former wrestling champion Mahavir Singh Phogat, whose youthful dreams of gold medal glory had eluded him. Early in the film, he tells his pregnant wife, ”What I couldn’t do, our son will. He will win gold for our country.” That anticipated baby boy turns out to be a girl, and Phogat would eventually have three more daughters. Those initially dashed hopes are reignited years later when his eldest two girls beat two boys to a pulp for calling them names. Realizing their athletic potential, Phogat flouts taboos about women competing in the sporting arena and sets about molding Geeta and Babita into wrestling champions. All of India knows how this story ends: Geeta and Babita respectively took a gold and silver medal at the 2010 Commonwealth Games and have been winning international accolades ever since. But what intrigued the film’s   and director Nitesh Tiwari is: ”Why in India is there so much bias against having a girl child?” ”Why is there so much desperation only to want a boy?” Tiwari asks. ”The movie aims at trying to change this mindset  —   that a girl is as a beautiful a gift of God as a boy.” The film sprawls across Haryana’s rural landscape and sparkles with engaging characters, including a nephew who narrates the film and provides comic relief. Tiwari says the creators consciously deployed plenty of humor because he says the ”issues are heavy,” and the ”audience should be enlightened as well as entertained.” But Tiwari also hewed closely to a delicate family dynamic, including a sometimes contentious relationship between Geeta and her father. ”And those fights still happen between the father and the daughter,” Tiwari jokes. India was perhaps primed for a film that grappled with the struggles of girls. The treatment of young women has been a central theme in the country’s politics and media in recent years  —   forced by horrific and   incidents like the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi in 2012. Indian film critic and journalist Anna M. M. Vetticad says Indian   are eager to see women on the screen portrayed in a new light. She says the success of Dangal is excellent news ”for those who believe that the hero stalking the heroine, extreme objectification of women, all of the things which have been Hindi film staples so far, are not the only thing that the entire audience wants.” The film’s release also follows the 2016 Rio Olympics, where women on India’s national team won the country’s only two medals  —   including female wrestler Sakshi Malik, also from Haryana, who brought home a bronze. Over a   athletic career, Indian badminton champion Damayanti Tambay says she senses a shift in her country, with female athletes venerated in a way they haven’t been before. She says the female Olympians returning from Rio were welcomed home as ”goddesses.” Babita Kumari Phogat, one of those Olympians, credits her father for getting her and her sisters ”out from under the veil” that cloaks many girls in Haryana. The patriarch of the first family of Indian wresting has in fact trained all four of his daughters in the sport and contributed to Haryana’s reputation as a breeding ground for India’s best wrestlers. But the family’s biggest victory, Babita says, is inspiring parents to believe in their daughters. This is a victory for the girls and women who were kept behind those veils, she says, and the victims of ”female feticide in Haryana.”"
484,"Barack Obama took to the podium in the press briefing room on Wednesday, the    day of the first black presidency, and after eight years of that becoming increasingly normal, the moment made it all start to seem strange again. So this whole black      thing really happened, huh?  It wasn’t that long ago that the idea of a black man in the White House was a side detail in a movie about the apocalypse, a righteous fantasy in an implausible TV thriller, or the   premise of Dave Chappelle skits. And it was a while into the primaries in 2008 before even black Democrats, who had been loyal to Bill and Hillary Clinton, thought he was viable enough to take seriously. And even when they did, lots of people openly worried that to elect him was to invite his assassination. But there he was on Wednesday, a dude from the South Side of Chicago, sporting one of the sharpest caesars in the history of the planet, trying one last time to calm the nerves of a jittery, divided nation. And President Obama seemed confident that the Oval Office would not be, once again, occupied by an unbroken parade of white dudes. ”We’re going to have a woman president,” Obama said at the presser. ”We’re going to have a Latino president. And we’ll have a Jewish president, a Hindu president. You know, who knows who we’re going to have? I suspect we’ll have a whole bunch of mixed up presidents at some point that nobody really knows what to call them.” Now, Barack Obama enters private life once more, this time as a towering historical figure. Over the last few weeks on the Code Switch podcast, we’ve tried to game out what has happened to race in America over the last eight years, and what Obama’s presidency might mean for race relations in the future. What we heard from our guests was that race shaped both support and dissent for Obama, raised the stakes of his success, exposed the constraints of his office, and made the whiteness at the center of American politics permanently visible. All presidencies matter, but none in modern American life will have similarly animated, reflected or collided with so many of the   cultural and social forces at play in the country. Obama’s faith in the inevitability of more American presidents of color was a good example of what Tressie McMillan Cottom might have called Obama’s misplaced faith in white folks. Cottom, a sociologist at Virginia Commonwealth University and one our podcast guests, underlined this paradox for us: Obama’s optimism about the country’s capacity to overcome its racial divisions  —   a byproduct of his remarkable personal story  —   made it possible for him to be elected. But, she said, it also led him to underestimate the vehemence of the opposition to his administration, which was punctuated by U. S. Rep. Joe Wilson’s ( . C.) 2009 outburst at a joint session of Congress. ”I still had a little bit of innocence left about how deference for the office of president could protect Barack Obama,” she said. ”But to think that in the face of all that pageantry that you could still scream ’You lie!’ and wag your finger at the president of the United States, that was probably the end of the last shred of innocence I had about how this was going to work. Then I said, ’Oh, this is going to work just like everything else works in this country.’ ” What did Wilson’s rude disrespect have to do with race? The architects and cheerleaders of the Republican party’s policies are, with a few exceptions, white people. The voters they turn out in midterm and presidential elections are, with a few exceptions, white people. Their opposition to the president and to Democrats didn’t need to be racist in order to be racialized. Those demographic facts were true long before Obama, but his presidency and the monochromatic opposition party arrayed in lockstep against him certainly seemed to cast those dynamics into sharper relief. There was no way to unsee it. Not that folks didn’t try. As we pressed these issues in the podcast conversations, I kept thinking about Ray and Arlene, an older, white Montana couple my colleague Shereen Marisol Meraji interviewed in the weeks before the election. They had settled into a comfortable,   retirement, so they weren’t competing with anyone for jobs, and there were few immigrants, of either the documented or undocumented variety, in their virtually   town. Yet, they said that the dangers presented by immigrants and Muslims, and a nagging fear that the culture was changing in ways they didn’t care for, was the most important issue to them. But they weren’t racist, they told Shereen. And they said that they never thought about race  —   that America didn’t have any problems with race. That was, until Obama came along and started making everything about race. That last bit, to me, seemed impossible to believe. But Whitney Dow, the creator of The Whiteness Project, told us right before the election that he wasn’t surprised at all to hear someone say that. ”[When] these guys said, ’Well, I never think about race, but now, every time I look up and see the president, I have to think about race,’ it’s a reminder about this tension [between] how you see yourself and what you know yourself to be,” Dow told us. He’d said he’d felt some of the same disorientation whenever he got a Christmas card with the First Family’s picture on it. The family in the White House had always looked like people Ray and Arlene might ostensibly know. Now that they didn’t, the whole thing caused folks like them a lot of disquiet, which they had a hard time articulating. That discomfort wasn’t always so apparent. Obama was massively popular when he was sworn in in 2009 Americans, even those who didn’t vote for him, seemed to be feeling good about the historic presidency  —   and, for some, good about themselves for feeling good about it. But there came a moment just a few months into his first term when the notion of a black man as president became real. That’s when Obama waded into a minor controversy around an ugly encounter between a noted Harvard historian (and, importantly, a black guy) and a local police officer, who was white. ”I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Obama said. He went on: ”But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of   and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” It was a question about a   that in an alternate universe a President John McCain probably wouldn’t have been asked about. It was an answer that in that alternate universe President McCain certainly wouldn’t have given. It was an    moment, but nonetheless surreal  —   the most powerful official in the country candidly acknowledging that capricious, unnecessary police contact was a fact of life in communities of color. And it was that moment, as Jamelle Bouie of Slate pointed out to us on the podcast, that Obama’s approval rating among white Americans took a nosedive. No one knew it at the time, but the Harvard fiasco would be Obama’s   foray into issues about race in America, and race and policing in particular. If Americans were scandalized by his remarks about that incident, it’s little wonder that his responses to stories like the shooting death of Trayvon Martin would be so polarizing. The ”beer summit” that followed was a trifle, one of those weird, facile ”conversations” that we too often insist upon following some racial controversy. But it laid bare the tensions between the office of the presidency and the blackness of the man in it, and augured how difficult it would be for him, and for all of us, to easily reconcile those two ideas. Yep, this black presidency was really happening. If Obama’s blackness mussed up white folks’ notions of the presidency and their relationship to it, his blackness also complicated the ways black folks critiqued the White House. ”I’m not the president of Black America,” Obama famously said in 2012 when pressed during his   campaign on issues of race and inequality. ”I’m the president of the United States of America.” And even while his approval ratings remained extraordinarily high among black folks, those numbers belied a more complicated story. For one, he was almost certainly being judged against the alternative the Republican brand is radioactive among black people, and so a dizzying array of black political inclinations is flatly expressed as electoral support for Democrats. That had all sorts of effects on Democratic politics. Even when black lawmakers disagreed with Obama, he was often much more popular than they were in their own districts, and by criticizing him they ran the risk of being seen like they were enabling his opponents. ”If Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,” Emanuel Cleaver, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said about black unemployment in 2011. ”There is a   reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.” Here’s a thought experiment: Would the rise of the Movement for Black Lives have occurred had Obama never been president? The question gets to the matter of how much the current state of race relations in the country lies at his feet. Some months ago, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the Harvard historian, pointed me to an idea from political theory called ”the revolution of rising expectations.” It holds that people don’t take to the streets when things are at their worst, but when things are starting to get better  —   just not fast enough. This idea is often used to explain the outbreak of riots among black folks in the 1960s the passage of civil rights legislation meant that people could finally envision the prospect of equality and at the same time see that it remained distressingly out of reach. The organizers of the loosely affiliated groups commonly lumped into Black Lives Matter were mostly millennials who were invested in complicating ideas about blackness. They rejected the respectability politics that older folks like President Obama would often invoke. They explicitly interlaced their calls for racial justice with other causes: sexual orientation gender class. And yet, he was the first presidential candidate for whom many of these newly activated people had ever voted. Obama’s presence, a sign of the gains that black folks had made in American life, had raised their expectations. It’s fair to say that many of the most heated racial debates of the Obama era were neither loosed by him nor coincidental to him. ”[As] much as symbolic thresholds matter  —   at lower frequencies where people live  —   the old race and class problems of structural inequality, normalized stigma, and everyday brutalization, especially at the hands of police, persist,” Nikhil Singh, one of our podcast guests, wrote in 2015. ”Mass protest against the impunity with which black men and women . .. have been killed recently, are bringing the contradictions of the    era to a head. Obama does not deserve credit for this, but he is a symptom.” So what will Obama mean to Americans and race going forward? Here are some wild prognostications of my own, since you asked: Outside of the strictures of the White House, Obama will become more pointed about issues of racial justice. He will probably travel a similar trajectory to   black figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali, both of whom became more beloved, particularly by white Americans, as the details of their battles against justice receded from memory. (Like them, Obama will then be held up as both an example of black excellence  —   and when useful, invoked as a cudgel.) And in the retelling of the last eight years, we will impose upon him a simplicity that was never even close to true. In the   I can’t help thinking about that saying the old folks have: You have to be twice as good and run twice as fast to get half as far. That’s either a lament about the drag of racism on black life or a   set of instructions on how to deal with it, depending on who’s saying it and when. Obama got very, very far, very, very fast  —   farther than all but a few dozen white men in the history of the republic. Everyone in that cohort arrived with a tremendous amount of   literal and political capital, and exceedingly good fortune. Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, a friend joked that the ”twice as good” maxim had been based on extremely conservative arithmetic. There’s no way a black candidate with Trump’s temperament or backstory, no matter how exponentially better he or she was, could be a credible candidate for national office. Perhaps. It’s also probably true that no black candidate without Barack Obama’s specific temperament and backstory could have been a credible candidate for the nation’s highest office. Looking back with us on the podcast, Jamelle Bouie of Slate wondered if, when it came down to it, the only person who could have been the first black president of the United States was Barack Obama. And still, his patriotism was questioned. His citizenship was questioned. The litigation of his legitimacy  —   of his Americanness  —   in the end, may have been the blackest thing about the first black presidency. ”Putting Obama’s politics aside . .. he is an   educated constitutional lawyer, who seems to be a moral and upright American example in every way you can imagine,” Bouie told Shereen and me. ”If Barack Obama isn’t good enough for some of these people, then none of us are.”"
485,"For many pregnant women, understanding what seafood is safe and healthy, and what should be avoided because of mercury concerns comes with a lot of  . In part, that’s because the federal government’s advice on the matter, first issued in 2004, has long been criticized as unclear. That guidance has included advice on how much seafood to eat, and which species pregnant and nursing women should avoid over concerns about mercury contamination. But critics say the government advisory has done more harm than good, scaring many pregnant and nursing women (and let’s be real  —   pretty much everyone else) away from eating seafood altogether. The problem is real. According to a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration, the agency analyzed fish consumption data from more than 1, 000 pregnant women in the U. S. and found that 21 percent of them ate no fish whatsoever in the previous month. And those who did eat fish consumed far less than recommended by the Dietary Guidelines: Some 50 percent ate less than 2 ounces a week and 75 percent ate less than 4 ounces. This week, in the waning days of the Obama administration, the FDA and Environmental Protection Agency issued an update to the advice, listing more than 60 species in a chart that ranks fish as a ”best choice,” ”good choice” and ”choices to avoid.” The goal is to make it easier for    to feel confident about the type of seafood they include in their diets. The new advice recommends consumers choose a variety of fish to eat. And it comes with an    illustration of what an appropriate portion size should be: 4 ounces for an adult, the full size of your palm and 2 ounces for children aged    —   which is more like the inside cup of your palm. And while expectant mothers have long been warned to stay away from shark, King mackerel, swordfish and tilefish from the Gulf of Mexico, now there’s three new species on the list of what to avoid: marlin, orange roughy, and bigeye tuna. But, not everyone is thrilled with the new advice. ”You can put this in with the Chelsea Manning pardon, it’s that controversial,” says Dr. Tom Brenna, a professor of human nutrition at Cornell University and a member of the government’s 2015 Dietary Guideline Committee. Brenna and other critics say the new advice doesn’t always jibe with the agency’s own scientific findings. For instance, a 2014 report from the FDA looked at the net effects of eating commercial fish during pregnancy on the neurodevelopment of growing babies. The report found it would be safe to eat 61 ounces of halibut a week. (That’s about 15   servings.) But the new advisory from the FDA suggests that halibut be limited to just once a week. ”They’re completely ignoring their own [2014] report,” Brenna says. ”It’s a terrible, awful message. They’ve ignored the nutrition science and at best, they’re ranking the amount of mercury.” And Brenna argues that splitting tuna into three different categories muddles an already complex message even further. Bigeye tuna (often known as ahi) falls on the ”avoid” list, while albacore and yellowfin are listed as ”good choices,” and canned light tuna, which includes skipjack, is listed as a ”best choice.” ”People won’t see there’s a difference between the types of tuna, they’ll only see that tuna is on the list,” Brenna says. Meanwhile, others worried the new advice might prompt pregnant women and small kids to eat too much tuna. ”If pregnant women or small kids followed the new advice from the government on mercury and tuna[,] they could easily consume more mercury than is safe for developing brains,” Lisa Lefferts, a senior scientist with The Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement. In an email to NPR, FDA spokesperson Peter Cassell says it’s important to note that this guidance is targeted to certain women and young children. ”We took a cautious and highly protective approach in determining which fish belonged in each category and are comfortable with the limits we are providing.” While mercury looms large when we’re talking about pregnant women and seafood, it’s not the only contaminant of concern. The new   chart lists both wild striped bass and bluefish as ”good choices,” meaning one serving a week is OK. But striped bass and bluefish on the East Coast have been known to have high levels of PCBs, which can build up in the fatty tissues of fish and bring health risks to humans, says Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s why, to cite one example, depending the fish’s size, Maryland’s consumption advisory recommends women limit meals of striped bass to as little as one serving a month  —   far less than the new   advisory recommends. The FDA maintains that its final consumption recommendations were based on rigorous scientific analysis. Agency spokesman Cassell says the FDA believes the recommendations will instill confidence, not uncertainty. Brenna disagrees. ”I think the advice they’re giving is not based on the evidence in their own detailed report,” he says, ”and that it confuses everyone.” Clare   is a journalist based in San Diego who covers food policy and sustainability issues. "
486,"Last year, Georgia’s former governor, Sonny Perdue, called up a farmer named Gary Paulk for some advice about planting blackberry bushes. Paulk thought it was a prank. ”I picked up the phone and he said, ’Gary, how you doing? This is Sonny Perdue,’ ” Paulk recalls. ”And I said, ’Yeah right, and I’m Mickey Mouse.’ ” Paulk says he apologized when he realized it actually was Perdue on the line. Perdue is now Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of agriculture, and Paulk expects that he’ll keep calling farmers for advice, and maybe just conversation. The    Perdue has deep roots in agriculture. He’s the son of a farmer and ran three businesses in the industry. Along with a farming and garden supply company, and a shipping company that operates through the Savannah port, Perdue ran AGrowstar, a company that buys and sells grain throughout the southeast. Perdue, a veterinarian by training, joked that the dirty nature of job qualified him to be governor. While in office he regularly visited clinics to spay and neuter cats and dogs. ”I don’t get to do this every day,” Perdue told a local paper. ”When you have a governor who’s a veterinarian and can draw a little bit of attention to the issue, it’s still very important.” When Perdue was Georgia’s governor, Paulk, who grows muscadine grapes, which are often used to make a sweet Southern wine, served on Perdue’s agriculture advisory commission. ”He took a very   approach to it,” Paulk says. ”He took it very serious, and took our advice to him very seriously.” As Paulk describes it, his advice to Perdue as governor was similar to what organized farm groups want Perdue to accomplish today, as head of the USDA: Loosen regulations, increase public awareness of agriculture, and boost trade. ”He comes from the farm and he’s very familiar with agriculture and how important it is to not just Georgia’s economy but the American economy,” says Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation and a native Georgian himself. Duvall, who was previously head of the Georgia Farm Bureau, says Perdue has an ”  policy” when it comes to farmers. But while farmers like Paulk and DuVall praise their former governor, environmental and consumer safety groups have a harsher assessment. Neill Herring, a   environmental lobbyist in Georgia, says Perdue focused on a certain kind of people in rural areas: ones with money. ”He was focused on people who were comfortable,” says Herring. ”Those were his constituents, those were the people who he aimed to please, and I think he did.” As governor, Perdue was caught in a more than a few scandals involving his businesses and personal property deals. He convinced the state legislature to spend millions on a fishing museum just miles from his home that hasn’t attracted as many visitors as expected. The New York Times called it a symbol of wasteful spending. Perdue attracted national attention during a drought in 2007, when he held a prayer for rain on the steps of the Georgia state capitol. ”I’m here today to appeal to you and to all Georgians, and all people who believe in the power of prayer, to ask God to shower our state, our region, our nation with the blessings of water,” he said. After the announcement of Perdue’s nomination, national environmental groups unleashed a chorus of criticism. ”It seems like he’s well poised to gut agriculture regulations that protect independent farmers, workers and consumers so that agribusiness can continue to prioritize profits above food safety, farmer livelihoods, worker safety and the environment,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch. Duvall says the criticism of Perdue is simply wrong. ”I have hunted with Sonny Perdue,” says Duvall, ”He’s just a really good guy, and I know that he appreciates the natural resources that we have in this country.”"
487,"Standing on the steps of the U. S. Supreme Court on Wednesday afternoon, Simon Tam, the bassist and frontman of the   rock group The Slants, was fired up. He’d just watched as most of the eight justices questioned whether the government should back his right to use his band’s name, which is a racial slur. ”If the government really truly cared about fighting racist messages they would have canceled the registrations for numerous white supremacist groups before they even approached our case,” he told a crowd of reporters. Tam had just emerged from the oral argument for Lee v. Tam, in which a representative of the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office insisted that Tam couldn’t register the band’s name because it was disparaging toward Asians. Tam maintains that the whole point of his band  —   and his advocacy  —   is to empower   and subvert stereotypes. His case, which has become inextricably linked to the battle over the Washington Redskins name, has put some   activists in a complicated position. While they’re inclined to stand behind a fellow advocate pushing for equity for   they wonder: At what cost? Would aligning themselves with The Slants put them in league with people pushing to protect a name that’s offensive to Native Americans? Tam says he sees his trademark effort as another form of activism as paving the way for others who want to reclaim words through registered trademarks. ”We grew up and the notion of having slanted eyes was always considered a negative thing,” he said. ”Kids would pull their eyes back in a   gesture to make fun of us . .. I wanted to change it to something that was powerful, something that was considered beautiful or a point of pride instead.” Tam said he’s had a lot of time to think about ”what ifs.” Like, what if the case was used to support the Redskins? ”At the end of the day, I’ve become more comfortable with that notion,” Tam said. ”Because we’ve been so obsessed with punishing villains like [Redskins owner] Dan Snyder, we don’t realize that there is this impact on bystanders. Those bystanders, in this case, would be the marginalized groups who have been trying to get their own trademarks registered. And to me, it’s more important to protect those communities than to worry about one racist guy getting his football team.” (Snyder contends that his team’s name is not racist and that it actually honors Native Americans.) The communities Tam is talking about protecting include the biker organization Dykes on Bikes, which won federal registration for its name but not its logo, and Heeb media, a Jewish publication that won registration for its newspaper but not its clothing products. But his advocacy strategy is exactly what concerns some activists. While groups spanning the ideological spectrum including the Cato Institute, the Asian American Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed amicus briefs backing The Slants, a small cohort of activists isn’t so sure. ”[Tam] casts himself as a First Amendment hero in a way that doesn’t really make sense given what is really at stake,” Robert Chang, executive director of Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, wrote in an email. Chang’s group filed an amicus brief in support of the trademark office. ”And he ignores . .. the impact that his case will have on the   effort of Native American activists with regard to the Washington football team. In much of his public commentary, he focuses on how he thinks the law was applied unfairly to him, in a racially discriminatory manner. He could have limited his legal theories and legal challenge to focus on that.” Instead, Chang said, Tam’s trying to invalidate the law ”that permits the government to deny federal registration, and the government’s imprimatur, to the Washington football team.” Cecelia Chang, legal director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) said that the uptick in racially and religiously motivated hate crimes over the last year underscores what’s at stake. ”There’s a real world cost to normalizing that kind of speech, particularly in a country of immigrants,” she said. In an amicus brief she filed on behalf of AAJC, which supports neither party, Chang acknowledged that many of the people behind the brief are fans of The Slants and generally ”support efforts to reclaim and   derogatory terms, but believe that socially progressive reclamation movements are not an excuse to open federal trademark registration to vile epithets and hateful marks.” The justices are expected to issue a ruling by June. Just hours after he left the Supreme Court, Simon Tam and his band were at a gathering in northwest Washington, D. C. Tam told a small crowd about his journey into   activism and on to the nation’s highest court. Then he and his band members broke out some instruments. They began to play a new song from their recent album. They call it, ”The Band Who Must Not Be Named.”"
488,"There’s no room for ambivalence when you perform Bob Dylan’s ”Masters Of War.” Among the earliest major contributions by our current Nobel laureate in literature  —   first published as sheet music in Broadside magazine in 1963, and then included on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that spring  —   the song is a blunt object, liturgical in its cadence and damning in its censure. That’s true even on this gracefully bobbing live version by Charles Lloyd  The Marvels, with Lucinda Williams on guest vocals. Lloyd is a tenor saxophonist and flutist long associated with a    agenda: He lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, moving in a bohemian circle that included Dylan. Near the end of that decade he found great success as a jazz mystic among hippie seekers at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Williams, who happens to be playing the Fillmore this Friday and Saturday, hails more from   and rugged country, but her connection with Lloyd doesn’t feel arbitrary. She had already played ”Masters Of War” with the saxophonist and his band a few times before this performance, which took place in late November, on Lloyd’s home turf in Santa Barbara, Calif. The two artists have different relationships with the song, which lends a small but useful tension to their interactions. Lloyd, who played an instrumental version on his recent album I Long To See You, has said that he first connected with the song by way of the folk singer Odetta. Her take on ”Masters Of War,” on the 1965 album Odetta Sings Dylan, is indignant but calm, above the fray. Williams, more of a hardboiled   takes the rage and spite of the lyrics and goes to town. When she sings, ”You ain’t worth the blood that runs through your veins,” you can almost feel the withering heat of her glare. And, like Dylan, she puts raw feeling into the delivery of the words, making them bristle and growl. (A reviewer for the Santa Barbara Independent called her performance of the song here ”a climax of purposeful protest. ”) As for the other members of the band  —   Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Leisz on pedal steel, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums  —   they keep the song grounded but light on its feet. Frisell, who has had ”Masters Of War” in his own repertory for years, turns his peekaboo chords and arpeggios into a running commentary, while Harland finds room to buckle and thrash. Just as there’s a clear message in the song, about the cynical profit motive of the   complex, there’s some obvious intentionality behind the timing of this track’s release. Williams and Lloyd see fit to let Dylan’s words do the talking  —   up to the bitter end, which has the narrator standing and gloating over a metaphorical grave. As Dylan put it in a conversation with Nat Hentoff, for the liner notes of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan: ”I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one.” ”Masters Of War” is available now via Blue Note."
489,"John Marboe is a Lutheran pastor who grew up admiring his local garbage collectors in Alexandria, Minn. When times were lean for his family, he decided to take on some shifts hauling trash. At StoryCorps in Minneapolis, Marboe tells his    daughter, Charlie, that he’s been hauling trash since she was about 8. ”Did I ever tell you the story about when I pulled up to an intersection and there was a mother and her little children and her littlest boy just started waving and I was waving,” he says. ”And the mother looked up at me with this kind of concerned look and then grabbed her son. It was almost as though, ’No, that’s not something you’re going to want to be.’ ” ”I think, to me, as your kid, I’m not embarrassed when people say like, ’Oh, what does your dad do?’ And I’m like, ’Oh, he’s a pastor, he’s a garbage man,’ ” Charlie says. Marboe, a Lutheran pastor in St. Paul, Minn. is also an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, teaching youth and spirituality, and he received his Ph. D. in mythological studies in 2011. He took the trash collector job because he was unemployed and needed to support his family. Marboe keeps hauling trash because it’s important. ”I don’t know if I want to say it’s more important, but it’s differently important. You’re doing something for people, and I think especially, I’m aware of that when it’s hot out, when it’s really smelly, when there are a lot of maggots,” he says. ”But as a garbage man, I probably know more about people on my route than their pastor does  —   because their trash tells a story.” Marboe remembers once he found a note written on the back of an envelope. It said, ”I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I’ve tried and I just can’t stand the pain anymore.” ”I looked at it and I thought, ’You know what? I’m paid here to take out the trash, not to intervene in people’s lives based on what I find.’ As a pastor, all I could do was say a prayer,” he says. Charlie’s first sentence was ’It all goes,’ and that, Marboe says, has special relevance to trash collection and life. ”’It all goes.’ And to do the trash, it’s sort of a reminder that every small thing that we ever do for other people is valuable, even if it might be really small and unnoticed,” he says. Audio produced for Morning Edition by Liyna Anwar. StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps. org."
490,"Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch team is in our fourth chair this week as we start by trying to make sense of all our reactions to HBO’s new drama The Young Pope. The cardinals! The intrigue! The smoking! The . .. unexpected animal cameos! It’s a really interesting show that has us a little perplexed in places, so please join us as we try to figure out whether we like it or not. We do like Hell Or High Water, the 2016 modern western starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges. Even if you’re not a fan of westerns or movies about bank robbers, it’s grounded by great performances both large and small, and it intersects with current financial policy issues in a very interesting way. As always, we close the show with what’s making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about another entry in his March To The Oscars, Glen is happy about a comic and a Netflix show, Gene is happy about a comedy series he also found on Netflix, and I am happy about a   special  —   which is also on Netflix. (These are the coincidences that arise when you don’t talk in advance about who’s happy about what, by the way. It wasn’t, like, Be Happy About Netflix Week.) Find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter: the show, me, Stephen, Glen, Gene, producer Jessica, and producer emeritus and pal for life Mike."
491,"xXx, in case you’ve forgotten, is the other action series that Vin Diesel started with director Rob Cohen (Stealth, Alex Cross) in the cultural desert of the early aughts, promptly abandoned, and then limped back to (after producers churned out one or more   installments). On his sabbaticals from the xXx and Fast  Furious franchises, Diesel  —   a performer often hailed as a ”visionary” by impartial observer Vin Diesel  —   lent his visionary skills as producer and star to more personal (and visionary!) genre flicks like A Man Apart, The Chronicles of Riddick and The Last Witch Hunter. Those all tanked, but the Fast films got progressively sillier and more popular once Diesel, the prodigal star, returned. So what does he need with xXx: Return of Xander Cage, a   featuring visual effects, jokes, and a grating   sensibility that even in 1999 would have felt dated? It’s got time for neither definite articles nor the suggestion that anything could be more totally extreme or subversive than a   action flick about a    man in jorts on a skateboard. Diesel’s protracted reign as an action star has always been a puzzle. His burly frame is most persuasive as a   platform for tattoos. He does not run or fight very fast, or furiously, or convincingly. (And the stunt double or doubles who perform his highway skateboarding,   skiing, and, um,   stunts here do not much resemble him, at least not in the cold, clear light of of IMAX.) He is as convincing an action hero as Sir Roger Moore was,   years ago. Sure, Diesel looks a little sturdier. But it doesn’t much matter that by Diesel’s present age, Moore’s body was already being held together only by a delicate exoskeleton of talcum powder and hairspray. Diesel’s character, Xander Cage (!) knows that hairspray  —   like ”suits” (as he calls his bosses) like sleeves, like hair itself  —   is for losers. What Diesel is sort of good at is what Laurence Olivier was good at: monologuing. It’s no accident that Diesel’s work as the voice of Brad Bird’s gentle cartoon The Iron Giant is the performance of his career. But xXx Part iIi doesn’t give him any monologues! And its dialogue, courtesy of screenwriter F. Scott Frazier (who did not write The Great Gatsby) often sounds as though it’s been run through Google Translate. A sample: ”He just took out the best of the best like it was Sunday brunch.” That    effect is sort of fitting, because like the Fast series, the   has generously exXxpanded and diversified its supporting cast to reduce its reliance on Diesel. Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen, contemporaneously starring in the equally diverse, infinitely better Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, has a strong role as Cage’s  . Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa is on hand too, as one of the bad guys, and his hands are blindingly fast. These two are   martial artists, but director D. J. Caruso cuts their fights in the way he would were he attempting to disguise the limitations of a far clumsier performer. (Vin Diesel, say.) Also on Team Cage are Ruby Rose from Orange Is the New Black as a sniper, Scotsman Rory McCann from Game of Thrones as a. ..   and   Canuck Kris Wu as a D. J. As in: someone who spins records in nightclubs. You might reasonably ask what possible need an ostensibly covert,     squad has for a DJ, and the answer, I’m afraid, is that you could not possibly be totally extreme enough to understand. Anyway, this bizarrely credentialed team is tasked with recovering a device called . .. Pandora’s Box. (When Mission: Impossible III christened its MacGuffin ”The Rabbit’s Foot” 11 years ago, and declined to ever say what it really was, that was a smart joke.) You keep thinking maybe Xander Cage  —   everyone refers to him by his first and last name in this movie, presumably in deference to the degree of his    extremity  —   will shoot someone with Chekhov’s Gun or even cut a fool with Occam’s Razor, but no. There are no   jokes in Vin Diesel movies. We’re told, in a     expository scene that even the great Toni Collette (as an NSA official) can’t pull off, that Pandora’s Box can be used to hack into any computer on Earth. So what the bad guys decide to use it for is . .. plucking satellites out of orbit and dropping them on top of buildings, like so many anvils in a Road Runner cartoon. But that’s not remotely how orbital mechanics work, you protest. Save it, you   Poindexter! This movie is just a little too exXxtreme for you. This is not a film that subtly suggests anything, but one of the things it insists upon most loudly is that women who are approximately 45 percent of Diesel’s age cannot keep their hands off him. (Former The Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev ends her character’s introductory scene by volunteering her safe word.) Collette is a mere five years younger than Diesel, so naturally her character is portrayed as a   harridan. Collette has a long resume of complex roles in real movies, and she looks like she’s composing an angry   to her agent even as she’s delivering her lines. Maybe she took this job because she always wanted to visit Detroit. (xXx: Return of Xander Cage was filmed on location in Toronto, the Dominican Republic, and Detroit.) I eventually lost track of the bits, scenes, and lines xXx iIi had ripped off wholesale from films as various and sundry as Point Break (v. 1991) Lethal Weapon 3, True Lies, and even Captain America: Civil War. At one point Dobrev likens the hunt for Pandora’s Box to looking ”for a needle in a stack of needles,” which is both a mixed metaphor and a   nod to another film wherein that exact expression is spoken: Saving Private Ryan. That    Oscar winner featured a      Diesel in a small but memorable supporting role. It was possible to believe then, as it was with Sylvester Stallone after Rocky, that a brilliant career awaited him. But when two roads diverged in the wood, Vin Diesel choose the path of most total extremity. He looks at peace with his choice."
492,"Updated at 4 p. m. ET, The National Mall has flooded with pink, as demonstrators descend on the nation’s capital Saturday for the Women’s March on Washington. Just one day after President Trump’s inauguration, marchers from across the country have gathered in the city to protest his agenda and support for women’s rights. The event opened with a rally, to be followed by the march proper  —   which had a path laid out from a starting position near the U. S. Capitol to its endpoint near the Washington Monument. The city’s metro system reported 275, 000 rides as of 11 a. m. According to metro officials that’s eight times more than a normal Saturday. Reuters adds that the number is also ”82, 000 more than the 193, 000 rides reported at the same point on Friday,” the day of Trump’s inauguration. In fact, the number of marchers swelled to the point of prompting reports there would be no space for a formal procession  —   a claim rebutted by organizers Saturday afternoon in a statement. ”We are marching,” reads the statement. ”We are marching straight ahead toward the Washington Monument to the ellipse of the White House.” The event grew from humble origins  —   a simple Facebook invitation after Election Day  —   to the much more massive demonstration seen Saturday. By the time marchers hit the streets, the Women’s March on Washington developed a broad platform of progressive political positions, a slate of celebrity performers and a series of sister marches planned across the world  —   on all seven continents. For protester Amy Jackson, though, the matter was simple: She just wanted to ”make her voice heard,” she tells NPR’s Marisa Penaloza. Jackson, who traveled to D. C. from Chocowinity, N. C. to be part of the march, said, ”It was very important to be here today.” Among the crowd that gathered for the rally outside the National Museum of the American Indian, NPR’s Sarah McCammon reported signs supporting a wide array of causes  —   from women’s rights and LGBTQ rights, to Black Lives Matter and excoriations of xenophobia. One thing seemed to be almost universal, though: The pink knitted caps known as ”pussyhats” among the marchers, in protest of Trump’s past comments about women. Popular as they may have been, the pussyhats were not the only costume worn by marchers. Others wore their causes on their sleeves, dressing in attire to call attention to issues like Native rights and environmental fears. In video Sarah recorded a block or two from the main rally, it appears there were marchers in a menagerie of outfits. Meanwhile, at a nearby metro station, NPR’s Pam Fessler reported the mood among the demonstrators has been more festive than protests Friday. Most of the demonstrators are women, Pam says, but some men have joined the march, as well  —   including one man carrying a sign reading: ”This is what a feminist looks like.” From the main rally stage, musicians and speakers addressed the crowd in an event that lasted some five hours  —   more than two hours longer than anticipated. The reason for that overflow was partly its smattering of surprise guests. Beyond the planned performances and speeches from figures like Janelle Monáe and Gloria Steinem, others including Madonna and Alicia Keys took the stage. ”It was woman that gave you Dr Martin Luther King Jr. It was woman who gave you Malcolm X. And according to the bible, it was a woman who gave you Jesus,” Monáe told the crowd, according to The Guardian. What began simply as opposition to Trump has developed a   list of demands, which organizers published as a platform prior to the march. But above all, organizers say, is the principle that ”Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights.” That statement is pulled directly from a speech Hillary Clinton delivered more than two decades ago in Beijing. Clinton tweeted her support for the march Saturday, expressing thanks ”for standing, speaking  marching for our values.” Arriving at that platform was not always a smooth process, though. NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang reports there has been disagreement between organizers about how to treat issues of race. ”This march was initially put together by white women, and a lot of women of color felt they weren’t part of the conversation,” Carmen Perez, one of the march’s national organizers, told NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang. ”We can’t continue to work in isolation. We can’t continue to be  . We have to make sure that we look up, that we begin to really coordinate our efforts.” Ultimately, more than 200 organizations  —   ranging from Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, to Amnesty International and the    —   partnered with the Women’s March on Washington. For Darcy Sawatzki, a demonstrator attending the march with her daughter, Delia, what matters most is showing up. ”I think showing up and paying attention is sort of one of the bare minimums of citizenship,” Sawatzki told NPR’s Brakkton Booker. It’s not her first march she has also participated in Black Lives Matter protests. She said it’s not unease with the new president that inspired her to march. ”I’m not here out of anger or fear, I’m out here for determination, for participation and hope that together we can make a difference.”"
493,"Updated at 6:10 p. m. ET, As the Women’s March on Washington has swelled in support, attracting attention and supporters in the   to Saturday’s demonstrations, its name has become something of a misnomer. Sister marches have been organized in all 50 states, several U. S. territories and countries around the world. They have tried to express solidarity with the aims of the original march: opposition to President Trump’s agenda, and support of women’s rights and human rights in general. Given the quirks of time zones, many of those marches kicked off before the event that inspired them. In Sydney, London, New Delhi, and other cities, demonstrators broke out their signs and pink hats before even their compatriots in D. C. could. Straight from NPR and member station reporters on the ground: Here’s a glimpse of the marches Saturday  —   across the country, and around the world. ”It is shoulder to shoulder” in Boston Common, WBUR’s Deborah Becker tells Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday. She describes the rally there as a ”sea of pink,” referring to the pink knit caps that have become distinctive of the Women’s March on Washington. The caps have come to be known as ”pussyhats,” in reference to a tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women by grabbing their genitals. Deborah reports that the message of the Boston protesters is one of solidarity with the primary march in Washington. They bear signs not only protesting Trump, but supporting a range of issues  —   from climate science to women’s access to abortion and birth control. Both Massachusetts senators, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, addressed the rally in Boston. ”I’m here to fight back!” Warren told the crowd. ”We are in marches to say we are fighting back. That’s who we are.” In what the Chicago Tribune is reporting to be the largest crowd outside of Washington, Chicagoans gathered at Grant Park on Saturday morning with plans for a rally, followed by a march. In the end, the march portion of the event was cancelled by the organizers when they determined there were too many people to march safely. ”Our march route is flooded. There is no safe way to march. We are just going to sing and dance and make our voices heard here,” march   Ann Scholhmer told the crowd, according to the Tribune. If participants were disappointed, they didn’t show it. Organizer Liz Radford told the crowd, ”We called, and you came. We have flooded the march route. We have flooded Chicago.” Thousands marched through the British capital Saturday in what was billed as a women’s march, but was ostensibly an   rally. Marchers walked about 2 miles from the U. S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square to Trafalgar Square, within eyesight of Big Ben. The event ran for more than three hours and the size of the crowds easily dwarfed political rallies in the   to last summer’s Brexit vote here. As in other cities around the world, protesters carried signs criticizing America’s 45th president. Many signs read ”We Shall Overcomb,” referring to the U. S. president’s signature  . ”Trump Special Relationship? Just Say No,” read others, referring to the historically close diplomatic ties between the U. S. and the United Kingdom. Many in this cosmopolitan, multicultural city  —   which voted heavily against the U. K. leaving the European Union  —   were already upset by Trump’s election in November. The president’s ”America first” inaugural speech only fueled alarm here. A British software engineer named David said he watched the speech with officemates yesterday in stunned silence. ”It was a harrowing, chilling experience,” David said, as he stood in front of London’s National Gallery overlooking the rally in Trafalgar Square. ”The sense of nationalism and protectionism was there and there was quite a sinister undercurrent.” David, who did not offer his last name, said he was disturbed by the insularity of the Trump’s address, elements of which reminded him of the positions espoused by the political   here in the U. K. ”There is a movement in Britain called ’Britain first,’ ” he said, ”which is a terrifying, horrible   group.” The march in London was among a number of   rallies across Western Europe on Saturday, including cities such as Berlin, Paris, Belfast and Copenhagen. ”I’ve never seen so many people standing in one place in Los Angeles in my life, and that includes   Dodger Stadium,” NPR’s Ina Jaffe tells Michel Martin on Weekend All Things Considered. As the demonstrators marched from one rally in Pershing Square to another rally outside City Hall, Ina says a single street could not contain all of them. Instead, marchers had to proceed down three parallel streets. Supporters there brought up LGBTQ rights, religious freedom and women’s rights, Ina reports  —   including one marcher who held up a sign with a picture of Carrie Fisher, which read: ”A woman’s place is in the resistance.” For a march fueled in part by dissatisfaction with President Trump, it seems only natural that the protesters finished their procession nearby Trump Tower on Saturday. WNYC reporter Sarah Hayley Barrett tweeted that marchers shut down whole stretches of Madison Avenue, as they spilled off the planned route and took alternate paths to Trump Tower. Shumita Basu, a producer with WNYC, noted that in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, where many of the protesters converged, the march was a ”sea of pink hats, signs.” ”There’s been a steady stream of marchers” in the streets of downtown Raleigh, reports Jess Clark of member station WUNC. ”It spans the spectrum  —   protesters represent diverse issues, diverse backgrounds.” She notes that she has seen men in baseball caps, women in hijabs and several people in those distinctive pink caps. ”The massive crowd has taken over the downtown area, shutting down several streets in the process,” The Associated Press reports from Raleigh. The news service notes marches and rallies are taking place in cities across the state, including Charlotte and Asheville. The march in Mexico City began at the U. S. Embassy and proceeded to the Angel of Independence monument. But, as NPR’s Carrie Kahn reports, the march was so large, the crowd of demonstrators stretched from one landmark to the other. Carrie says the march comprised a mix of Americans and Mexicans, who appeared to be protesting Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto as much as President Trump. Peña Nieto has dismal approval ratings in his own country a recent poll showed only 12 percent of Mexicans approve of the job he’s doing. The chants  —   shouted in both Spanish and English  —   focused not only on the two leaders, but women’s rights and gender equality, as well. In Sioux Falls, the women’s march has focused partly on American Indian rights, reports Kealey Bultena of South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Chants of ”Native lives matter” rippled throughout the march. ”We want to protect Mother Earth, first of all, for the future generations and also we have our human rights as women,” marcher Julia Brown Wolf told Kealey. Brown Wolf had traveled from the Crow Creek Indian Reservation for the demonstration. ”You know, we have to think in seven generations ahead.” Kealey reports Brown Wolf marched with her granddaughters. ”She does not want them to face discrimination for being a woman or a Native American,” Kealey says. Demonstrators gathered in the city’s Hyde Park carrying signs with slogans like ”Bridges not walls,” and ”A woman’s place is in the revolution.” As protester Stef Vogt told The Sydney Morning Herald, ”We want to send a sign to the women in the U. S. that we’re all in this together.” But participants also say this isn’t just about Trump. ”Women’s rights are not about women,” musician Amanda Palmer told a the marchers. ”They’re about everyone. My son and husband are feminists.” In Buenos Aires, American expats and locals held signs and wrote messages across their bodies as they gathered for a rally in support of the women’s march. Local organizers echoed the guiding principle behind the march in Washington, D. C.  —   that ”Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” While some protests are principally marching to express solidarity with the demonstrators in the U. S. others are directly raising issues of misogyny on a more local level. In New Delhi, protesters carried signs reading ”I will go out,” to protest sexual harassment in public spaces. The Sundance film festival is underway in the city, but women, men and children still stepped away to trudge down Main Street in the blustery snow. Many of the filmmakers and   in Park City for the annual event came to protest Donald Trump’s presidency and to defend women’s rights. They chanted slogans such as ”Love Not Hate, Make America Great” and ”We live in Trumpled Times.” Then they rallied as the snow flurried around them, with comedian Chelsea Handler and actress Maria Bello among the speakers. Longtime activist Dolores Huerta, who’s the subject of a documentary that premiered at the festival, led the crowd in chanting, ”Si se puede, Yes, we can.” Jessica Williams, who stars in one of the feature films premiering at the festival, told the crowd that her ancestors fought for her to be where she is  —   to ”stand in the snow in front of a bunch of white people in Uggs.” ”I grew up thinking (the) civil rights movement already happened,” said Williams. ”This election is a wake up call. The silver lining is, we are here . .. in literally 21 degrees supporting each other.” And all the way from Baltimore, the Lethal Ladies of Bliss step team, featured in a new documentary premiering Saturday, roused the crowd with   chants of resistance. There were even ”marchers” in Antarctica. Linda Zunas, a reseacher in a remote corner of the continent called Paradise Bay, told The Independent that she organized a group of 30 people with banners reading ”Penguins for peace” and ”love from seven continents.”"
494,"On his first full day in the White House, President Trump went to the CIA presumably to try and offer an olive branch to members of the intelligence community he often maligned over their conclusions that Russia had conspired to influence the U. S. elections. Instead, he falsely denied that he had ever criticized the agency, falsely inflated the crowd size at his inauguration on Friday, attacked the media and told intelligence officers gathered to, ”Trust me. I’m like a smart person.” It was a rambling speech that was reminiscent of many of his campaign rallies. But Trump did begin by praising the work that CIA officers do and the danger they put themselves in every day, saying they would be instrumental in ”making us safe” and ”making us winners again.” He made the speech in front of a wall of 117 stars representing those in the agency who had lost their lives in service. He called the memorial ”very, very special” and said he had enjoyed touring the building prior to the speech. ”There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” the president boasted, referring to himself in the third person. He said that the agency sometimes hadn’t gotten the backing they deserved from the White House, and promised that ”you’re going to get so much backing, maybe you’re going to say, ’please don’t give us so much backing’”  —   adapting a line he said many times during the campaign. He ended his remarks by telling those gathered that, ”I love you. I respect you. There’s nobody I respect more. You’re going to do a fantastic job. We’re going to start winning again, and you’re going to lead the charge” in helping combat ISIS. He praised his pick of Rep. Michael Pompeo,  . to lead the CIA, who is slated to get a confirmation vote by the full Senate on Monday. Trump called Pompeo a ”total star” and a ”gem” and said he may have been his most important Cabinet pick. Referencing his ”running war with the media” and calling them ”among the most dishonest human beings on earth”  —   a line which got laughs and applause from the crowd of CIA officers  —   he claimed that the press had misreported what he’s said in the past. ”They sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community,” Trump said. ”And I just wanted to let you know, the reason you’re the No. 1 stop, it is exactly the opposite, and they understand that.” In the wake of the intelligence community’s findings that Russia engaged in cyberattacks intended to influence the elections in favor of Trump, he’s accused them of leaking information to the press, likening it to ”Nazi Germany.” He’s repeatedly cast doubt on their findings, and after a Washington Post story in December reported the CIA conclusions, he said in a statement that, ”These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” But Trump continued bashing the media, launching into a tirade claiming that the crowd sizes during his inauguration yesterday were being misrepresented. ”We had a massive field of people. You saw that. Packed,” he said. ”I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, they show an empty field. I said, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, it looked like a million, a million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there.” ”It went all the way back to the Washington Monument,” Trump claimed. There are no official crowd estimates available for Friday’s inauguration the National Park Service stopped doing so after inaccurate estimations of the Million Man March in 1995. But according to aerial photos and multiple NPR reporters on the ground, the crowd was nowhere near the Washington Monument. The mall area near the monument was sparsely populated, and Trump didn’t offer any verification for where the 1 million to 1. 5 million estimate came from, or for knocking down one news report’s estimate that there were only 250, 000 people in attendance. Trump also claimed that the rain should have scared people away, ”But God looked down, and He said, ’We’re not going to let it rain on your speech,’” and that, though he ”got hit by a couple of drops” when he started his speech that the rain ”stopped immediately . ..and then it became really sunny.” In fact, neither of those claims is true, and it was raining during Trump’s speech and remained overcast and cloudy. Trump also touted his electoral win, saying that he had tremendous support from the military and said he would ”guarantee a big portion” of people at his CIA speech voted for him. In fact, the military and the intelligence community are two separate entities. Several CIA veterans tell NPR they’re unconvinced that the speech can undo months of bitter relations. ”CIA’s employees are professionals and will serve the First Customer to the best of their ability, but they certainly aren’t fools,” said former CIA analyst Aki Peritz. ”They’ve all heard the hostile rhetoric directed at them from Donald Trump. .. and one prepared kumbaya speech isn’t going to change the real concerns CIA’s workforce  —   from the 7th floor to the greenest trainee  —   have with their new boss.” Paul Pillar, the CIA’s former top analyst for the Middle East, seconded that view. He said his former colleagues will welcome the gesture of a Presidential visit, ”but a single visit and a few nice words will not outweigh prior public disparagement. Unwarranted accusations about leaking and comparisons to Nazis are not the sort of attack that is easily forgotten.” ”Much depends on whether Mr. Pompeo sees and performs his role as the White House’s envoy and overlord, or instead as the leader of the agency with everything leadership implies, regarding identifying with the institution,” Pillar said. ”All that remains to be seen.”"
495,"Making good on his promise to get started on ”Day 1,” President Trump and his administration got right to work on Friday, taking steps to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and announcing the reversal of their predecessors’ plans to reduce mortgage insurance premiums on federally insured home loans. The new president signed an executive order to ”minimize the economic burden” of key provisions of the Affordable Care Act pending its repeal, allowing government agencies not to enforce regulations that impose a financial burden on a state, company or individual. Republican lawmakers have previously said that any repeal of the law would be immediately followed by a replacement, so that anyone who is insured through the ACA will not lose health insurance in the transition. But as NPR’s Alison Kodjak reports, the executive order is broad enough that it might dismantle key provisions of the ACA before a plan for replacement is ready. Reversal on housing insurance premium reduction, Within an hour of Trump’s swearing in, the Federal Housing Authority also announced the reversal of planned cuts to interest premiums on FHA mortgages. Outgoing HUD secretary Julian Castro had ordered the reduction not two weeks before, estimating that the change would save eligible homeowners an average of $500 a year. In a statement Senator Chuck Schumer said, ”In one of his first acts as president, President Trump made it harder for Americans to afford a mortgage. Working class Americans, struggling Americans  —   now it’s harder for them to get a mortgage.” The Senator added in a tweet that ”it only took an hour for those populist words delivered on the steps of the Capitol to ring hollow.” Revamping of Whitehouse. gov, Visitors to whitehouse. gov Friday afternoon noticed some immediate changes. Pages on climate change, LGBT issues, civil rights, and health care, have been replaced with pages on an ”America First Energy Plan,” ”America First Foreign Policy,” ”Bringing Back Jobs and Growth,” and ”Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community.” Department of Justice Decisions, Also just a few hours after inauguration, the Department of Justice requested and was granted the postponement of a hearing scheduled for Tuesday in a case challenging a Texas voter ID law. The department was scheduled to argue that the state law intentionally discriminated against Latino and   voters. ”It’s a very disappointing outcome,” Myrna Perez, Director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice, said Saturday in a phone interview. Perez is one of the litigators on the case. ”This case has been in the courts for the better part of four years, and the people of Texas deserve an expeditious recovery of their constitutional rights.” The Justice Department also requested, and was granted, a delay for an initial hearing on a sweeping police reform agreement with the Baltimore Police Department. This comes just over a week after the city of Baltimore and the Justice department announced that they had reached a   deal to attempt to mend the broken trust between the community and police after the death of Freddie Gray, and address systemic problems of excessive force and discrimination a DOJ investigation found in an investigation. In an opinion from the Office of Legal Council, it concluded Friday that the appointing of President Trump’s    Jared Kushner to a White House position did not fall under the prohibition of nepotism, because of the president’s special hiring authority. Kushner stands behind the new president in photos as he signs his first executive order  —   beside another new addition to the Oval Office: gold drapes."
496,"President Donald Trump, fulfilling a campaign promise to start to repeal Obamacare on Day 1, signed an order directing federal agencies to waive enforcement of large swaths of the law. The   order allows the head of the Department of Health and Human Services or any other agency with authority under the law, not to enforce regulations that impose a financial burden on a state, company or individual. It’s so broad it could allow many of the law’s provisions, including many of taxes it imposes on insurers and the requirement that individuals buy insurance, to die from lack of enforcement. The order is an important political act for Trump, who pledged throughout his campaign that he would act quickly to roll back the health care law. Its reach, however, depends upon exactly which provisions he decides to target. The order comes as Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price,  . is awaiting his confirmation hearing and vote, which could come within days or weeks. It’s unclear how much of this order could be carried out before Price, if he’s confirmed, is installed at HHS. Trump’s order also pushes one of his favorite health care ideas  —   to allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines  —   by encouraging ”the development of a free and open market in interstate commerce for the offering of healthcare services and health insurance, with the goal of achieving and preserving maximum options for patients and consumers.” It lands just as members of Congress are working to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Trump and Republican lawmakers have promised that any repeal would be followed immediately by a replacement for the law and they’ve said that anyone who has insurance through the ACA will not lose it in the transition. ”While President Trump may have promised a smooth transition, the Executive Order does the opposite, threatening disruption for health providers and patients,” said Leslie Dach, director of the Protect our Care Coalition, a group of organizations trying to save the Affordable Care Act. Health policy analysts have warned that repealing the unpopular parts of the law such as the taxes or individual mandate could lead to the collapse of the individual health insurance market. This executive order could allow those provisions to be rolled back before a replacement bill is ready. Republicans in Congress have laid out a number of broad road maps for a new health care law but have yet to reveal a specific bill that would show how many people will get insurance coverage or how much it might cost."
497,"Along with the oath of office at the Capitol on Friday, a much quieter part of the presidential handover took place, as the federal government’s websites changed hands. Different administrations have used the White House website to highlight their programs and priorities ever since that site was founded in 1994. And much as the Trump team will fill the empty picture frames in the White House with what it wants, it likewise has highlighted its policy priorities on its website. The Trump site, for example, now lists his six policy positions, as opposed to the Obama administration’s breakout of broad topic areas. But the same as many protested Trump’s inauguration in person, there was plenty of Internet outcry on Friday about topics like climate change and LGBT rights being ”scrubbed” from the site. But as Snopes pointed out on Friday, ”It’s inaccurate to say that these terms were specifically scrubbed from the site by Donald Trump,” as Trump’s policy action items have simply supplanted Obama’s. Indeed, Trump’s site does mention the climate, albeit not in the way that advocates for combating climate change would like: ”President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan.” However, one of Washington’s    policy topics right now (perhaps the top policy topic)  —   health care  —   is not currently in Trump’s ”Issues” list. The   and many Republicans in Congress have repeatedly stressed their desire to repeal and replace Obamacare. The @POTUS Twitter and White House Facebook accounts were likewise handed over on Friday. However, the digital transition will not be complete for some time. The Trump White House website has maintained the look of the Obama site, maintaining its typefaces and color schemes, with a fuller style change coming later this year, as Politico reported Thursday. One notable holdover from Obama’s site is the ”We, the People Petitions” section, which links to a tool with which the public can propose petitions. That tool thus far reflects how polarizing the new president is. As of Friday afternoon, three petitions had been proposed: one calling to ”immediately release Donald Trump’s full tax returns, with all information needed to verify emoluments clause compliance,” another proposing to ”divest or put in a blind trust all of the President’s business and financial assets,” and another to ”let American farmers grow hemp once again to create jobs and rebuild the rural economy.” The site says that petitions need to hit 100, 000 signatures within 30 days to get a White House response. As of press time, they had 28, 409, 6, 351, and 190 signatures, respectively. The department websites have likewise shifted to reflect the new administration to varying degrees. The alterations reflect both the changeover in personnel  —   as with the removal of departing Secretary Ernest Moniz’s ”exit interview” on the Energy Department website’s front page  —   and the changes in policy. The Labor Department’s website is an example of this. As of Thursday, that site’s front page featured the Obama administration’s fiduciary rule  —   which requires financial advisers to act in the best interest of their clients  —   and overtime rule, which broadened the number of workers who would be required to be paid overtime (a federal court blocked that rule in November). Those rules both drew sharp criticism from conservatives. Today, the featured posts are the department’s occupational outlook handbook  —   a regular Labor publication  —   and a retirement savings education campaign. Likewise, some of the pages about Obama administration policies are gone. That   link  —   which led to a page about how ”conflicts of interest can take a bite out of retirement savings at any age”  —   now redirects to a page on ”saving fitness worksheets.”"
498,"As promised, President Trump got to work on Day One, spending some time in the Oval Office in between the inaugural parade and a trio of formal balls. Trump signed an executive order Friday night directing government agencies to ”ease the burdens” of Obamacare while the new administration and Congress work toward repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus presented Trump with the order, which he described as: ”An executive order minimizing the economic burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act pending repeal.” It’s not clear what kind of relief the executive order envisions. Trump also signed paperwork authorizing the elevation of two new Cabinet secretaries. The Senate voted this evening to confirm Trump’s nominees for defense secretary, James Mattis, and homeland security secretary, John Kelly. Trump called his first day in office ”busy, but good.” ”A beautiful day,” he added, before changing into formal wear for a round of celebratory balls. Also Friday evening, Priebus was preparing a memo for all federal agencies, ordering a freeze on government regulations. It was not immediately clear whether that order would apply retroactively to regulations in the pipeline from the outgoing Obama administration. Trump was joined in the Oval Office this evening by his national security adviser, Mike Flynn    and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and campaign manager turned counselor Kellyanne Conway. The new president is already putting his mark on the workspace. Crimson drapes in the Oval Office have been replaced with gold. Obama’s rug, featuring inspirational quotes such as, ”The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has been swapped for a new floor covering. And a bust of Winston Churchill once again occupies a place of honor. The Churchill bust had been removed during the Obama years, replaced by a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. That bust is still there."
499,"Donald Trump had already emerged as the likely presidential nominee of the Republican Party back in April when he gave a foreign policy speech pledging that ”America First” would be ”the major and overriding theme of my administration.” It was a phrase guaranteed to prompt a reaction. Surely the two words sounded good together, but where had we heard them together before? And then, once again, the phrase stood out on Friday  —   front and center in President Trump’s inaugural address: ”We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first  —   America first.” As a businessman, Trump has been famous for nothing so much as his penchant for   and promotion. As a candidate, he rediscovered a slogan others had used (Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign had buttons that said ”Let’s Make America Great Again”) and made it his own. He now appears to be doing something very similar with ”America First,” a battle cry with more than a little history behind it. Assuming he is aware of at least some of that history, Trump is demonstrating his confidence that his adoption of a phrase can supersede its past. The phrase made an appearance with an exclamation point (”America First! ”) as the slogan of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 2000. Buchanan had been an aide to Reagan and a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and sought the Republican nomination for himself twice in the 1990s. But in the millennial year, Buchanan shifted his attention to the Reform Party. Along the way, Buchanan proposed pulling out of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in addition to opposing military intervention overseas. Trump, too, briefly sought the 2000 Reform Party nomination. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump alluded to a book Buchanan had written arguing that the U. S. was beguiled by Great Britain into opposing Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany in World War II. (The book was titled: Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.) Trump told NBC’s Tim Russert that Buchanan was ”a Hitler lover” and the choice of ”the really   wacko vote.” For many, Buchanan’s isolationism and revisionist views of World War II harked back to the America First Committee, the largest national organization opposing U. S. involvement in World War II prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Formally organized by students at Yale in 1940, it attracted a wide variety of activists and was bankrolled by several major corporate leaders. Automaker Henry Ford was on its board for a time. Most in the AFC wanted to avoid seeing the U. S. drawn into the European war the way it had been dragged into World War I in 1917. But some of the group’s leading lights also saw efforts to involve the U. S. against Nazi Germany as a plot led by the British and by ”the Jewish races”  —   a phrase used by the AFC’s most famous spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, the    hero. In April of this year, Williams College professor Susan Dunn wrote for CNN that it was ”extremely unfortunate” that Trump ”chose to brand his foreign policy with the noxious slogan ’America First,’ the name of the isolationist, defeatist,   national organization that urged the United States to appease Adolf Hitler.” The AFC, and opposition to entering World War II, all but vanished after Pearl Harbor, and Lindbergh retreated from public life. But some of the AFC’s other major figures later emerged as   internationalists, supporting the United Nations and other forms of global cooperation. While the AFC was the most prominent promulgator of ”America First” in memory, it was not the first: The phrase had gained political cachet during World War I as well. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was struggling to win a second term in the White House, and he was no better than an even bet against Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes. The Great War was raging on the Continent, and Wilson leaned toward helping Great Britain and France. But such an alliance was vigorously opposed by many Americans  —   especially German and Irish immigrants and their descendants. Wilson ran on a platform of strict neutrality. His most famous slogan was ”He kept us out of war,” a boast that would turn ironic when he asked Congress for a declaration of war just a month after his second inauguration. But the 1916 Wilson campaign also used the theme ”America First” on printed flyers and posters, tapping into national pride as well as isolationist sentiment."
500,"People traveled to Washington, D. C. from around the country to witness the transition of power to the 45th president of the United States. Amid celebration and clashes, a few faces stood out. Watching giant screens, blocks away from the incoming president, these people braved crowds and weather to watch history being made. Ken Crider and his wife, Penny, Age: 51, City of Residence: Detroit area, Crider has a hat signed by Ted Cruz. Well, it began that way. Crider, an elector for Michigan, sported a wide cowboy hat spotted with signatures, mostly of political figures, while attending the inauguration. ”Once I got Ted Cruz’s signature on here as a guest, being as my wife was a delegate, I started walking around the convention center, seeing how many I could get.” These include Rudy Giuliani, Ben Carson and   President Donald Trump, to name a few. Kara Zielinski, Age: 20, City of Residence: Washington, D. C. student at George Washington University, Zielinski wiped away tears as Trump made his oath. She said she didn’t think there was any cause for celebration she said she felt ”very disturbed” by the new administration. ”Any surrealism that people were feeling was wiped away. This is real. This isn’t going away.” Even so, she believes it was important to attend the event as part of the ”American experience.” ”I wanted to hear what he had to say and see how it goes,” she said. ”And I do live in D. C. now, so I can’t really ignore it.” Russell (left) and Wayne Bargiel, Ages: Russell, 65 Wayne, 61, City of Residence: Maywood and Saddle Brook, N. J. The two brothers have had their fair share of inaugurations. Though they can’t remember the exact number each have attended, Russell believes he’s seen six. They have no party affiliations, but like to see the festivities. And for whoever the next president may be after Trump, the two say they hope to see him or her sworn in. ”I’m planning on it,” Russell said. ”God willing.” Firas Nasr, Age: 23, City of Residence: Washington, D. C. Nasr is the founder of Werk For Peace, a queer grassroots organization that uses dance to promote peace. By 8:30 a. m. he was leading a group of supporters in dancing in the front of an entrance gate at F and 11th streets. This is his first time protesting at a presidential inauguration and he says he’s very happy with the turnout. ”We have completely blocked the checkpoint to get in. And we are here, we are queer, and we will dance. Hallelujah.” Liam Quidore, Age: 18, City of Residence: Southern California, student at Yorba Linda High School, As Presidents Trump and Obama took their car ride from the White House to the Capitol, Quidore watched the screen on the National Mall with friends. After flying across the country to attend, he was initially a little nervous about the day’s event, but ultimately felt being at the inauguration was surreal. ”I think it’s a     chance to be able to experience this kind of thing, especially at my age. And I really appreciate the opportunity that I have to be able to see something as great as this in person.” Marlene Dickey, Age: 77, City of Residence: Amissville, Va. Dickey can’t remember the only other inauguration she attended, when she was a child, but she knows she wanted to be here for this one specifically. In the next presidential term, she said, she’s looking for a lot of change: health care premiums coming down, encouragement of the right to life, and a   for many businesses. ”I just wanted to be here because I think it’s a historical moment. I just wanted to support him.” Roger Scott (left) and Daniel Shaw, Ages: Scott, 48 Shaw, 38, City of Residence: Washington, D. C. Inaugurations are not a new thing for Scott. He said he’s attended several inaugurations, always as a protester. ”Democrat or Republican, both parties are taking orders from the same billionaires and millionaires,” Scott said. ”And so we’re here to say that we’re going to fight that every step of the way.” Amy Kelash, Age: 54, City of Residence: Gilman, Minn. Kelash and her friends joked about attending the inauguration at a New Year’s celebration. And the next day, they decided something so that the   idea didn’t have to stay a joke. In the end, the friends took a   bus ride to get to D. C. and Kelash says she feels ”overwhelmed with pride for the country.” ”We’ve never done anything like this before. None of us have ever been in Washington. We milk cows. We come from a town [with] a population of 211 people, so this is overwhelming.” Timothy Moore, Age: 18, City of Residence: Cleveland, Ohio, Moore is no stranger to selling Trump paraphernalia he says he’s been to approximately 30 Trump rallies, where he sold buttons,   and other goods. He was hoping to make $5, 000 dollars by the end of the inauguration, but at 7 a. m. he was still waiting on large crowds to show and buy his wares. ”I’m expecting millions. Where they at?”"
501,"  President Donald Trump and wife Melania Trump ended a busy Inauguration Day with a visit to three balls in Washington. The Liberty Ball and Freedom Ball both took place at the Washington Convention Center. The Trumps took the stage first at the Liberty Ball shortly after 9:30 p. m. ”Well, we did it,” Trump began. ”We began this journey and they said we  —   we, and me  —   we didn’t have a chance. But we knew we were going to win.” Trump thanked his supporters, along with his wife Melania and Vice President Mike Pence. ”We want to see great things happen for our country,” Trump said. ”We want to make America great again and we will.” Their first dance was to musicians performing the Frank Sinatra song ”My Way.” The first lady’s dress at the inaugural ball, which often ends up in a museum, was a joint effort of designer Hervé Pierre and Melania Trump. A little over 45 minutes later, according to The New York Times, the Trumps headed over to the Freedom Ball. And their first dance was, once again, ”My Way.” The final stop was the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball at the National Building Museum. Many of the attendees were service members in full uniform. The president, first lady, vice president and second lady each danced with a service member. During the ball, Trump addressed service members in Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan via a live video link. ”You have somebody that’s going to be right alongside you,” Trump said, per DoD News. ”We’re going to do it together. Honestly, not only the support you’ve given me, but the courage you show is incredible, and it’s going to be appreciated. It’s going to be appreciated more than ever before.” The night closed with Trump and Pence cutting a giant red, white and blue cake  —   with a saber."
502,"When the transition from President Obama to President Trump happened officially at noon ET, a lot changed, including the White House website. Waiting on the new website were six priority areas laid out, including on foreign policy. The entire foreign policy section is literally just 220 words, so it’s hard to draw more than a thumbnail sketch about Trump’s foreign policy. But it gives the first hint of something of a Trump doctrine. Echoing his inaugural address, ”America First” is the organizing theme. To that protectionist point, there’s a whole section on trade. And Trump specifically laid out three points on his approach to the world and his priorities: 1. Defeating ISIS2. ”Rebuild” the military3. ”Embrace diplomacy” . .. ”We are always happy when old enemies become friends. . ..” 1. Defeating ISIS, On defeating ISIS, however, it still remains unclear what Trump will do exactly. ISIS was the top concern for Republican primary voters, and his tough rhetoric helped him in the campaign. He declared he would ”bomb the s*** out of them” but would not lay out a plan. He said he wanted to be ”unpredictable.” He never committed to a ramping up of ground troops. But he mentioned the possibility of as many as 30, 000 troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That’s nowhere close to the number of troops the U. S. had at the height of the Iraq war, but  —   if Trump followed through  —   it would represent a significant ramping up of U. S. involvement. Currently, there are only about 600 American military personnel in Syria, about 8, 400 in Afghanistan and almost 6, 000 in Iraq. Russia is also a critical player in Syria. Trump, of course, has said he would be reaching out to Moscow to help fight ISIS and hopes the Russians are helpful. 2. Rebuild the military, Trump has repeatedly harped on this throughout the campaign, but the context here is important. The U. S. spends $596 billion a year on its military. That’s about three times more on its military than all other NATO countries  —   combined. While spending, adjusted for inflation, has declined some during the Obama administration, the U. S. remains the largest and most capable military in the world. NPR’s Phil Ewing   this notion here in April of last year. 3. ”Embrace diplomacy”  —   ”we are always happy when old enemies become friends” Trump said his foreign policy would be ”based on American interests.” The new president has been very  . He has actually been against U. S. trade policies for decades the rhetoric has remained the same since the 1980s. But back then the bogeyman was different  —   today, he talks of China back then, it was Japan that he said was dumping its cars and VCRs. Trump also noted that he would ”embrace diplomacy,” that the U. S. would ”not go abroad in search of enemies,” but ”that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies.” The turn of phrase  —   ”we are always happy when old enemies become friends”  —   could be interpreted somewhat provocatively. It could raise eyebrows politically, given Trump’s praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout the campaign and his grudging acceptance that Russian meddling was responsible for the hack and leaks of Democratic emails. ”I think it was Russia,” Trump said in his first press conference since being elected before adding later: ”All right, but you know what, it could have been others also.” On ”old friends” becoming ”allies,” ironically, it is precisely America’s closest allies  —   Japan, South Korea and most of NATO  —   who are most queasy about Trump’s provocative talk that has questioned the utility of these   relationships. NPR International Editor Will Dobson and Middle East Editor Larry Kaplow contributed to this post."
503,"The inauguration of President Donald Trump was a divisive event, as the protests in Northwest D. C. showed. But a few blocks southeast, another battle was unfolding on the inaugural stage. Not between Republican and Democrat, but between a man and his poncho. Light rain began just as Trump started in on his remarks. Fortunately, many in attendance came prepared. Former first lady Michelle Obama and former second lady Jill Biden shared a bubble umbrella. First lady Melania Trump had one, too. Other attendees had translucent ponchos. Former President George W. Bush went that route, but it didn’t work out exactly as planned. As much as he tried, he just couldn’t seem to get the poncho to cooperate, and the Twitterverse couldn’t let it go. Bush shouldn’t worry though it’s not the first time a Republican has got himself into some trouble with a poncho. Back in 2012, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney was criticized for making fun of some NASCAR fans for wearing the rain gear, saying: ”I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.” If history is any guide, will the dreaded poncho make another splash on the political stage four years from now? Or will it be bubble gum? (Watch closely behind Melania Trump as another former Texas governor, Rick Perry, struggles to blow a bubble.)"
504,"Here’s a quick roundup of some of the   you may have missed on this week’s Morning Edition. Inked, Don’t cry for me, Susanna. Cry for the   Charger fans and their    tattoos. As Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said, the San Diego Chargers announced that they’re moving to Los Angeles for the 2017 season. And unfortunately, their fans are not moving with them, but their fans’ tattoos? Well, that’s a little bit tougher. Tattoo parlors are coming to the aide of the fans though. Think of them as   quarterback, coming to to relieve the other two after a catastrophic 3 quarters. The parlors are offering discounts to help people get through this ”painful endeavor” by refashioning the Chargers icons into something else. Turns out team love isn’t forever, only diamonds are. Waddle, waddle, Put one foot in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking out the door. Well, unless you’re this swan. As Morning Edition host David Greene said on Monday one swan decided to ruffle some feathers of those on a commuter train outside of London. For two miles the swan waddled along the tracks with the train slowly crawling behind it. After a much delayed commute, the British news site Metro reported one man got onto the tracks and waved his laptop at the swan who was finally captured. Before you go there, no harm came to the bird. It was released and apparently apologized for its transgressions. Now mosey along. There’s nothing else to read about birds here. No Scrubs, She don’t want no scrub. A scrub is a shark that can’t get no love from her. Honestly, that’s what I believe Leonie said. As Morning Edition host David Greene said on Tuesday, Leonie is a proud zebra shark mom, who gave birth to three baby sharks last year. But unlike the campfire song ”Baby Shark,” these babies did not have a daddy shark. In fact, Leonie didn’t have any contact with a male shark before this set of three was born. So here’s a fun fact: the British magazine New Scientist reports that occasionally some animals that reproduce sexually can also reproduce asexually. Sharks are included on this list. However, this usually happens when a female hasn’t made contact with a male before. That’s not the case with Leonie. She had many little baby sharks with a male partner. He probably tried to holler, again, but his game was kinda weak and Leonie decided she didn’t want any of his time and she went her own way. Paint paw prints  Your child couldn’t paint that, but maybe your bear could. This is, assuming of course, if you had a bear. Then maybe your child could sell your bear’s paintings to potential buyers at exhibit openings. And then your bear would hibernate? Yes, you’re with me now. Now as Morning Edition host Rachel Martin said on Wednesday, that is basically how one Finnish painter operates. Juuso  —   the artist himself  —   is a   brown bear and he has his paintings on display in Helsinki. Eleven original works of art can be seen and some of his prints could be yours. That is if you’re willing to spend some cash as some of his prints have sold for more than $4, 000. Yeah, that’s not chump change. What’s better? Some paintings feature some bits of Juuso’s fur.   though it’s   cool."
505,"Hundreds of thousands of Americans are now working as contractors for the rapidly growing   industry, specifically for the largest companies, Uber and Lyft. But a new survey, released this week, finds that Lyft, with its fluorescent pink mustache symbol, is more popular with drivers. More than 75 percent of Lyft drivers said they were satisfied with their experience, while less than half of Uber drivers said the same. Lyft is a significantly smaller company, but its drivers made more money. According to the survey, Uber drivers averaged $15. 68 per hour, while Lyft drivers made an average of $17. 50. Plus, Lyft also prompts passengers to tip. This was one of the findings from a survey of 1, 150 drivers, one of the largest polls of the sort. It was conducted through the blog, podcast and YouTube channel known as The Rideshare Guy, by the founder Harry Campbell with help from researchers at Stanford University. Declining pay, While the   companies are enormously popular and often much cheaper than a taxi, Campbell and his team have previously reported that the prices have been declining. Those price drops may be increasing the valuations of the companies, but Campbell says they are taking their toll on drivers who must work longer hours to make a living wage. ”What that means for drivers is that they are driving further for the same income,” Campbell says. ”Ultimately they aren’t making more than they would in a service job at McDonald’s or Burger King.” The drivers are contractors rather than employees of the companies, and their wages are determined by how many rides they do in a day. But the survey also found that the most valuable element, after pay, was the flexibility of hours. ”You can take the day off without asking your boss,” Campbell says. So overall, he says, ”for drivers the situation isn’t terrible, but it isn’t improving.” The survey dovetails with a $  settlement that Uber just reached with federal regulators who charged that the company misled drivers by exaggerating how much they could earn and encouraging them to lease cars through a ’ ’ program that turned out to be not as   as advertised. Different demographics  The driver survey also found that drivers tend to be a lot older than their passengers. Close to 30 percent are between 51 and 60 years old, and another quarter are older than 61. Campbell says some of this reflects the fact that many retired people drive to supplement their social security or pension. But Campbell believes this might also reflect a darker trend: age discrimination. More than 53 percent of drivers are   which is 20 points above the national average. ”You have these older   drivers,” Campbell says, ”where it’s a difference between no job and a job. .. This is one of their only options.” On the upside, the survey illustrates how the ride hailing companies  —   which accept virtually anyone as long as they meet eligibility requirements  —   are slowly breaking the mold for women. Close to 20 percent of drivers are female, compared to about 1 percent among taxi drivers and chauffeurs. Unfortunately, women still make less than man, by close to $2 an hour. Though Campbell suggests it might be because a lot of female drivers are ”uncomfortable driving Friday and Saturday nights, when demand is highest but there are a lot of intoxicated passengers.” Campbell says ultimately some drivers manage to get the system to work better for them than others. For instance, some drivers might have more   cars or lower car payments, which raises their profit margins. But for others, the numbers just don’t add up. According to the survey, about half of all   drivers quit after just one year."
506,"It can be difficult to know what to say when a friend is struggling. The conversation is hard to even start. Maya Cohen, a   student at Tulane University, says she knows better how to intervene after playing a video game created to help people learn how to recognize signs of psychological distress like depression, anxiety and substance abuse, and get them professional help. Like all incoming students at Tulane, Cohen had to participate in an online conversation simulation game titled ”  For College Students.” The purpose is to teach empathetic conversation skills. In the game, you play Jesse, a friend of Travis, a depressed young man who’s been failing his classes. Jesse notices that Travis hasn’t been the same lately, and goes to his apartment to see how he’s doing. Checking in is the kind of supportive effort that friends ideally do for one another, and the game is supposed to encourage more of that. We hear out each other’s burdens. Friends are the first bulwark of support when times are a little rough or when something’s deeply wrong. We might pride ourselves on the advice we give, the shoulders we offer, the general ”being there” for our friends. But our skill at doing that varies, says Glenn Albright, a psychologist at Baruch College at the City University of New York and cofounder of Kognito, the company that developed the game. ”It’s the sad reality that a lot of people don’t know how to help people,” he says. ”How to identify those who are struggling, to approach them, talk to them and give them a level of comfort.” Albright thought that the right conversational training program could help people help those around them. ”You’re talking about 40 percent of college students reporting systems of depression where they say it’s interfering with their functioning,” Albright says. Kognito’s first simulation, released in 2009, focused on   conversations. The company has since developed over a dozen simulations. Many focus on peer conversations, like the game that Cohen played others address   or family interactions. At the end of the conversation, participants get examples of how to sensitively suggest mental health services. In simulations for medical professionals, that might mean managing care collaboratively with other health professionals. Kognito grounds all of these simulations in psychological counseling methods such as motivational interviewing, which stresses conversation techniques like using   questions and listening and reflecting on what someone says during a conversation. ”[This] is really trying to engage the other person in dialogue, understand what’s happening and what’s influencing their behavior,” says Marlyn Allicock, a health behaviorist at the University of Texas in Dallas who is not involved with Kognito. ”Those skills are really grounded in empathy.” In the game that Cohen played, when Jesse relates to the things his friend is saying, Travis responds much more warmly. If Jesse is brusque during the conversation, Travis clams up. ”They’ve done a really nice job modeling a person’s behavior,” Allicock says. The games also shows things that might push people apart, Allicock notes. Giving unwarranted advice, for example, might give the impression that you think you know better than your friend. ”Those are things that push people away,” Allicock says. ”I’m not going to open up to you if you’re saying, ’You’re not doing this right.’ ” Cohen says she didn’t realize any of this until she started playing through the Kognito simulation. ”A speech bubble came up with tips,” she says. One says using ”I” statements is good, but not when a judgment is attached. That reminded Cohen that when a friend of hers would complain about something, Cohen would make a judgment. ”I would approach her and be like, ’I think you’re overreacting,’ ” she says. Cohen, 19, says she kept thinking back to one time last year when she feels she really should have talked to her friend. She got a screenshot of text messages that her friend Angie had sent to her boyfriend. We aren’t using her last name to protect her privacy. The reason will become clear later in this story. ”[Angie] was texting her boyfriend saying, ’I feel none of my friends care about me. Would anybody even notice if I was gone?’ ” Cohen says. She was worried, and wanted to ask Angie about it. ”I just didn’t know how to start that conversation. And once I did I wouldn’t know how to continue it.” Instead, Cohen brought the text to her school counselor, who pulled Angie out of class. ”At the time I was really mad because I was like, so depressed, and now you’re making my life harder,” Angie says now. ”They added this entire like new situation.” Angie, 18, says that at the time she was considering killing herself. The counselor’s intervention got her the help she needed, but the fact that none of her friends tried talking to her first made her upset. Cohen feels like it put a strain on their relationship, even after they made amends. ”We could never go back to how we were before,” Cohen says. After the Kognito training, Cohen says she’d been thinking a lot about how she could have handled the situation better. At the very least, she says, she could have gone to Angie first to check in on her, talk to her and find a way to get her help, but with her consent. ”That would have been more inclusive of Angie,” Cohen says. Angus Chen is a freelance writer based in New York. Find him on Twitter @angrchen."
507,"In its   history, Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C. never had a deaf female president  —   until a year ago. Roberta Cordano is the first deaf woman to lead the school. Gallaudet is a liberal arts university devoted to deaf and    students. Classes are taught in American Sign Language, and all students and faculty are required to know how to sign. But president Cordano never attended a deaf school herself. ”I grew up during a period of time when it was believed that American Sign Language was what they called a monkey language,” Cordano says, speaking through an interpreter provided by Gallaudet. While the interpreter translates rapidly, Cordano whispers out faintly in English as she signs. Cordano grew up surrounded by other Deaf people. Her parents and older sister are Deaf and so were many of her childhood neighbors. Her hometown of Delavan, Wisc. is where the Wisconsin School for the Deaf is located. But even though her father was a teacher there, her parents sent her to the local public school. ”They wanted to make sure their children were going to do well,” she says. ”At that time, it wasn’t really understood that American Sign Language was a language in and of its own right.” Going to a hearing elementary, middle and high school made Cordano a pro at reading lips and pronunciation. She never had an interpreter in the classroom. In hindsight, Cordano says school was exhausting. ”I had worked all day long trying to understand people and focus so much on what they were saying and then figuring out what I was trying to be taught.” Cordano says she had to work twice as hard as her peers just to keep up. But she didn’t burn out. When time came to choose a college, Cordano decided to stay in a hearing environment. She went to Beloit College for undergrad and the University of   for law school. She broke with family tradition her parents and older sister are alumni of Gallaudet. ”They understood the value of understanding and appreciating the richness of both worlds,” Cordano says. While Cordano enjoyed her college and law school experience, she was often the only deaf person in the room. Her experience is contrastingly different from the lives Gallaudet students lead on campus. ”It’s like another country,” says freshman Ariella Dramin, who also spoke through a Gallaudet interpreter. ”It would be nice if we had our own country, but we don’t.” Dramin is fourth generation deaf. She says being deaf should be seen as a culture, not a disability. It’s a concept, she adds, that many people outside of Gallaudet don’t understand when they meet her. ”I hate when people at a store try to say something to me and I say, ”I can’t hear you,” and they have this pity face,” she says. ”We’re a community, we’re fine. We have a language.” American Sign Language flourishes at Gallaudet. Students chat with their peers in the lunchroom and as they walk through the hallways to class, carrying out their conversations with their hands and facial expressions instead of spoken words. Gallaudet feels like any other college campus, just quieter. While Gallaudet is the only university devoted solely to the deaf and hard of hearing, the Americans With Disabilities act requires all universities to provide interpreting services. But   Savannah Hobbs chose Gallaudet because she didn’t want to rely on someone to translate for her. She didn’t enjoy having an interpreter in elementary school. ”The interpreter doesn’t go with me to lunch. I was completely left out of any kind of conversation,” she says. ”Here, not only can I have my own conversation at lunch, but I can just look over to a table and see what other people are talking about because everyone’s using the same language.” There’s a long history of Gallaudet students insisting deaf people are as capable as the hearing. In 1988, Gallaudet students led massive protests calling for the school to appoint its first deaf president. The Deaf President Now protests were successful and the university has maintained a tradition of having a deaf leader ever since. Despite her deaf upbringing, Cordano brings an outsider’s perspective to Gallaudet. Most of her private and professional life has been in hearing environments. Her wife and two children are hearing, and most of the jobs she’s had before coming to Gallaudet  —   she’s done everything from lead healthcare companies to serve as the assistant attorney general of Minnesota   were in a places where she, as a deaf woman, was a minority. ”When I moved to Minnesota, I actually saw the model of bilingual education,” Cordano says, referring to schools where deaf and    students receive equal instruction in both English and American Sign Language. Cordano helped start two charter schools following this model. ”I grew to love and respect that model so much because I realized it was an option I was never given.” Cordano never had a deaf school experience of her own where she could sign to her classmates and peers. But she doesn’t feel like she missed out. She considers herself an inherent optimist. ”I think I’ve always navigated two worlds,” Cordano says. ”And I’ve cherished both worlds.”"
508,"In the Central Valley, there’s a bumper sticker you see all over the place. It’s shaped like California, and reads ”My job depends on Ag.” In California, that agriculture depends on immigrant labor. Many farmers in the state supported President Donald Trump despite his   stance on immigration. So as the new Trump administration takes office, what’s the thinking of those involved in the region’s biggest industry? Just after the workday ends, men in dirty jeans and work boots stream into a small record store in the farming town of Mendota. Racks of CDs and music posters line the walls, but nobody’s browsing. The guys are in line to use the store’s wire transfer service. They’re sending money home to families in Mexico and El Salvador. ”We just came in from the fields  —   nine hours pruning pistachio trees,” says a   man in a   sweatshirt. He’ll say only that his name is Pablo because, like all the farm workers I talked to for this story, he’s in the country illegally. I ask him what he thinks of Trump’s tough talk on immigration. Pablo’s answer includes a strong, derogatory word. ”You think a gringo’s gonna be pruning pistachios?” he asks me in Spanish. He says in his 17 years working the California fields, he’s seen only Latinos  —   mostly immigrants  —   doing this work. So he’s not buying the idea that he’s taking away a job from a U. S. citizen. I also visit Steve Murray’s farm outside Bakersfield, where a few workers are crouched among rows of strawberries that will sell at farmers markets around the region. As Murray watches them work, he explains why he needs foreign workers. Even though this area has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state, Murray says he has a hard time finding people to pick his fruit. He didn’t vote for Trump, and he says his business would suffer if the new administration carries through on plans for mass deportations of immigrants. ”When the economy went south  —   what was that, in 2007, 2008 and 2009  —   and jobs dried up, there were people that returned to Mexico and didn’t come back,” he says. ”It’s hard to imagine that things could get much worse.” An hour north, near Porterville, dairy farmer Tom Barcellos is feeling more optimistic. He tells me he met Trump, and he’s betting the  ’s   side will win out. ”Of course you heard about him saying ’build a wall,’ ” Barcellos says. ”Well, what he told us is that wall is going to have a door in it, and we’re going to talk to the right people that want to come in and work, and they’re going to have an opportunity to do that.” There’s already an agricultural guest worker program  —   the   visa program. And use has gone up steadily over the past five years, as fewer workers enter the country illegally. But every farmer I talked to complained about it, calling it cumbersome and expensive. Some experts speculate a Trump administration might strip away worker protections and create a program that’s more favorable to employers. Barcellos says Trump assured him that people who have been working in the United States for years will have a chance to get temporary visas, too. But, Barcellos says, ”Citizenship . .. that’s a different animal and let’s not mix up the two.” A path to citizenship doesn’t seem likely under Trump. And not every farm worker I spoke with wants U. S. citizenship. Take    Eugenio. I meet him while he’s pruning pistachio trees on Murray’s farm near Bakersfield. Eugenio’s wife and kids are in Mexico. ”So I make a little money, then go back to Oaxaca, where I’m building a house,” he says. Eugenio tells me he’s crossed the border eight times illegally. But he says border security is so tight now he hasn’t been home to Mexico in five years. ”I’m trying to figure out how to come with a work visa,” he says. ”I’d really like that.” Then there are people like Elfego, who’s working on a tree nearby. He doesn’t like the idea of visas. He’s been in the United States 17 years. His family is here. ”What would happen if Trump starts giving visas to people over there?” he asks. Elfego worries legal guest workers from Mexico would replace him. ”What happens with those of us who are here? He’ll deport us because we’re illegal,” he says. Some worry the future under President Trump could bring more immigration raids, less enforcement of farmworker protection laws or the forced use of   a government tool for checking employment eligibility. For now, the only thing certain is that the Central Valley’s $35 billion agricultural economy depends on policies that balance the needs of both growers and workers. This story comes to us from NPR member station KQED in California. It first aired as part of The California Report."
509,"At Goats and Soda we’re always watching the developing world. A group of international photographers is doing the same thing  —   but from a drone’s perspective. We mined the website dronestagram (think Instagram for drone pics) for the most riveting drone photos of the developing world from the past year. Here are a few of the   images we came across and the stories behind them. An island home  Zorik Olangi grew up on Malaita, which is part of the Solomon Islands in Oceania. He’s now a postgraduate trainee in obstetrics and gynecology in nearby Papua New Guinea but returns home often  —   along with his drones, which he flies as a hobby to take aerial photos. ”Coming from a rural remote area, I always wondered what my island looks like from the air,” Olangi says. He says the village pictured here, Lilisiana, is known for its expert sea navigators and fishermen  —   and its shell jewelry. In fact, Olangi tells us, shells from this region were used for thousands of years as currency. The homes pictured, according to Olangi, are built from mangrove trees found in nearby forests and have roofs stitched from palm leaves. He says they could be built so close to the lagoon’s edge because the waves break far from the shore. Over the years, Olangi has seen more homes built out of modern materials and families placing a greater emphasis on education. His big fear for his island is climate change. ”My only worry is that the sea levels are rising and these villagers will surely be affected.” Romanian sheep, seen from the sky  Professional photographer and videographer Szabolcs Ignácz captured this shot while on assignment for the World Wildlife Fund in his home country, Romania. He passed this herd of sheep along the road in the village of Marpod, in Romania’s Sibiu County, and launched his drone to take this photo (and some mesmerizing video, which can be seen at his website, DroneMob). Ignácz says Marpod is in the heart of Transylvania, where traditional Saxon houses nestle in the mountains. ”I might compare it to the Shire from Lord of the Rings,” he says. Many of the 800 or so residents are farmers, Ignácz says, noting that some have found success moving into organic farming and tourism. ”Lion’s Rock” towers above a Sri Lankan jungle, Jerome Courtial, a French travel and aerial photographer based in London, traveled to Sri Lanka with the intention of photographing the ancient palace and fortress complex of Sigiriya. Known as ”Lion’s Rock,” the UNESCO World Heritage site towers above the surrounding jungle. To launch his drone from the ideal place, Courtial tells us, he hiked through dense jungle, surrounded by hostile monkeys. Cambodian children couldn’t believe what they saw,  This image was captured by Christopher Honglin of Mauritius while on a trip to Cambodia with his girlfriend  —   and his DJI Phantom 3 drone. When the couple visited Tonlé Sap River region, Honglin says: ”Kids were in awe at the sight of the drone. We wanted to share how their village looked from the top. They couldn’t believe their eyes.” For more drone images from around the globe, visit dronestagram. "
510,"With no shortage of material to work with, Saturday Night Live satirized a packed week in American politics, reiterating themes imparted by critics for months. The episode kicked off by lampooning Russia’s role in influencing the U. S. election. Cast member Beck Bennett brought back smug shirtless Vladimir Putin, the star of Saturday’s cold open, to assuage America’s fears about their new president, in a speech carried by RT, the Russian   outlet. ”You are worried that your country is in the hands of this unpredictable man. But don’t worry, it’s not,” he smirks. Just look at Russia, suggests SNL’s Putin, whose administration also started out on a road of skepticism. ”Many Russians were skeptical of me at first too, but today, no one seems to hear from any of them,” he says. ”It’s like they’re gone.” The same day millions of American women marched to protest an administration they believe threatens their rights, Bennett’s Putin says that we must simply look to the satisfaction of Russian women to ease our fears. Enter Olya, Kate McKinnon’s subservient Russian character, reading from a scripted statement detailing her contentment under Putin’s leadership. Olya returns, from outside the window behind him, wearing a pink ’pussyhat,’ gesturing ”I’m watching you,” at her leader. SNL made fun of the low attendance of Friday’s inauguration, the central topic of discussion at the White House Briefing Room earlier Saturday evening, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer accused media outlets of downplaying crowd sizes. But what may have genuinely quelled American viewers more were diplomatic words from the week’s host, comedian Aziz Ansari. Ansari’s monologue fell in line with a larger trend among soapbox comedians, who aim to argue a broader social message first  —   to what’s often their already solid fan base  —   and to elicit laughter second. As NPR Politics reporter Jessica Taylor notes, ”The most nuanced takes on the election have come from   comedians,” like Dave Chappelle’s hosting stint the weekend after the election and now, Aziz Ansari the day after the inauguration. ”We’ve always been divided by some of these big political issues. It’s fine,” the comedian said. ”As long as we treat each other with respect and remember that ultimately, we’re all Americans, we’ll be fine.” Dubbing him the ”Chris Brown of politics,” Ansari said we shouldn’t demonize all of Trump’s supporters. Like the fans of the pop star who beat former girlfriend Rihanna, some supporters rallied behind Trump for his ideology (in Brown’s case, the tunes) not his character. Laying out the day’s events as a reason to stay hopeful, Ansari continued, ”Change doesn’t come from presidents, change comes from large groups of angry people. And if day one [of Trump’s presidency] is any indication, you are part of the largest group of angry people I’ve ever seen,” he cracked. ”Yesterday, Trump was inaugurated  —   today, an entire gender protested against him.” The next   sketch of the night featured Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway (McKinnon, again) in a   parody. Dodging questions in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper (Bennett) McKinnon’s Conway pivots instead to perform a musical number about her newfound celebrity in the political world. Next up, the show’s ”Weekend Update” segment took on the week’s leftover news headlines. In exchange for the ”Update” anchor’s usual humorous twist to cap off each news item, Michael Che frequently leaned on a reaction image of Michelle Obama depicted with a   glance, adding a curt ”Hmph.” The many faces of the former first lady on Inaguration Day, which suggest she broke her poker face, have been circulating social media. The   show closed with a sentimental tribute to the 44th president. Cecily Strong, joined a couple verses later by Sasheer Zamata, sang ”To Sir, With Love,” in front of a backdrop of a    photo of Barack Obama. The scene echoed the show’s   episode, featuring Kate McKinnon’s solemn double tribute to a freshly defeated Hillary Clinton and the late singer Leonard Cohen. The screen faded to black with the message, ”Thank You President Obama.” Viewers on Twitter lamented the absence of resident Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, who has previously said he’s ”trying to shed the Donald Trump cloak.” Hopefully Baldwin’s   will give some solace to the new president, who has criticized SNL as ”Unwatchable! Totally biased, not funny and the Baldwin impersonation just can’t get any worse. Sad.”"
511,"A top aide to President Donald Trump says he won’t release his tax returns, insisting that voters aren’t concerned about the issue. ”The White House response is he’s not going to release his tax returns,” said Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, on ABC’s ”This Week.” ”We litigated this all through the election. People didn’t care,” Conway added. During another interview on NBC’s ”Meet The Press” Conway also repeatedly clashed with host Chuck Todd over estimates of crowd size at Friday’s inauguration, saying the difference between media and administration officials amounted to ”alternative facts.” ”You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” she said. Conway also pushed back hard against suggestions that Spicer had deliberately misrepresented crowd size, telling Todd, ”. .. if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here.” (Conway’s interview with Todd begins shortly after the 6:53 mark.) Conway’s comments about the President’s tax returns seem to represent a departure from Trump’s earlier statements, which indicated that he would release his returns, if not for the fact that he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. In September, after   presidential candidate Mike Pence released his own tax returns, Pence’s spokesman noted, ”These returns are being released with the full support of Mr. Trump who plans to release his tax returns upon completion of a routine audit.” During his Jan. 11th press conference, Trump said, ”I’m not releasing the tax returns because, as you know, they’re under audit.” He added, ”You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters, OK? They’re the only ones. ..I won. I mean, I became president. No, I don’t think they care at all. I don’t think they care at all. I think you care.” An ABC   Street Journal poll released earlier this month indicated that 74 percent of Americans want Trump to release his tax returns, including 49 percent of his own supporters. In addition, about 217, 000 people had signed an online petition calling for the returns to be released as of   Sunday. U. S. presidents are not required to release their tax returns, but they have regularly done so since the 1970s, as a gesture of transparency. Trump’s refusal to do so has been widely criticized by critics who say his many domestic and foreign financial ties need to be scrutinized more carefully. ”The   did not release his tax returns. Every other candidate for president has released his tax returns, but he didn’t want to. And he apparently won’t, and we just have no idea where the financing is coming from for all these companies he owns all over the world, all these interests,” said Richard Painter, ethics adviser to former President George W. Bush, during an interview on NPR’s ”Fresh Air” earlier this month. The Conway interview came one day after Trump excoriated the media over reports about how many people showed up to watch his   saying journalists are ”among the most dishonest people on earth.” During a visit to the CIA, Trump said as many as 1. 5 million people showed up for the inauguration, and Spicer later added that it was ”the largest to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” But aerial photographs indicate a much smaller crowd, and ridership on the Washington D. C. subway system was down from President Obama’s second inauguration in 2013. While Trump himself had offered an estimate of crowd size, Conway said it wasn’t possible to count the number of people attending, saying, ”I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or another. There’s no way to quantify crowd numbers.” That echoed comments made by Spicer himself, who said the National Park Service no longer gives official estimates of crowd size. However, he then went on to give detailed estimates of the crowd size."
512,"Donald Trump’s first day in office has been marked by much of the same discord that characterized his campaign. In the hours after his inauguration, the newly   President began some of the work of governing  —   even as hundreds of thousands of people gathered in cities across the country, and around the world, to protest Trump’s presidency. Women descend on Washington, Many women brought their families to the main Women’s March in Washington, D. C. which began with a rally with the U. S. Capitol in the background. Heather Ba from Chapel Hill, N. C. said she came with four generations of her family, including her own    son. ”We came to show our disapproval of our new president, and I think also to draw attention to women’s issues,” Ba said. She said she believes President Trump to be ”psychologically unwell and not fit to be president,” and said she was considering becoming more involved in local politics during the next few years. Erika Abril came to Washington from Leesburg, VA. with her two teenage daughters. ”I just want them to be part of this  —   making history,” she said. The family is originally from Ecuador, Abril said, and she’s alarmed by some of Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and minorities. ”It’s just hard to be out of a country that sometimes you don’t like what is happening in there, and then coming here thinking that everything’s gonna be okay, and then not knowing what is going to come,” she said. ”That is the hardest part.” Abril and her daughters held a sign that read, in Spanish, ”Respect my existence or expect my resistance.” Her    daughter, Maria Emilia Proano, expressed frustration and disbelief that such a march felt necessary. ”We shouldn’t be doing this, because we should already be equal to men and everything.” Mothers, daughters, and sisters, They were far from the only multigenerational family at the March. Kristina Apgar, 31, came from Brooklyn, New York to march with her mother, Ruth Apgar, and    sister, Samantha Apgar, who lives in Connecticut. ”I would be here no matter what by myself, but the fact that my mom and my sister are here and we’re all united fighting for women’s rights and inclusivity for all Americans, it means so much more,” Kristina Apgar said. Ruth Apgar remembers a time when she ”put up with a lot in the workplace,” and she said she doesn’t want her daughters to struggle like she did. ”I’m not going back to the good old days, because quite frankly, they were not good old days for me,” she said. Men, too, While the crowd that filled the streets for multiple blocks was mostly female, there were men among the marchers. Eugene Beckley, a software developer from Ellicott City, MD. said he was thinking of his mother and female cousins when he came to the march. He said he’s worried about the impact of Trump’s administration on women’s rights. ”Feminism in general is only going to grow and be more supported by men supporting it,” Beckley said. Not just women’s issues, While the Women’s March was billed as a display of unity among people concerned about the tone set by the new administration, it hasn’t been without internal conflicts. Women describing themselves as   feminists have expressed disappointment about not being allowed to be official partners for the event, whose platform supports abortion rights. And concerns have surfaced about the representation and inclusion of minority women, prompting organizers to stress that the march was also a platform for demonstrators concerned about issues ranging from racial inequality to climate change. Stefani Peart, an   student at George Washington University from East Orange, N. J. said she felt the march ultimately succeeded at bringing diverse groups together. ”Being able to stand out here and see people of all races, all ethnicities come together to fight for the same common cause of just women’s rights in general is something that needs to happen more often. ”And the fact that we’re doing it right now just shows how [united] we are as a nation as much as Trump is trying to divide us.” Her classmate, Arion Laws, is also  . The Charleston, S. C. native said she came to send Trump and his administration a message. ”They’ve basically insulted every single minority,” she said. Laws said she hoped the large crowds in Washington and across the country would send a message: ”I just want him and his administration to know that no, you can’t silence us, and we won’t be silenced.” Protests beyond the Beltway, In addition to the main event in Washington, D. C. women and their supporters protested across the country and around the world. Marches were held in several major European cities, Mexico, Thailand, and India, among other places. Protestors in the United States who couldn’t make the trip to Washington organized their own hometown events. Thousands turned out in larger cities like Boston and Chicago, while many smaller cities like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, saw substantial turnouts given their size. President Trump starts working Friday, visits the CIA on Saturday, As protestors marched through the streets of Washington, D. C.,Trump made an official visit to CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA. where he praised the CIA, railed against the media, and talked up the size of the crowd at his inauguration: ”a   area, all the way up to the Washington Monument, was packed.”  That’s despite the fact that aerial photos of Trump’s inauguration showed substantial empty space on the National Mall. In his first hours in office, Trump also took several official actions, including revamping the WhiteHouse. gov website and signing an executive order to ”minimize the economic burden” of the Affordable Care Act. Soon after Trump took office, the Justice Department requested and was granted the delay of two hearings on controversial issues one involved a voter ID law in Texas, and the other was a hearing related to a police reform agreement in Baltimore."
513,"The streets of Washington looked vastly different the day after Donald J. Trump’s inauguration than they did the  . Instead of the largely white crowds that lined Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, people of all colors, classes and ages filled the streets for what’s being called the most diverse march for women’s rights ever. The Women’s March On Washington drew tens of thousands to the nation’s capital to press for protection of women’s rights, including reproductive health care, LGBT issues and equal pay. ”Sister marches” held concurrently in every state across the nation, (and in several cities abroad) added to the numbers and the diversity. But all that diversity came with a cost: racial tension  —   not just around the march itself, but around the feminist movement, who leads it and why. Some bemoaned the discord as a distraction from the march, saying on this occasion, ”we should all be women first.” Grace Hong is not surprised. A professor of Asian American and Gender Studies at UCLA, Hong says for decades, white women didn’t have to consider any interests beyond their own because ”historically, the category ’woman’ has, implicitly, meant white women.” The call to put womanhood above all else, Hong says, is based on the idea that ”critique and dissent undermine a unity that’s based on the lowest common denominator: Find the one thing everyone has in common.” The fact that the feminist movement was so white for so long, says Ashley Farmer, is the reason so many women of color steered clear of it. Farmer is a historian at Boston University, and concentrates on   women’s history. She says women of color noticed when their interests and needs didn’t get a full hearing. ”When we actually get down to representation or creating a list of demands or mobilizing around a set of ideas,” Farmer says, ”it tends to be that white   or   women’s priorities get put above the rest.” It was that way in the 1850s, when some feminists split over whether to champion abolition or women’s rights. (That’s when Sojourner Truth gave her famous ”Ain’t I A Woman?” speech at a women’s rights conference in Ohio.) It was that way in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when ”Sisterhood is Powerful” became a rallying cry  —   but with very few exceptions (Flo Kennedy, Shirley Chisholm, Eleanor Holmes Norton) brown and black sisters were very much on the sidelines. It’s why some   women, like writers Alice Walker and bell hooks, chose to refer to themselves as ”womanist,” not feminist. They refused to divorce their race from their gender. (They were intersectional before intersectionality as a term came into existence, created by black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.) Today, ”womanist” also resonates with a younger generation of feminists, not all of them black. Dolores Arredondo, a marketing executive with Wells Fargo, in Los Angeles, has been calling herself a womanist for years, in direct response to what she saw as white feminists’ exclusion. ”I just remember this history of the feminist movement,” Arredondo shrugs. ”I can see the history, and none of them looked like me.” Arredondo attended the Los Angeles march with her    daughter Sophie. Brenda   says she’s not hung up on labels. The director of the California regional office for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group,   says she’ll answer to most anything  —   feminist, womanist, whatever  —   but she has another term she prefers: chingona. ”It means badass!” she says, gleefully. ”A chingona is someone who is not afraid to stand up for what they believe in, somebody that’s happy to shake things up when needed.” Chingonas, she says, get things done. And they come in all races and genders. The Women’s March on Washington started out pretty white, but quickly added young women of color in positions of leadership. They’re three of the four main organizers, and a lot of attention has been paid to how diverse this march has been in contrast to earlier ones. But even as the march’s diversity was being celebrated, it was also causing tension. When ShiShi Rose, a young black Brooklyn blogger, wrote an Instagram post advising white women allies that ”now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less.” She suggested they become more conversant in culture beyond the mainstream standard. Some white women were so offended that they cancelled plans to attend the march. Margo Jefferson doesn’t have much patience with that. A Pulitzer   cultural critic for The New York Times for years, (and part of the Artist Table of creatives and celebrities who participated in the New York sister march) Jefferson remembers being one the few early black feminists who called themselves that. (”Of course I was lonely back then,” she admits. ”It was harder for black women to make a feminist movement in the 1970s. ”) Jefferson advises white women who were offended by Rose’s post to ”Sit back. You’re associated with a history that has to do with being bossy and   and bigoted in some ways. I can see how that would rattle, and even anger you,” she says gently. ”But I do not consider it reason enough to cancel an attendance at a march like this. Get over it.” Julie Wittes Schlack is a Boston writer and corporate executive who was neither rattled nor offended by criticism from women of color. If the movement is going to progress to the next level, Schlack believes, white feminists like her are going to have to deal with some hard truths. They are right to be proud of their contributions to women’s progress in this country, she says, but more needs to be done. ”The benefits of our work so far around things like reproductive rights aren’t conferred equally across all women,” Schlack points out. ”And that’s what I think younger feminists, feminists of color, particularly, are trying to wake us up to.” The issues are broader, messier, more intersectional: race, gender, class, nationality, immigration status, everything is connected. The   Schlack refers to won’t just benefit women of color, points out Boston University’s Ashley Farmer: ”When you make something that accounts for the most oppressed, everybody’s life tends to get better.” But that process may have bumps from time to time. UCLA’s Grace Hong believes the discord around today’s marches may, in the end, be good for feminism: ”Maybe the point is to not all agree,” she says. ”Maybe the point is to do these kinds of things so that you can have the tough conversations.” And maybe, she says, these marches are the next step toward having those tough, but necessary, talks."
514,"Donald Trump took the oath of office on Friday before a crowd speckled with red, many of them wearing the campaign’s famous ”Make America Great Again” hats. Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington in downtown D. C. drew a crowd with vastly different political beliefs, but there was one similarity, as the sea of people was peppered with pink,   ”pussyhats.” The (mostly) homemade hats were a sly reference to lewd comments Trump made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before the election. And they also echoed some of the traits that experts said made the Trump hat so effective for the winning candidate. Marchers on Saturday said they liked the hat because it unified them around one general message. ”I think this woman who put this together is frickin’ brilliant and a genius because it’s such a political, simple statement: a pink hat, and all you have is the pussycat ears,” said Mellicent Dyane, 50, a casting director from New York City, wearing a neon pink hat as she watched the rally. ”It speaks volumes.” In that sense, the pussyhat has some of the same traits that made the ”Make America Great Again” hat work: it sends a very particular political message, one that is simultaneously unifying and antagonistic. The Trump ”Make America Great Again” implies that somehow, someone (perhaps the political establishment, especially from the party in power for the last eight years) allowed America to no longer be great, and that the wearers are banding together to get that greatness back. Despite not bearing a slogan, the ”pussyhats” have their own clear target of criticism, explains one expert. ”It doesn’t have the words on the hat like the ’Make America Great Hat’ does, but the name of the hat evokes memories of this [Access Hollywood] tape that has a message that the people who made this want to convey,” said Todd Davies, associate director of Stanford’s Symbolic Systems program. But the hats were intended also to be unifying for women (and the men who came to support the march). Following an election where Donald Trump effectively used masculinity as a campaign strategy, the pussyhats are unabashedly feminine, in that they are pink and homemade (not to mention that they reference a derogatory term for the female anatomy). That’s by design: the ”Pussyhat Project” website explains that ”knitting and crochet are traditionally women’s crafts,” adding, ”[knitting] circles are powerful gatherings of women.” The similarities don’t end there. Both hats represent a kind of backlash: one by a group of people who believed they were ignored political outsiders, and the other by people who recently suffered a stinging election defeat. In addition, simplicity is arguably a central goal of both hats, albeit to different ends. The Trump hat’s plain red background with white Times New Roman lettering ”represented [an] everyman sensibility,” as FastCo Design’s Dianna Budds explained this year. Likewise, most pussyhat patterns are simple  —   one article promised viewers they could learn how to sew a hat ”in the time it actually takes to ironically watch The Bachelor”  —   allowing some crafters to crank out and distribute many. While the red caps and pink knit hats invite comparison, they aren’t perfect analogues of each other the homemade pussyhats, in shades ranging from fuchsia to powder pink to mauve (and a few that weren’t pink at all)  —   were naturally not as uniform as the   Trump hats. Again, the Pussyhat Project characterizes that as a feature rather than a bug, allowing people to be unique and diverse in their designs. (Likewise, the homemade hats helped people connect with one another  —   marchers on Saturday reported getting hats from their grandmothers, wives, state legislators, and even strangers on the street.) Importantly, though, the pussyhat has a long way to go to reach the power that the Trump hat has. Extolling the red trucker hat as the ”symbol of the year 2016,” Davies wrote about what made it stick. ”Lots of things can be symbols,” he said. ”but relatively few things actually are. Being a symbol is an acquired status that gets established through use.” The pussyhats could simply become a memento for marchers, as opposed to something they continually wear. After all, Trump rallies gave supporters regular reasons to get together and don their hats, eventually making the caps familiar to many Americans. The pink hats very easily might never reach that point. At least for now, the pussyhats and trucker hats fulfill the basic role of identifying tribes. Saturday afternoon,   families ate in restaurants alongside   marchers. Without even talking, they knew exactly which team they were on."
515,"Updated at 9:00 a. m. ET  The Trump Administration spent its first full day in office taking shots at the media and arguing about crowd sizes at Friday’s inauguration. Press secretary Sean Spicer delivered a fiery broadside against the Fourth Estate from the White House Briefing Room Saturday evening, claiming that reporters had engaged in ”deliberately false reporting” in the past 24 hours since President Trump took the oath of office. And, after berating the press, he walked away without taking any questions. ”Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” Spicer claimed. He blamed new floor coverings on mall areas that ”had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” And Spicer claimed that fences and magnetometers going further back than ever prevented ”hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the mall as quickly as they had in years past.” However, CNN reporter Ashley Killough tweeted out a photo showing that floor coverings had in fact been used at Obama’s second inauguration. Spicer correctly said that the National Park Service does not do crowd estimates any longer, so that there was no official estimate to rely on, and NPR has made no official estimation of crowd size because official figures aren’t available. But then Spicer went on to make his own estimate on the crowd size and incorrectly claimed that the number of people who used the Washington D. C. Metro on Friday had outpaced the number of people who used the service during President Obama’s second inaugural. In 2009, 317, 000 people had, in fact, used the Metro by 11 a. m. according to WMATA, as Spicer cited. But the White House press secretary then claimed that 420, 000 people had used the Metro on Friday by 11 a. m. only 193, 000 people had ridden Metro. For the whole day on Friday, 570, 000 people used the system, but in 2013 there were 782, 000 riders and 1. 1 million riders in 2009  —   both much larger than Trump’s inauguration. ”This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration  —   period  —   both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said in another unverifiable claim. Spicer’s own math was that there were 250, 000 people in the immediate area of the inaugural dais at the Capitol, and another 220, 000 from 4th Street to the media tents. Spicer then claimed there were another 250, 000 people from the media tents to the Washington Monument. ”All of this space was full when the president took the oath of office,” Spicer said, claiming the entire area from the Capitol to the Washington Monument was full. However, aerial photographs show that claim is false. The area just in front of the Washington Monument was sparsely populated and far from full, as confirmed by photographs and from NPR’s reporters on the ground. Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the television audience was larger than the second inauguration of Barack Obama in 2013. Ratings from Nielsen showed an audience of 30. 6 million on Friday. Their ratings from 2013 back up Trump’s assertion, with an audience of 20. 5 million. Past inaugurations measured by Nielsen that exceeded the audience for Trump’s inauguration include Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, Jimmy Carter in 1977 and Richard Nixon in 1973  —   the only president to have a larger audience for his second inauguration than his first since these ratings have been compiled. The dispute over crowd size came Saturday as thousands and thousands of women and men gathered in D. C. and in major cities around the country and the world to participate in the Women’s March on Washington to protest Trump’s agenda on women’s rights and his past statements degrading women. Trump himself had made similar claims disputing crowd estimates earlier on Saturday when he traveled to the CIA to address intelligence officers. The president said he believed there was anywhere between 1 million and 1. 5 million people on the National Mall as he delivered his inaugural address, and he also falsely claimed it stopped raining and the sun came out just as he started speaking when, in fact, the rain continued and the day remained overcast and cloudy. Spicer lectured reporters for not focusing more on Trump’s CIA speech, telling them ”that’s what you folks should be writing and covering instead of sowing division about tweets and false narratives.” Spicer also complained about a report from pool reporter Zeke Miller of Time Magazine on Friday that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office. Miller later admitted he had made a mistake, apologized and reported that it had ”been obscured” by a Secret Service agent and a door.” President Trump himself also attacked Miller over that mistake in his speech at the CIA. Spicer claimed that report was ”irresponsible” and ”reckless,” but in fact the press secretary had tweeted Friday night that he accepted Miller’s apology. Spicer ended with an unprecedented warning that they would hold the press accountable and go around them when necessary. ”The American people deserve better, and as long as he serves as the messenger for this incredible movement,” Spicer said of the president, ”he will take his message directly to the American people, where his focus will always be.”"
516,"Republicans plan to turn control of Medicaid over to the states as part of their replacement for the Affordable Care Act, according to an adviser to President Donald Trump. Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, told NBC News’s Sunday Today with Willie Geist, that the health care law that will replace Obamacare will turn Medicaid  —   a joint   health insurance program for the poor  —   into a block grant program. The change would mean the federal government would give money to the states to implement Medicaid as they see fit. ”Those who are closest to the people in need will be administering it,” Conway said in the interview, which was recorded the Thursday and Sunday. ”You really cut out the fraud, waste and abuse, and you get the help directly to them.” Medicaid is now funded by the federal government and states together and it has an   funding stream, meaning it pays for all health costs to which its beneficiaries are entitled under the law. Conservatives who are concerned about the impact the growth in health care spending will have on the federal and state budgets have advocated block grants as a way to cut the Medicaid costs. But many health policy analysts say that block grants could lead to reductions in care. ”A Medicaid block grant program would institute deep cuts to federal funding . .. and threaten benefits for tens of millions of   families,” said Edwin Park, vice president for Health Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in a report on the group’s website. Block grants can take several forms. Under one scenario, the federal government would offer a fixed sum of money to each state, which would grow with inflation. Since the rate of overall inflation is typically lower than inflation in the health care sector that leads to an erosion of spending over time. And such a fixed block grant means less money is available when the economy is suffering and more people qualify for Medicaid benefits. Another scenario offers states an allowance for each beneficiary. Under such a plan, spending would increase in bad economic times to cover the additional people who need care. However, overall benefits could still fall over time, depending on how the program accounts for rising health care costs. Conway didn’t give details about how a block grant program would be structured. Medicaid grew under former President Barack Obama, who gave states the option of expanding eligibility for the program to millions of people who live above the poverty line.   states and the District of Columbia have expanded their programs. Republicans who are advocating repeal of the Affordable Care Act haven’t said whether they will force those states to roll back their Medicaid programs. Conway also reiterated Trump’s promise that ”everybody” will have insurance coverage under his Obamacare alternative. ”President Trump has said that people will not go without coverage. And he means that,” she said. ”That is certainly part of the official plans that are being worked on.” However, she said that health care for all didn’t mean the president advocates universal coverage or a   health plan. ”What he means is that no one will go without coverage,” Conway said. ”There will be ways for people to access affordable, quality health insurance if they’d like to get it.” Conway said voters can also expect an Obamacare replacement to include wider use of health savings accounts, which allow people to save money   to help pay for their medical costs. Critics say such accounts don’t help   people who struggle to pay health insurance premiums because many don’t have extra money to put aside. Also, they often pay little or no income tax, so such an account doesn’t give them a boost.  Health savings accounts, depending on how they’re structured, can help wealthy people however. That’s because they allow people with high incomes and who pay a high rate of high tax to shelter more of their money from federal taxes."
517,"This post has been updated to include more information about the evaluation work done by GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.  It seems like a  . Before you spend big bucks on a massive effort to improve life for the world’s poorest  —   say, distributing millions of free bed nets against malarial mosquitoes, or offering thousands of women microloans as small as $200 to start small businesses  —   you should run a smaller scale test to make sure the idea actually works. After all, just because a project sounds good in theory doesn’t mean it’s going to pan out in practice. For instance, what if giving out the bed nets for free makes people less likely to value them? Maybe you should charge a fee on the theory that while less people would get the nets, those who do will be the ones who see a need for them and will therefore take the trouble to actually use them. And what if some totally different method wouldn’t achieve better results for less money? For instance, maybe the key to lifting women’s incomes isn’t helping them start a small business but helping them land a salaried job? Yet for decades, questions like this have been left unanswered. Instead health and development aid for the world’s poorest has largely been designed based on what seems reasonable, rather than what can be proved with hard evidence. Since the early 2000s, however, a growing movement of social science researchers have been pushing   to do ”impact evaluations” of their programs. That’s a phrase used in the world of aid that means checking whether your program is achieving its ultimate objective  —   say raising incomes or reducing disease. In particular, these scientists have been arguing for the use of what they call the   of proof: the ”randomized controlled trial.” In an RCT you randomly divide the people you’re studying into at least two groups. One gets the intervention you want to test. The second, an otherwise identical ”control group” of subjects, doesn’t get the intervention. Then you compare the results for each group to see what difference, if any, the intervention made. Over the last decade there’s been an explosion in the number of RCTs being done to measure health and   efforts, and they’ve helped settle some major debates about what works and what doesn’t. (As it turns out, offering bed nets for free as opposed to at a price, appears to be extremely effective. On the other hand, while microloans may have all sorts of uses, the evidence suggests that lifting people’s incomes over the long term is not one of them.) Despite these successes, the researchers who advocate this approach  —   they’re sometimes called ”randomistas”  —   also worry that RCT’s are still not being deployed frequently enough, and that even when they are done, policy makers often fail to apply the lessons. This sense of mixed progress was evident at a recent conference organized by the Washington, D. C.  tank Center for Global Development, where some of the most prominent randomistas gathered to take stock. Just ten years ago one of the most active centers of RCT work was running about 70 impact evaluations worldwide. Today the number it’s completed or currently has underway tops 800. That’s according to Abhijit Banarjee a professor of economics at MIT who helped found the center  —   the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or    a network of affiliated researchers at nearly 50 universities who set up RCTs in the fields of global health and poverty that was started in 2003. And when you include the work of groups beyond   the number of impact evaluations of global health and poverty programs that are completed and published each year has risen steadily in the last decade from about 50 per year to 500 per year, said Emmanuel Jimenez. He’s director of the International Impact Evaluation Initiative, or 3ie, an NGO that maintains a searchable database of findings in addition to providing $83 million to fund studies since 2008. Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director of   credits the rise of RCT’s not just to funding organizations like 3ie but other research nonprofits that conduct them. Today, she said, major   players ranging from the World Bank and USAID  —   the main U. S. government agency responsible for development programs  —   all have departments that use impact evaluations in one way or another. ”What encourages me is that we’ve built a whole kind of ecosystem of groups who are trying to move this forward,” said Glennerster. But like other randomistas, she also worried that that the number of RCTs is still paltry compared to the number of development programs that governments, international organizations and NGOs are carrying out. Even at the World Bank and USAID, only a small portion of projects are subject to impact evaluations, agreed Amanda Glassman, chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Every year, her group does an exhaustive review to identify   health programs that made a big impact. Of about 250 that they looked through this past year, ”only 50 used rigorous methods to establish the attributable impact. And none of the very largest programs in global health had done any impact evaluation” of the type she argues are needed  —   including two major international nonprofit organizations: Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis as well as GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. This doesn’t mean the health products that these health programs use  —   medicines or vaccines, for instance  —   haven’t been proven effective through, say, medical trials or studies of what happens to the incidence of disease when you vaccinate a certain population, explained Glassman. Officials at GAVI note that the organization also tracks the increase in vaccination rates and decline of diseases in areas where it works, using a number of official data sources. Measuring impact ”is a major part of how the organization operates,” says Hope Johnson, director of Monitoring and Evaluation for GAVI. Glassman says that’s not enough when ”the challenge isn’t just the biological effect of a pill or vaccine but how to get those pills or vaccines to those who need them.” One question, for instance: Is it more effective to do an intensive   campaign in which health workers armed with vaccines fan out across a community than to provide routine vaccinations at health clinics. Then there’s the question of how much attention   are paying to the results of the RCTs that are being done. Banarjee noted that RCTs have at least already ”fundamentally changed our understanding” of some key issues in aid  —   the limits of microloans as a tool for ending poverty, the advisability of offering not just bed nets but all sorts of other preventive health products like de worming pills and chlorine treatments for water for free or heavily subsidized prices. But in many cases, the information generated by RCTs isn’t used to improve aid. Jimenez, of 3ie, described an internal review done by the World Bank  —   where he used to work  —   which found that only about half of impact evaluations done on Bank projects were even cited in the final reports on those projects. So why do some RCT’s make an impact while others vanish without a trace? One important lesson: collaboration with local governments is critical. Researchers need to work more directly with the   who implement aid programs, said Jimenez. Several speakers at the conference described successful experiences doing this: A team from   has worked with Indonesia’s government to test and then roll out measures to curb corruption in a rice distribution program that serves 66 million people. And researchers from the   institute RTI have been helping the government of Kenya design new teaching techniques to improve reading and math skills in elementary schools. To make these partnerships with policymakers work  said Jimenez, researchers might sometimes need to put their personal career interests on the  . For instance, researchers often prefer not to publicize their results until they’re ready for publication in a prominent journal. But that can take months. Instead said Jimenez, researchers need to be ”getting results out when the   need it.”  ’s Banarjee said that figuring out how to collaborate with governments is such a priority that   recently launched a whole branch dedicated to doing just that  —   it’s called the Government Partnerships Initiative. Otherwise, he said, ”a lot of good ideas don’t get implemented. And I think that’s really a tragedy.”"
518,"Many in the science community have expressed concern about the lack of science literacy demonstrated by the new Trump administration. A look at the administration’s statements and actions related to five key issues that are informed by science  —   anthropogenic climate change, vaccines, evolution taught in public schools, environmental science and protection of public lands, and human rights  —   bolsters that concern. As the new administration takes office, here’s a look at statements made and actions taken by the Trump team  —   and a check against the science. Climate Change, In Nov. 2012, Donald Trump tweeted that climate change was a creation of the Chinese. More recently, in a May 26, 2016, speech in North Dakota, he vowed to dismantle the international Paris Accord. Trump’s pick to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has said there is a viable ”debate” about   science and has encouraged ”dissent” about it, leading The New York Times to call him a   denialist. During his confirmation hearings Wednesday, however, Pruitt acknowledged there is ”some” role of human activity in climate change. Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson said he doesn’t see climate change as an imminent national security threat. Here, provided by NASA, is a compendium of statements from science associations showing the consensus that   trends from the last 100 years are  . How is ”a consensus” defined?   percent of   scientists agree on this fact. Vaccines, Environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a vaccine skeptic that is, he takes seriously the possibility that routine vaccinations for childhood diseases might cause autism. Kennedy met with Trump last week, afterward noting that the meeting had come at Trump’s request, and said that he would lead a   vaccine safety panel. Since then, the Trump team has clarified that the forming of this panel is a possibility and not a certainty. By contrast, here is an absolute certainty: Any link between vaccines and autism is false, as the CDC unequivocally states. As noted by NPR’s Domenico Montenaro: ”. ..the fact that Kennedy  —   who has lent his name and prominence to a controversial cause of whether vaccines, specifically the preservative called thimerosal, cause autism, for which there is no evidence within the scientific community  —   is part of [this] conversation, once again, reflects Trump embracing the fringe when it comes to the science of autism and vaccinations.” On Wednesday, an editorial in Nature underscored just how very solid the science is against any link between vaccines and autism: ”There is already ample evidence that vaccines do not elevate the risk of autism. A 2015 study of more than 95, 000 children found no association between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and an increased risk of autism  —   even among children with a family history of the disorder.” Evolution Taught In Public Schools, Unlike anthropogenic climate change, the teaching of evolution in public schools was not mentioned (as far as I can determine) during the campaign or its aftermath. Back in 2009, however, Pence told TV interviewer Chris Matthews: ”Do I believe in evolution? I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the Earth, the seas and all that’s in them.” What matters, however, is not Pence’s personal belief but whether he (and Trump) would vigorously defend the teaching of evolution in   science classes  —   without the ”equal time” teaching of creationism, which is not science. Pence did address this question, in the same interview with Matthews: ”I think, in our schools, we should teach all of the facts about all of these controversial areas and let our students, let our children and our children’s children decide based upon the facts and the science.” There is no controversy about evolution, though. There is no doubt that, like all other life on Earth, we humans have evolved and continue to evolve. And as I have argued here before, we fail our children unless we teach them precisely that. The National Center for Science Education is, as its website proclaims, ”the only national organization devoted to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools”. (The NCSE also promotes   science, as 13. 7’s Tania Lombrozo has noted.) The NCSE website includes page after page of fabulous resources giving the facts of evolution. The Smithsonian’s Human Origins program offers equally excellent information about the timeline and details of human evolution. Environmental Science And Protection Of Public Lands, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Interior is Ryan Zinke, who declared during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday that climate change is not ”a hoax.” He also said that he is against selling of public lands to the states, which would increase the risk of development on those lands. On both counts, this is somewhat encouraging news for environmental science. Zinke’s remark that humans ”influence” climate change does, though, seriously underestimate the scientific conclusions that I have noted above about anthropogenic climate change. And crucially, as The New York Times reported: ”Mr. Zinke also emphasized his support for drilling, mining and logging on federal lands, activities strongly opposed by many environmental groups.” Environmental science specifies threats to the environment from oil and gas drilling, including disruption of wildlife migration routes oil spills that hurt animals’ health and pollution that negatively affects ecosystems’ health as well as scenic views and night skies. When these activities, not to mention mining and logging, occur on public lands  —   on range lands, in or near national forests and near national parks  —   the costs to animals, plants and the land itself have the the great potential to be severe. From a scientific perspective, then, Zinke’s record is mixed at best. Human Rights, Trump has mocked disabled people, denigrated the character of people from Mexico and, according to the global   organization Human Rights Watch that just last Friday cited Trump as a threat to human rights, ran a campaign ”fomenting hatred and intolerance.” Trump’s policy proposals, the new Human Rights Watch report said, ”would harm millions of people, including plans to engage in massive deportations of immigrants, to curtail women’s rights and media freedoms, and to use torture.” My field of anthropology, which embraces science, can help here. Anthropology tells us that our species, Homo sapiens, is only 200, 000 years old that we evolved physically and cognitively in Africa and that, wherever we may live in the world, human populations are equal in our ability to learn and in our essential humanity. Of course, anthropology is also about taking the time to live among, closely observe and, most importantly, listen to people in other cultures, other neighborhoods, other streets within a neighborhood, even other rooms within an apartment complex. The idea is to learn. When we reject xenophobia and cultural stereotypes in favor of open looking, listening and dialogue, we come to recognize the varied ways we may express our common humanity. We humans are not   to behave in any certain fixed way, even within a population an anthropological perspective tells us that the circumstances that surround us greatly influence our behavior. To a great degree, in terms of our compassion or our cruelty to others, we choose who we become. Tania Lombrozo, writing here at 13. 7, noted that now is the time to expand our circle of moral concern to include people of all backgrounds  —   a conclusion that fits beautifully with an anthropological outlook. And I have added animals to that moral circle. The onset of the Trump administration can and should be considered a time of opportunity: Here is the moment for us to collectively increase not only our compassion, but also our science literacy, and that of our children. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape"
519,"It’s not fair to compare the 2004 film Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to the new Netflix series A Series of Unfortunate Events. But let’s do it anyway. Both film and TV show adapt the first three volumes in the wildly popular and manically melancholy series of books for children written by Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) though the Netflix series covers the fourth book as well. Both are   six ways to Sunday, with muted brown and somber gray soundstages standing in for expressionistically bleak landscapes and baroquely decrepit mansions. Both feature beloved actors in   roles (Film: Billy Connolly! Luis Guzman! Catherine O’Hara! TV: Patrick Warburton! Aasif Mandvi! Catherine O’Hara!) and both attempt to achieve the singular tone of the books. It’s the specificity of this tone that made the books such a success. As Handler himself has noted, it owes a great deal to Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey. There is a deliberate,   achingly Anglophilic quality to the prose dreadful events are related in a manner engineered to keep us at an emotional distance. Characters and story beats are   at, readers are admonished to skip pages ahead, and constantly given schoolmarmy vocabulary lessons. As a result, the mood of the books is waspish, even arch, but never grotesque. ”Whimsically dark” is a narrow sliver of narrative real estate to build a story on, yet it’s there that ASoUE lives. It’s the Netflix series that comes closest to achieving that tone, for two reasons. One, it foregrounds Lemony Snicket. Jude Law played him in the movie, but chiefly in  . The Netflix series turns him into a kind of omnipresent, lachrymose host played with deadpan,   solemnity by Patrick Warburton. In the series, Snicket is constantly stepping into the shot to impart some new nugget of depressing information, or express concern at something that has just happened, will soon happen, or is happening. He’s like Rod Serling at the beginning of The Twilight Zone, if an episode ever featured Neil Patrick Harris in drag. Snicket’s physical presence turns out to be important. In the movie, Law’s   did much of the same work, or tried to, but having Snicket literally step into the proceedings to warn us about what we’re about to see next feels exactly like those moments in the books when Snicket’s narrator would admonish us for reading him. But the big reason it all works? Neil Patrick Harris’ evil Count Olaf. Look, it will likely not surprise you to learn that the acting choices Harris makes as the villain of the piece are generally smaller than those made by Jim Carrey in the film. The film was big, and Carrey made it bigger, and it’s hard to fault him for it. As written, the character of Count Olaf is an     after all he’s operatically evil. And when called to do so, Harris can twirl with the best of them: He can lean into Olaf’s dastardliness with a fervor that chews its way through the scenery, and the props, and much of the craft services table to boot. Mostly though, Harris’ Olaf vibrates at a lower frequency. When he’s not being performatively nasty, he seems merely . .. annoyed. Tetchy. Distracted. Impatient. Vexed at the world for not appreciating him. It’s smaller, and feels truer, than anything Carrey managed to find in the character. It’s also variation on Harris’ Dr. Horrible  —   a guy who can turn it on when he needs to, but whose malice seems like an act. Maybe that’s why his vaunting lust for the Beaudelaire fortune doesn’t seem so much   as . .. something to do. Should we get another season of the series that takes us further into the books, those smaller, humanizing aspects Harris is injecting into this cartoonish villain will pay off in ways I probably shouldn’t spoil. But I keep thinking of a scene in one of the later episodes of the TV series, in which Olaf is asked why he does the things he does, why he torments the three Beaudelaire orphans so much. ”Because it’s fun,” he says. I buy that NPH sure looks like he’s having a blast."
520,"Since it opened 50 years ago, the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic has been a refuge  —   for everyone from flower children to famous rock stars to Vietnam War veterans returning home addicted to heroin. Strolling through the clinic halls in San Francisco, Dr. David Smith, the medical organization’s founder, points to a large collage that decorates a wall of an exam room affectionately referred to as the Psychedelic Wall of Fame. The 1967 relic shows a kaleidoscope of images of Jefferson Airplane and other legendary counterculture bands floating in a dreamscape of creatures, nude goddesses, peace symbols and large loopy letters. ”That was made by a woman who had just taken LSD,” Smith says. ”She stayed here for a very long time and put all that up. It lasted as long as her LSD trip.” He continues on to what was once called the ”bad trip” room, where clinic staff would talk clients down during acid trips gone awry. Fundamentally, Smith and others say, the organization has remained true to its roots in counterculture, still offering free care in a deliberately nonjudgmental atmosphere. But it is also drastically different: It is now the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics  —   plural  —   and part of a    conglomerate with the decidedly   name of HealthRIGHT360. All told, HealthRIGHT 360 serves approximately 40, 000 patients each year via a wide range of programs, including reentry services to ease the transition of formerly incarcerated adults and teens into life outside jail, residential and outpatient drug treatment, mental health care and medical and dental care. In 2014, it purchased a    building at 1563 Mission Street in San Francisco as additional space, to offer all of these services under one roof. The organization also serves patients in neighboring San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. It’s been a long journey from Smith’s early days running a standalone clinic. When his clinic first opened, it operated 24 hours a day with an army of volunteer physicians from the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University. The one paid staffer was a nurse. The first year’s budget was her salary: $25, 000. The clinic had what Smith describes as a ”guerilla pharmacy.” Pharmaceutical representatives, he says, would load up their trunks with medication samples and drop them off at the clinic, where a team of UCSF volunteer pharmacists bottled up the medication and shelved it. ”Our first exam table was my kitchen table,” he recalls. Decisions were made by consensus. Even the janitor weighed in, Smith says. Back then, iconic music promoter Bill Graham organized benefit rock concerts  —   featuring performances by George Harrison and Janis Joplin  —   to help keep the clinic afloat financially. Smith remembers when Joplin overdosed on heroin, and the clinic rushed over an ”overdose team” armed with naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opiates. ”We zipped out there,” he says, ”and reversed her overdose.” Smith says he saw many Vietnam veterans returning from the war in the early 1970s who were addicted to heroin. They felt ostracized, he says, by what was then called the Veterans Administration, and headed to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and its clinic, which by then offered comprehensive medical care and a drug detox program. The influx of veterans led to federal grants to Smith’s clinic from the Special Action Office on Drug Abuse Prevention. ”That began the government funding era in the 1970s and ensured our survival,” Smith says. In the 1980s, a young woman named Vitka Eisen came to the Haight Ashbury clinic struggling with heroin addiction, and learned firsthand the value of the personal attention the clinic offered. ”I went there for detox at least nine times,” she says. ”I never felt shamed or judged. They always acted like they were glad to see me.” Her trust in the staff, she says, led her to kick her heroin habit and return to school. She eventually earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University. Today Eisen is CEO of HealthRIGHT360. By 2011, like many   nonprofits, the organization Smith helped start in the 1960s was deeply in debt. So it merged with Walden House, a respected San   addiction and mental health treatment program, which wanted to offer comprehensive medical care to its patients. The merged nonprofit adopted the name HealthRIGHT360. By joining forces, Eisen says, Walden House and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics were able to weather the extraordinary financial expense of shifting their organizations to electronic health records, a requirement of the Affordable Care Act. With the network in place, she says, it’s been easier to train and add new providers as HealthRight360 has expanded. The merger also allowed the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to erase its debt in a year. Between 2011 and last July  —   when the organization merged with Prototypes, a Southern California women’s drug treatment center  —   HealthRIGHT360 acquired five other community clinics in Northern California and now offers treatment at 40 sites up and down the state. Ben Avey, assistant director of external affairs at the California Primary Care Association, says such mergers aren’t new, but they have accelerated under the Affordable Care Act. At the individual clinics that comprise health systems like HealthRIGHT360, ”they speak your language, know your culture, understand the situation you’re coming from,” Avey adds. As CEO, Eisen led the consolidation that streamlined HealthRIGHT 360. ”We have one board, one human resources department, one finance department, one payroll department and one executive,” she says. The annual revenue is $110 million.   the city, county, state and federal governments all reimburse HealthRIGHT 360 for providing patient services, as do commercial health insurers. But ties to the early days remain. The early treatment of concertgoers evolved into San   Rock Medicine, which is now part of HealthRight360. Staff members set up medical clinics   at rock concerts, circuses and fairs in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, providing medical treatment that garners $1, 038, 000 annually from the venues. The nonjudgmental attitude of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics’ staff toward patients also continues to this day, according to    David Smith, (no relation to the clinic founder) who has been coming to the clinic since the 1980s and says he’s always felt welcomed and accepted. This was true, Smith says, even when he was homeless in the early 2000s. ”It didn’t matter if I was dirty,” he says. ”I didn’t have to feel like I couldn’t come in here because I wasn’t in the proper state of cleanliness  —   which was, unfortunately, the case for quite a bit of time.” Kaiser Health News, is an editorially independent part of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. Laurie Udesky is an   freelance journalist based in San Francisco. On Twitter: @laurieudesky. "
521,"To revisit the box office numbers for 1988 is to remember when movies that made a lot of money looked entirely different than they do now. Rain Man grossed more money domestically than anything else that year. It was followed in the top 10 by Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Coming To America, Big, Twins, Crocodile Dundee II, Die Hard, The Naked Gun, Cocktail, and Beetlejuice. Only one sequel in the bunch. That’s two adult dramas (if you count Cocktail, which . .. maybe?) seven comedies, and Die Hard. In 2016? Rogue One, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life Of Pets, The Jungle Book, Deadpool, Zootopia, Batman v Superman, Suicide Squad, and Sing. Five action franchise entries and five kids’ movies, and that’s it. It was back in that more    environment that the 15th biggest movie of the year was Beaches, starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey as best friends who meet as girls under the Atlantic City boardwalk and remain friends right up until  —   spoiler alert  —   one of them dies. (If you think about it, that’s how any friendship ends if it lasts long enough. Again, spoiler alert.) Beaches is often remembered as the epitome of the weepie, the hankie movie, the sniffler, whatever you want to call it. In fact, it’s more interesting than that and contains more angular and painful moments than that, but what people remember is the crying and dying. It makes sense, in a way, that Lifetime would remake it almost 30 (gulp) years later with Idina Menzel and Nia Long as CC and Hillary. They’re both solid actresses who have been wonderful in lots of roles over the years, and the film is directed by Allison Anders, who’s directed a lot of TV but also the films Gas Food Lodging and Grace Of My Heart, both of which are strong stories about interesting women. But unfortunately, the remake, which airs on Saturday night, winds up representing the flatter,    film people remember, rather than the film that really was. One of the problems is just timing: the Lifetime film has 90 minutes to do the work of a theatrical film that ran two hours and three minutes. Entire plot elements are dropped, and the opening sequence in which the girls become friends is much shorter, making it much harder to believe that they formed a bond that carried them through years of    all the way to adulthood. And while it’s hard to be critical of child performers, there’s nothing in that opening sequence anywhere near as arresting as it was when the young Mayim Bialik, doing the seemingly impossible by plausibly being a young version of Bette Midler, sang ”Glory of Love” with a feather boa. Here, young CC is simply an ’  young busker who doesn’t have a permit, rather than a precocious,   kid in feathers who’s first seen puffing on a cigarette. From the very beginning, she doesn’t have the original CC’s huge personality, and Hillary’s instant fascination with her makes much less sense. More generally, the biggest problem is that the two women are too similar in this version. In the original, Hershey is so chilly and patrician and Midler is so Bette Midler that the contrast is obvious and stark. But Menzel and Long are playing very similar women here  —   they’re both smart, direct, conventionally beautiful, elegant adults. There’s none of the sense Hershey so convincingly conveyed that Hillary is often embarrassed, particularly in the presence of the man who becomes her husband, by CC’s joyful vulgarity. And similarly, Menzel has none of Midler’s visible insecurity about how she’s viewed by a friend who’s become a proudly droll sophisticate. The fights in the original Beaches are scary and ugly they’re raw and hurtful, and you understand how they could lead to long estrangements. Here, the stakes just never feel quite high enough. This version seems to build their conflict around professional success, which is less compelling than in the original, where their conflict was largely about cultural positioning  —   about who was classy and who was not, and why. Without that conflict, all you have is a couple of pretty ordinary fights between women who seem at all times naturally   to each other. And unfortunately, the lack of nuance in the portrayals of young CC and Hillary in the prologue carries through to the role of Hillary’s daughter (Sanai Victoria) who is written without the resistance to CC that you get from Grace Johnston in the 1988 film, so that she’s nothing but cute and perfect and sweet all the time. In the original version, CC’s unlikely relationship with Hillary basically echoes in her relationship with Hillary’s daughter  —   Midler’s CC doesn’t seem, and doesn’t feel, like a natural mother. But Menzel’s CC seems almost as much of a natural as Long’s Hillary is. To answer one obvious question: Yes, Menzel sings ”Wind Beneath My Wings.” She also sings ”Glory Of Love.” But the quirkier musical numbers from the original, including not just Midler’s odd ”Oh Industry” but the wonderful bauble ”I’ve Still Got My Health,” her very sad rendition of ”I Think It’s Going To Rain Today,” and the memorable ”Otto Titsling,” find no substitutes. So while you get Idina Menzel singing The Pretenders’ ”I’ll Stand By You,” her musical theater talents are set aside in a way Midler’s were not. The point isn’t that a remake has to walk in the footsteps of the original  —   in fact, it can’t and shouldn’t. But when you remove the parts of a film that make it interesting, you have to put in other elements to make the new one interesting in a different way. You have to put something back for everything that you remove. One lesson here is that memorable ”weepies,” like memorable anythings, are harder than they look. Over time, things flatten in our cultural memory, until attempts to recreate them based on what endured in that memory are likely to fall short for reasons that feel nebulous. Saturday night’s new Beaches, unfortunately, doesn’t amount to much. But go back to the original  —   it’s more interesting than you remember."
522,"President Trump is now filing the documents needed to remove his name as top executive at his companies, finally making good on a promise to leave management by Inauguration Day. He may be a couple of days late, but public documents show Trump is making changes at the helm of his businesses. For example, a filing from Florida’s Department of State, entered Monday, shows son Eric Trump as president of Trump International Hotels Management LLC. In March 2016, Donald J. Trump had been registered as president of the company. That sort of management shift was confirmed in numerous documents that began appearing online throughout Monday afternoon. The filings don’t show a change in ownership, just a replacement of Donald Trump as the top executive. The Trump Organization may have gotten a nudge from a weekend report by ProPublica, an independent nonprofit news service. It had contacted officials in Florida, Delaware and New York and found no indication that Trump had begun transferring management to his sons. White House spokesman Sean Spicer was questioned Monday about whether Trump would release documents verifying the president had resigned from his businesses. Spicer said Trump has ”resigned from the company as he said he would before he took office,” adding ”he’s taken extraordinary steps to ensure that that’s happened.” It’s believed Trump has more than 500 business entities, so   them all could take some time. He did manage to sever ties with his businesses in the United Kingdom in time for his inauguration Friday. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s newest ventures  —   the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C.  —   had a rough first couple of months. The luxury hotel just blocks from the White House may have been sold out for inauguration festivities last week, but it lost more than $1. 1 million in its first two months of operation. The hotel lost $334, 000 in September and $825, 000 in October. The Trump Organization had estimated a $84, 000 loss in September and $481, 000 profit in October. Those figures come from the federal General Services Administration, which owns the historic building that houses the hotel. GSA information was obtained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Reps. Elijah Cummings, Gerald Connolly, Peter DeFazio and Andre Carson asked the GSA for any correspondence it has had with the Trump Organization. They want to see how the federal agency is addressing an ”apparent breach” of the hotel’s lease agreement. When the Democrats got the GSA information, they released it to the public on Monday. The lease explicitly says ”no elected official of the government of the United States” may hold that lease. The letter said the documents did not give any reason why the hotel’s income levels for its first two months were so far below the company’s own projections, although September was a soft launch for the   hotel. There were no figures from November, when Trump won the presidential election, until now. One of the concerns ethics analysts have is that the hotel could create a conflict between Trump’s business and his presidency. For example, foreign governments, lobbyists and special interest groups may stay at the hotel, just blocks from the White House, as a way of currying favor with the president. Trump’s lawyers say he will hand over any of the hotel’s profits to the U. S. Treasury Department. NPR intern Lucia Maffei contributed to this report."
523,"Updated at 12 p. m. ET, A team of ethics experts and legal scholars filed a lawsuit in federal court Monday morning that says President Trump’s overseas businesses violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars presidents from taking money from foreign governments. The group says it is asking the court ”to stop Trump from violating the Constitution by illegally receiving payments from foreign governments” with ties to Trump interests. The lawsuit states that: ”These violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens. As the Framers were aware, private financial interests can subtly sway even the most virtuous leaders, and entanglements between American officials and foreign powers could pose a creeping, insidious threat to the Republic.” The lawsuit cites numerous examples of how Trump stands to make money by doing business with companies and other entities linked to foreign government. For example, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which is owned by the Chinese government, is a tenant at Trump Tower in New York, and its lease is due to expire during Trump’s term, the suit says. This could mean that the Chinese government will be in negotiations with the Trump Organization to renew the lease. Another tenant is the Abu Dhabi Tourism  Culture Authority, which is owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates, the lawsuit notes. The suit also says that Trump collects royalties from his TV show The Apprentice and its various spinoffs, many of which air on broadcast networks owned or controlled by foreign governments. It also cites numerous examples of Trump properties in Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Scotland that require various government permits and exemptions. ”When Trump the president sits down to negotiate trade deals with these countries, the American people will have no way of knowing whether he will also be thinking about the profits of Trump the businessman,” according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is part of the suit. CREW says in the suit that it has been harmed by Trump’s conflicts of interest because as a   watchdog, it has been forced to put more time and resources into opposing and publicizing them. The legal scholars and former White House ethics officials filing the lawsuit include Richard Painter, ethics adviser to President George W. Bush Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine and Supreme Court litigator Deepak Gupta. Former Obama administration ethics adviser Norman Eisen told Morning Edition recently that Trump’s business ties violate the Emoluments Clause in numerous ways: ”We need travel no further than a few blocks from the White House, the Trump Hotel. There’s been controversy now about whether or not they’re pressuring governments to leave other hotels in Washington and come to their hotel. ”Whether those allegations are proven or not, there can be no question that the Trump Hotel in D. C. is aggressively seeking business from foreign governments. Once Mr. Trump takes the oath of office, that will be a violation of the Constitution.” It remains to be seen how the lawsuit will be received, because the courts have never ruled on how the Emoluments Clause relates to the president. Trump’s lawyers have already indicated they will oppose the suit. As The New York Times noted: ”The president’s lawyers have argued that the constitutional provision does not apply to   payments, such as a standard hotel room bill, and is intended only to prevent federal officials from accepting a special consideration or gift from a foreign power.” ”No one would have thought when the Constitution was written that paying your hotel bill was an emolument,” Trump lawyer Sheri Dillon told a news conference earlier this month. ”This is purely harassment for political gain, and, frankly, I find it very, very sad,” Trump’s son Eric told the Times."
524,"Updated at 5:15 p. m. ET. President Trump acted on Monday to keep a signature campaign promise: withdraw the U. S. from the   Partnership. Trump’s action is mostly symbolic. As he signed the memorandum in the Oval Office, Trump said, ”We’ve been talking about this for a long time,” adding it’s ”a great thing for the American worker.” Trump also signed two other presidential memorandums (a pool report, and the original version of this story, referred to these actions as ”executive orders”). One imposes a hiring freeze on federal workers, except for military positions and in the case of national security. The other action reinstates the   Mexico City policy, a rule that began in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was president. As NPR has reported, the policy ”blocked federal funding for international family planning charities unless they agreed not to ’promote’ abortion by, among other actions, providing patients with information about the procedure or referrals to providers who perform it.” The TPP, as it’s known, is a trade agreement with 12 Pacific Rim nations. It was never ratified by the U. S. because of congressional opposition but was strongly backed by the Obama administration. It would create a free trade area stretching from Japan to Chile, and it was seen as an effort to create a counterweight to China, which is not a party to the agreement. During the campaign, Trump called the TPP ”a horrible deal” and a ”potential disaster” that would hurt U. S. workers and companies. His action on TPP is Trump’s first effort to address the concerns over trade that helped propel him to the Oval Office, and there are many more expected. He is expected to begin talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. In a meeting with business leaders Monday morning, Trump said, ”We want to make our products here.” He also vowed to retaliate against businesses that close U. S. factories in favor of foreign plants. ”If you go to another country,” Trump said, ”we are going to be imposing a very major border tax.” Trump said that right now, ”we don’t have free trade because we’re the only one that makes it easy to come into the country.”"
525,"For President Trump, the easy part is over. During the 2016 campaign, Trump slammed the U. S. national security and foreign policy establishment as run by people who were ”so dumb,” ”predictable” and played for ”a bunch of suckers.” Now he owns it. Trump’s inauguration makes him responsible for responding to hot spots and crises around the world  —   challenges that scale from the risk of an individual terrorist attacking inside the U. S. to the danger of a nuclear standoff with Russia. The new president is still assembling the team that will help him. Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last Thursday the new administration has asked more than 50 senior deputy and assistant leaders to stay in place through the transition, including Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work Brett McGurk, the top U. S. envoy for the fight against ISIS, and Nick Rasmussen, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. As the Trump team continues to take shape, here are seven tough international challenges it will face. 1. North Korea,  The Defense Department won’t confirm press reports that North Korea could soon   a ballistic missile that might be capable of hitting the U. S. with a nuclear warhead. But Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said the military would be ”ready” no matter what. He urged Pyongyang not to misread the change of authority in the U. S. as an opening to make what he called a ”provocative act.” ”We’ll continue to be prepared as we go through this transition,” Cook said. North Korea has demonstrated that it can detonate nuclear weapons and that it can fire ballistic missiles. It’s now trying to build a weapon small enough to fit on a missile effective enough to hit the U. S. or on one of its existing rockets that could target South Korea or Japan. The U. S. has treaty alliances with both nations, and they host some 80, 000 U. S. troops. Although the North has attempted and failed launches in the past, national security watchers in Washington warn that the unsuccessful tests are ultimately productive because they help Pyongyang learn. As NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported, intelligence officers in Washington warn the North Korea nuclear missile threat is the one that doesn’t get enough attention. 2. China, Trump’s dealings with China might be the most consequential bilateral relationship of his presidency, given the size of the economic, diplomatic and military intricacies. They’re off to a rocky start. Beijing was angry about Trump’s   phone call with the president of Taiwan  —   which was seen as a challenge to the   ”One China” policy. Then there was the seizure of a U. S. underwater drone from an oceanographic survey ship that helps the U. S. Navy search for foreign submarines. China returned the ”glider” after Washington demanded it back, but it was another reminder by Beijing that it considers the East and South China Seas its own, even though the U. S. and the other countries in the neighborhood say they are international waters with competing claims. China has been building up reefs and creating artificial islands in the area to bolster its claims of ownership. Washington says none of that construction changes the laws that keep the waterways open. But tension seems likely to remain a recurring theme. 3. Afghanistan,  Trump and his new aides have barely spoken about their plans for America’s   war, which has now gone on for more than 15 years. Barack Obama hoped he could end his presidency with only a small detachment of U. S. troops there, but gains by the insurgent Taliban forced him to freeze the planned drawdown and hand Trump a deployment of more than 8, 500 troops. New combat units are gearing up to deploy to Afghanistan this year to fight insurgents for ground the U. S. has already gained and lost, especially in the south. The dilemma is that Afghanistan’s government probably can’t survive without American financial and military support. Trump suggested in an interview last summer that the security situation might mean he had no choice but to continue with the   American deployments to Afghanistan. ”I think you have to stay and do the best you can,” he told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. ”Not that it’s ever going to be great, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.” 4. Iraq, The Pentagon says Iraq’s army  —   with significant American support  —   is making progress in its fight against the Islamic State. The terrorist group is at risk of losing its northern stronghold in Mosul, the last city that is even partly under its control. But even if the heavy fighting ends in Iraq, there will be political challenges for the U. S. the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government based in Irbil. Who will be in charge? Who will provide security? What role will neighboring Turkey and Iran play in Iraq? Can Iraq’s mostly Shiite government provide credible governance to the Sunni areas? If Iraq reverts to the sectarian divisions so prevalent before the rise of ISIS, that could undermine any battlefield victory over the extremist group. 5. Syria,  The buildup of forces has begun for an assault on the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa, in northern Syria. With no support from the host government and no major nearby bases from which to support the combatants, the effort depends on small groups of American special operators training and arming thousands of local Kurdish and Arab fighters. The Pentagon under Obama said it was confident it could make the effort work, but Trump and his choice for defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, may seize the opportunity to step things up. Mattis recently said he wanted to ”energize” the war. Mattis did not give specifics, but the U. S. could, for example, give American warplanes greater latitude in attacking ISIS  —   although that could also bring greater risks of civilian casualties. Or the new administration could deploy more U. S. forces beyond the current 600 or so special operators now in Syria. The potential upside is that more American power could deal a decisive blow to ISIS. The potential downsides are the risks to American forces and local populations, and the ultimate question about what comes next  —   whether the U. S. would wind up trying to extricate itself from another Middle Eastern war. 6. Libya,  Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the U. S. has deplored ”ungoverned spaces” around the world. Yet the U. S. helped create another one in Libya, which has been lawless since 2011, when the U. S. and European military operations helped rebels oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Libya has become a refuge for Islamic State fighters, and American troops have responded with airstrikes and other operations. The latest took place Jan. 18, when Air Force   Spirit bombers killed an estimated 80 ISIS fighters in desert camps outside the coastal city of Sirte. The U. S. is supporting one of the groups that hope to form a new government in Libya, but under Obama it did not make a major effort. Trump’s team must decide how much energy it wants to expend on trying to establish order in Libya. 7. Eastern Europe,  The nations of Eastern Europe are nervous. Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2014, and others, including Poland and the Baltic States, worry they could be next in the crosshairs. Trump says he wants a better relationship with Russia and that if, based on public comments, Russian President Vladimir Putin likes him, that’s a plus. What Eastern European nations fear is they’ll be the ones paying the price for any rapprochement. Obama committed to new demonstrations of military support for the Eastern European members of NATO, including regular rotations of troops for training exercises. Trump must decide whether to keep that up. And he is facing renewed pressure from the NATO allies and some advocates inside the U. S. to go even further and commit to full, permanent military bases. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, an Arizona Republican, asked Mattis at his confirmation hearing about whether he would support a ”permanent military presence in the Baltics.” Mattis said he would. Squaring that outlook with Trump, along with Mattis’ vocal support for NATO, will be one of the biggest stories of the first months of the new administration. Trump himself is sanguine about the world scene he will encounter, as he told The New York Post this week. ”I don’t think we’re going to be tested,” he said. ”I’m not a game player. They understand me.”"
526,"President Trump began his first full workweek in the White House by hosting a breakfast ”listening session” with business executives. In his opening remarks, Trump largely stuck to traditional Republican themes of lower taxes and reduced regulation. But he also reiterated his threat to impose a border tax on companies that move jobs overseas  —   a plan with little support from the president’s fellow Republicans in Congress. Trump said he hopes to hold similar meetings with business leaders on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly. ”We’ll get to know each other very well,” he told executives, including CEOs from Ford, U. S. Steel, Dow Chemical and Under Armour. The president renewed his campaign promise to reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 or 20 percent. He suggested that for many businesses, a reduction in government regulation would be even more valuable. ”The problem with the regulation that we have right now is that you can’t do anything,” Trump said. ”It’s out of control. It’s gotten out of control.” The incoming administration has already ordered a freeze on new government regulations. Eventually, Trump said he’d like to eliminate about   of the existing rules. He argued that it’s possible to do that while still safeguarding workers and the environment. ”I’m a very big person when it comes to the environment,” Trump said. ”But some of that stuff makes it impossible to get anything built.” Trump sees both tax cuts and regulatory relief as ways to make doing business in the United States more attractive. ”What we want to do is bring manufacturing back to our country,” he said. ”It’s what the people wanted. It’s one of the reasons I’m sitting here instead of somebody else sitting here.” The United States has about 5 million fewer manufacturing jobs today than it did in 2000. The decline of   factory jobs contributed to Trump’s victory in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Economists say most of the jobs losses result from automation, which allows American factories to churn out more products with fewer workers. But Trump tends to highlight   factory work that’s relocated to   countries such as China. He once again promised to punish American executives who shift jobs overseas. ”A company that wants to fire all of its people in the United Sates and build some factory someplace else, and then thinks that that product is just going to flow across the border into the United States, that’s not going to happen,” Trump said. ”They’re going to have a tax to pay, a border tax.” ”Some people would say that’s not free trade,” he added. ”But we don’t have free trade now,” pointing to barriers that other countries often erect to block U. S. imports. Congressional Republicans have been cool to Trump’s call for a border tax, which would complicate international supply chains and raise prices for U. S. consumers. But Trump told American business leaders there’s a simple alternative. ”All you have to do is stay,” he said. ”Don’t leave. Don’t fire your people in the United States.”"
527,"A doctor handed Melissa Morris her first opioid prescription when she was 20 years old. She’d had a cesarean section to deliver her daughter and was sent home with Percocet to relieve   pain. On an empty stomach, she took one pill and lay down on her bed. ”I remember thinking to myself, ’Oh, my God. Is this legal? How can this feel so good?’ ” Morris recalls. Soon, she started taking the pills recreationally. She shopped around for doctors who would write new prescriptions, frequenting urgent care clinics where doctors didn’t ask a lot of questions and were loose with their prescription pad. Morris’s path started with Percocet and Vicodin, commonly prescribed pain medications for acute injuries and illnesses. When those drugs no longer got her high, she switched to Oxycontin pills. Then she started injecting Oxycontin. After that, she got her hands on Fentanyl patches, a highly addictive and potent opioid. She’d chew on them instead of applying them to skin as the package directed. When doctors got wise to Morris’ shopping tactics, her supplies of the pills diminished, and she turned to heroin, instead. She started stealing to fund her addiction. Morris then got into the drug trade herself, dealing methamphetamine and other illicit substances, to raise money to buy more heroin. ”You can buy a gram of heroin for 50 bucks,” she says. It’s relatively cheap. ”That’s why so many people here have turned to heroin.” Morris lives in Sterling, Colo. a city of 14, 000 that’s a   drive northeast of Denver. The biggest employer is a state prison. Since 2002, the death rate from opioid overdoses in Logan County, which includes Sterling, has nearly doubled, according to data analyzed by the Colorado Health Institute. Morris says she has known at least 10 people in her community who have overdosed on a mix of drugs in the last few years. Sterling is far from unique. Rural areas and small cities across the country have seen an influx not only in the prevalence of prescription opioids, but in illicit ones like heroin. According to the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioids were involved in more than 33, 000 deaths in 2015  —   four times as many   deaths as in 2000. A recent University of Michigan study found the rates of babies born with symptoms of withdrawal from opioids rising much faster in rural areas than urban ones. Like Morris, many new heroin users find themselves using the drug after getting addicted to prescription drugs first. The CDC reports three out of four new heroin users report abusing prescription opioids prior to trying heroin. In the U. S.   deaths more than tripled between 2010 and 2015, with 12, 989 heroin deaths in 2015. As the drug use reaches into more communities across the country, researchers are scrambling to both diagnose what causes some people and some regions to be more susceptible to opioid abuse, and to devise solutions. Dr. Jack Westfall, a family physician and researcher at the University of Colorado and with the High Plains Research Network, works with a network of rural clinics and hospitals in the state. He says many doctors on the Plains are feeling frantic. ”We don’t know what to do with this wave of people who are using opioids,” he says. ”They’re in the clinic, they’re in the ER, they’re in the hospital. They’re in the morgue, because they overdosed.” For more than a decade, opioids have been a key part of a rural doctor’s pain management for patients, Westfall says. Treatment options are often fewer in a rural area alternatives like physical therapy may not be available or convenient, so drugs are a prime option. Some researchers think larger economic, environmental and social factors leave rural Americans at particular risk, says University of California, Davis, epidemiologist Magdalena Cerdá. After the 2008 recession, rural areas consistently lagged behind urban areas in the recovery, losing jobs and population. ”You have a situation where people might be particularly vulnerable to perhaps using prescription opioids to   a lot of symptoms of distress related to sources of chronic stress  —   chronic economic stress,” Cerdá says. Plus, the specific types of jobs more prevalent in rural areas  —   like manufacturing, farming and mining  —   tend to have higher injury rates. That can lead to more pain, and possibly, to more painkillers. In some ways, the social structures of rural regions contribute to the spread of illicit drugs, says Kirk Dombrowski, a sociologist at the University of  . ”One of the things that is counterintuitive to most of what we think of as [being part of life in] a small town is that rural people have much larger social networks than urban people,” Dombrowski says. In some cases, his research suggests, rural residents know and interact with roughly double the number of people an average urban resident does  —   giving rural people more opportunities to know where to access drugs. ”So some of those social factors of being in a small town can definitely contribute,” he says. ”It’s not a fundamentally rural problem,” says, Tom Vilsack, Barack Obama’s secretary for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, who led the Obama administration’s interagency push to curb opioid abuse. ”But it’s a unique problem in rural America because of the lack of treatment capacity and facilities.” That lack of treatment is definitely a problem in Sterling, where patients often have to drive a long way to get care. Melissa Morris relies on Suboxone, a prescription combination of buprenorphine and naloxone that’s used to help wean people off heroin or other opioids. Morris says she doesn’t get high when taking it, but does avoid the vomiting, diarrhea and sweating that comes with opioid withdrawal. She puts it under her tongue to let it dissolve and take effect. Morris, who has been off heroin since 2012, makes a   drive to a clinic to pick up her supply of Suboxone. It’s in short supply in many rural communities, in part because few rural doctors have gone through the required training to prescribe it. There’s there’s a   waiting list to get an appointment with the only doctor in Sterling who is certified to prescribe the drug, Morris says. Other areas of Colorado’s eastern Plains have no doctors at all who are legally able to dispense Suboxone. A new effort from University of Colorado researchers could help there, with plans to train 40 primary care doctors, their clinical care teams, and nurses in Colorado’s Plains and southern San Luis Valley. Morris acknowledges that close social ties in her town may have contributed to the spread of opioids there opioid users, she says, tend to ”stick up for each other.” Those bonds can spread drug use quickly, but they also cut other ways, she says. Just recently she recruited two   friends to the clinic she goes to weekly for treatment. ”I used to sell them pill and heroin,” says Morris, who is now helping these friends get clean. ”And so I do have hope. I’ve seen those success stories.” This story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a collaborative public media project reporting on important stories in rural America."
528,"Ajit Pai, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, will be the country’s new chief telecommunications regulator. He’s a proponent of limited government and a   approach to regulations. Pai’s promotion within the FCC under the administration was long rumored and confirmed on Monday by his office. In a statement, Pai said he looked forward ”to working with the new Administration, my colleagues at the Commission, members of Congress, and the American public to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans.” On Twitter, Pai also added: ”There is so much we can do together to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans and to promote innovation and investment. From broadband to broadcast, I believe in a   version of Jefferson’s 2nd Inaugural: we are all Republicans, we are all Democrats.” Pai is a longtime Washington lawyer who has worked in the Senate, at the Justice Department and the FCC and had a stint at Verizon before becoming an FCC commissioner in 2012. As a regulator, he voted reliably against many policy proposals by former Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler, including the contentious and   move to establish   net neutrality rules. Under Wheeler, the FCC moved to impose the     and   rules on Internet service providers in a way that put them under the   regulatory regime. (The agency’s Democratic majority later moved to leverage new oversight powers to set the first privacy restrictions for the ISPs, which Pai opposed.) Though the net neutrality rules  —   after years in limbo  —   have now been affirmed in court, Pai and his fellow Republican FCC commissioner Mike O’Rielly have indicated plans to revisit those Internet regulations as well as other FCC rules. ”In the months to come, we also need to remove outdated and unnecessary regulations,” Pai said in a speech in December. ”The regulatory underbrush at the FCC is thick. We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation.” The FCC is an independent   commission whose majority usually flips in party affiliation depending on the party of the president, who nominates the members. With a Republican majority under Pai  —   who has often made the case for   solutions  —   the FCC is expected to chart a deregulatory and fiscally conservative approach. As The New York Times points out, Pai’s view of competition in telecommunications drastically differs from that of his predecessor: ”Mr. Pai has said web firms such as Google and Facebook are competitors to wireless, cable and broadcast companies in voice calls, messaging and streaming video. The F. C. C. under Mr. Wheeler, Mr. Pai said, strapped too many rules on internet service providers without providing real evidence that consumers were harmed without regulations.” As commissioner, Pai put personal focus on several telecom issues, including a push to connect more rural communities to   Internet and a quest to help struggling AM radio stations. His FCC speeches were also known for clever pop culture references. In statements, industry groups praised Pai for his integrity and   leadership. Consumer advocacy groups decried him as reactionary and  . ”While he doesn’t always agree with our industry on every issue, he is both thoughtful and willing to listen,” the Internet Association chief, Michael Beckerman, said."
529,"On Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. Between the inauguration Friday and the Women’s March on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people came to the nation’s capital to bear witness, protest and show support. Ten NPR video journalists spent two days around Washington, D. C. documenting the events. Here’s what they saw."
530,"Multiple destructive storm systems damaged property and killed at least 19 people over the weekend, and continued to batter much of the U. S. with rain, snow and wind today. All 19 reported deaths were in the South, where apparent tornadoes ripped through towns over the weekend, damaging and destroying buildings in multiple states. ”Trailers are just flat, just laid on top of people,” Debbie Van Brackel, a volunteer EMT in Adel, Ga. told the Atlanta   on Sunday. ”You need a bulldozer to pull it off. Trailers are upside down.” The newspaper reported that 15 people died in the southern part of the state, including seven people in a mobile home community in Adel and four people in the town of Albany, Ga. Patrick Marsh of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. told The Associated Press that 39 possible tornadoes were reported in the Southeast over the weekend. Of those, most were reported in Georgia. The governors of Mississippi and Georgia both declared states of emergency for portions of their states where the destruction was most profound. Mississippi Emergency Management Agency officials confirmed that an EF3 tornado struck three counties in the state, killing four people and injuring more than 50 in Forrest County, according to The   newspaper in Jackson. All four fatalities were in the town of Hattiesburg, the paper reported. In Palm Beach County, Fla. where the Sun Sentinel reported the National Weather Service had issued a tornado warning overnight, the school district’s Twitter account announced that one of the county’s high schools would be closed Monday due to ”apparent tornado damage.” The NWS warned of winds as strong as 55 miles per hour on Monday morning. Also over the weekend, a separate rainstorm soaked Los Angeles and surrounding communities in Southern California. On Monday morning, a National Weather Service flash flood watch was still in effect for Los Angeles and Ventura counties. ”Coastal areas of Los Angeles County were among the hardest hit, with Long Beach Airport setting a new   rainfall record, 3. 87 inches,” the Los Angeles Times reported. ”The intense rain was too much for local roads. Sunday afternoon, both the 110 Freeway in Carson and the 710 Freeway in Long Beach were shutdown due to extreme flooding that left cars stranded like islands in a lake.” ”Today was very intense,” National Weather Service meteorologist Brett Albright told the Times on Sunday. ”It’s not a normal event.” The rain eroded hillsides, some them already weakened by wildfires, causing multiple mudslides. The Times noted that multiple cities had issued evacuation orders for neighborhoods near recent burns, including in Duarte, Santa Clarita and parts of hilly Santa Barbara County north of Los Angeles. A hill that broke away in Sierra County, Calif. buried most of a road, according to Caltrans, the state’s transportation agency. In Topanga Canyon north of Los Angeles, falling debris closed the road through the canyon on Sunday. At higher elevations, the precipitation fell as snow, closing Interstate 80 completely for a period overnight. And in the Northeast and   another storm was dumping rain and snow and battering coastal cities with wind on Monday. In New York City, ”A   warning is in effect until Tuesday, and with up to four inches of rain possible over the next couple of days, a flood watch and coastal flood advisory will take effect this afternoon,” The New York Times reported Monday. The National Weather Service warned of gusts up to 45 miles per hour for parts of Maryland, including Baltimore, and snow in the western part of the state all week. A winter storm warning is in effect for parts of central New York state and Pennsylvania until midday Tuesday, and the National Weather Service warned roads would be ”very dangerous,” asking residents in the affected areas to travel only in emergencies. Around State College, Pa. the NWS predicted between 6 and 10 inches of snow."
531,"If you book a tour of   Holland, the guide may take you to Volendam. It’s a picturesque village north of Amsterdam, with cobblestone streets, tulips and a little old lady selling the local delicacy, smoked eels, from a kiosk at the end of the pier. Volendam is a small but prosperous place, with waterfront homes and sailboats tied up at the docks. There’s almost full employment, and very few immigrants. About a dozen people NPR stopped on the street all used the same words to describe their town:  . Traditional. A good place to raise kids. It’s also a stronghold of the Netherlands’   Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders. He’s famous for     rhetoric. He promises to pull the Netherlands, one of Europe’s most prosperous countries, out of the European Union, if he’s elected this March. And he’s leading in the polls. ”It’s the same as [Donald] Trump. We never expected him to be U. S. president. But a little bit of revolution also here in the Netherlands is not wrong,” says Theo Stirk, who owns a   factory in Volendam. When you hear about populist movements, the stereotype might be America’s Rust Belt, where Trump carried the vote, or old mill towns in the north of England  —   many of which voted for Brexit, the British departure from the EU. But some of the same political ideas are gathering support in Volendam. It’s a bit of a contradiction for the Dutch, who’ve long defined themselves as open to the world  —   as history’s naval explorers and international bankers. The Netherlands welcomed and took in Jews more than 500 years ago, after the Spanish Inquisition. The world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, used to be a Dutch colony. But many Wilders supporters in Volendam say globalization has gone too far. ”The Netherlands’ economy is founded on different people [since] the Middle Ages,” says Stirk, the fish factory owner. ”But if you allow them to come into your country, you must ask them to fit in our society and do the same things we are doing.” Stirk says he thinks religious Muslims don’t fit in and pose a threat to liberal values that have become synonymous with Holland: equality, gay rights, legalized drugs. On the sidelines of a youth soccer game at the Volendam field, coach Wem Krockman says he supports banning immigration because the Netherlands, with 17 million people, is already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. ”You see all the fugitives coming by boats to Italy, to Turkey? They are looking for jobs, they are looking for houses,” Krockman says. ”There’s only one man in Holland who says, ’Take care, in 10 years, we’ll have a problem.’ We think he’s right.” That one man, he says, is Wilders. In his political speeches, the   leader invokes nostalgia for places like Volendam  —   for the traditional Holland many tourists come to see. But those traditions are fading. And it turns out the old Dutch identity the   likes to play up is pretty hard to define. Standing not far from Krockman is one of the soccer dads from the visiting team, Bulent Ozturk, who happens to be from an immigrant family. The Netherlands, Ozturk says, may be famous for tulips, clocks, wooden clogs and windmills, but its culture is similar to those of nearby European countries, like Germany or Denmark. In those countries, just like in little Volendam, there’s an increasingly vocal nostalgia for a white, Christian past that doesn’t include people like Ozturk. The   leader Wilders is riding that sentiment, and is forecast to win the most votes in the Netherlands’ election this March."
532,"Even though studies show kids whose fathers take an active part in their lives are less disruptive and better adjusted socially, most programs that aim to up parenting skills are geared towards mothers. And a lot of dads aren’t eager to sign up for parenting classes. So researchers at New York University created a parenting class for dads that wasn’t called a parenting class. Instead, it was pitched as academic readiness training for preschoolers. But the fathers, who were mostly     residents of New York City, did improve their parenting skills. And their children’s behavior language acquisition got a boost, too, the study finds. ”When someone tells you they’re in a parenting course, the first thing that comes to your mind is, ’Well, what’s wrong with their parenting?’ ” says Anil Chacko, an associate professor of counseling psychology at New York University and lead author on the study. ”It assumes there is some deficit present.” This study, published last week in the Journal of Clinical Child  Adolescent Psychology, recruited 126 fathers from three Head Start centers. (Head Start centers provide programs that look to increase school readiness in young children from   families.) From there, fathers were either asked to participate in eight weekly sessions lasting 90 minutes each, or put on a waitlist as a control. The program, Fathers Supporting Success in Preschoolers: A Community Parent Education Program, was deliberately framed as an   program for children and not as a parenting class. And because men are generally more reluctant to talk about their problems to others  —   from their physical health problems to their parenting insecurities  —   a program that took the focus from their potential deficits as parents to improving their kids’ academic potential was probably much more appealing, Chacko says. That could account for the whopping 79 percent attendance rate for the sessions, a number Chacko says is high for parenting programs for dads. In each session, fathers in groups of around 10 watched short videos of other fathers reading books with children, but with obvious, exaggerated errors. A father might count the wrong number of cows on a page, and ignore when the child counts the cows correctly. Then, the dads discussed how those mistakes could affect children. After the eight weeks of sessions, in which dads also read books together with their children both in Head Start and at home, both father and child benefited. Based on researchers’ observations and parent questionnaires, dads’ parenting skills —  like establishing routines, rewarding good behavior and ignoring   behavior —  improved by at least 30% compared to the dads on the class waitlist. Children’s overall behavior improved, too. And standardized tests showed a 30% increase in the children’s language development and school readiness. ”I’m very glad to see research on fathering and the engagement in men of child care and child development,” says Michael Addis, a professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts who was not involved with the work. ”It is understudied historically as a culture we have associated parenting with femininity.” He adds that this can make it difficult for men to present themselves as involved fathers, and is often why men get left out of parenting studies. While the findings are positive in the context of shared book reading, Chacko says his team also encouraged fathers to analyze other situations in daily life the same way. They are hoping that this could further improve kids’ social, emotional, and behavioral development. The researchers also note that while the methods in parenting programs typically don’t vary too widely, the way they’re presented to the community is crucial. While this presentation was successful in a particular slice of New York City’s population, it may not have reached families in other cultures or socioeconomic backgrounds. ”The challenge is not the science. We have a good sense of what the key parenting skills and behaviors are,” Chacko says. ”The real challenge is engaging parents  —   and it’s a huge challenge.”"
533,"Six million years ago, giant otters weighing more than 100 pounds lived among birds and water lilies in the wooded wetlands of China’s Yunnan province. That’s according to new research from a team of scientists who discovered a   cranium of the   species in an open lignite mine in 2010. They recently published their findings in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. The researchers concluded that this   prehistoric creature is ”two to three times larger than any modern otter species,” Denise Su, the head of paleobotany and paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, tells The  . The fossilized cranium was nearly complete, but flattened to about an inch and a half thick. ”The bones are pretty fragile, so we couldn’t really reconstruct it physically,” Su said. ”So what we did is we took CT scans of the cranium, and then we digitally reconstructed it.” The cranium was particularly interesting because it revealed that the animal’s teeth had ”some badger features,” Su explains. The species name Siamogale melilutra, is a nod to that  —   in Latin, meles means badger and lutra means otter. And the completeness of the cranium provided the researchers with important information about how otters evolved, Su said. It shed light on a dental mystery in particular. The giant otters possessed large bunodont, or   teeth. Scientists have wondered whether different species of otters inherited these teeth from a common ancestor, or evolved them separately because they were eating similar things  —   a process known as convergent evolution. But by comparing this specimen to modern and other fossil otters, Su says they found ”these bunodont teeth actually arose at least four different times within the greater otter lineage.” That finding suggests they emerged because of convergent evolution, rather than inheritance from a common ancestor. The scientists initially found other bones from the species in 2009, including an upper arm bone. Su remembers looking at that bone and thinking, ”This looks like an otter but it’s huge. . .. Is this really an otter?” There are big questions about why the animal was so large and how it moved on land and in water. ”A lot of times in modern carnivores, the large size is partly due to subduing prey, so their prey is bigger and the carnivores also get bigger,” Su explains. But the scientists think that this animal likely ate small creatures such as mollusks  —   so, ”why the big size?”"
534,"Updated at 3 p. m. ET on Jan. 27, There has been a lot of arguing about the size of crowds in the past few days. Estimates for President Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March a day later vary widely. And for crowd scientists, that’s pretty normal. ”I think this is expected,” says Mubarak Shah, director of the Center for Research in Computer Vision at the University of Central Florida. Shah says he encountered something similar during mass protests in Barcelona, Spain a couple of years ago. ”The government was claiming smaller number than the opposition was claiming,” he says. Counting quarrels have popped up during previous events in the U. S. as well. During the Million Man March in 1995, the National Park Service estimated the crowd to be far smaller than the organizers claimed. The controversy led Congress to bar the Park Service from doing head counts on the National Mall. The reason that disagreements frequently arise is that there’s no foolproof way to get an accurate head count of a large crowd. Decades ago, crowd estimates were done by people who simply looked at photographs of an event. They would count the number of people in one small area of a photo, then extrapolate that number to estimate the entire field of view. This method was inaccurate, though, in part because some areas might have lots people packed together, while others would have just a few people with large spaces between them. Computers have improved counting somewhat. They don’t suffer fatigue the way humans do, and a computer doesn’t have any political bias, Shah says. But even computers have limits, says Dinesh Manocha of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They have no problem sorting a few people who aren’t packed together. But when you have big crowds, like those seen across the country in the past few days, it gets tricky. ”When it’s more than 100, 000, we just can’t estimate right. We don’t have an answer today,” he says. It often comes down to image resolution. Manocha says even professional cameras only capture about 40 million pixels. So if there are one million people, each person will appear as a   smudge. A company called Digital Design  Imaging Service, is actually trying to make an estimate of attendance at the Womens’ March. They used   cameras attached to a tethered balloon to take photos of the marchers. Even with his   surveillance system, Curt Westergard, the company’s president, says he doesn’t expect to get a precise figure. Clouds meant the company couldn’t supplement their own photos with satellite images. And the number of people changed constantly throughout the day. ”Our main goal really on this just to ascertain a rough order of magnitude,” he says. ”So if somebody says a million vs. 100, 000 we can easily prove one or the other.” On Friday, Westergard said his company estimated some 440, 000 people were on the National Mall and surrounding streets for the Women’s March. The firm will also share its raw data so that others can try to make their own estimates. ”We can and do make all of our data transparent. We put it online,” he says. ”If you don’t like what we said, count it yourself, and here’s the data.”"
535,"LeRoy Rodgers spends plenty of time in the Florida Everglades  —   mainly in airboats. He works for the South Florida Water Management District. On a recent day, he eases his boat alongside a tree island. He doesn’t like some of the changes he’s seen, so he pulls a pair of clippers from a bag and hops over the side. Rodgers will need the clippers to cut a path through the Old World climbing fern that has almost swallowed the island. ”A   deer trying to make your way through this,” he says. ”You can see how difficult it would be.” The fluorescent green fern is everywhere. It cascades from trees, its vines weaving a thick mat near the ground obstructing every step. Florida has long battled invasive species: Burmese pythons, feisty lizards from Argentina, Cuban tree frogs. Now another pest is tormenting the state: the Old World climbing fern. The tenacious fern is toppling trees as it swamps the state. It also threatens to derail a national wildlife refuge. Rodgers says the tree islands dotting the sawgrass prairie here in the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge are where birds and other wildlife forage and nest. He takes the fern in his hand. ”That’s where the spores are produced. . .. You see they’re everywhere,” he says. ”So there are spores by the billions all around us right now, and that’s the other part that makes this plant so invasive.” The Old World climbing fern first appeared in Florida as an ornamental plant and is native to Africa, Asia and Australia. With no natural predators here it grew unchecked. The fern stands to take down more than tree islands. Its grip on Loxahatchee has prompted the state to threaten to terminate its lease authorizing the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the land. That’s strenuously opposed by environmental groups in a region where a   environmental restoration is underway, the nation’s largest ever. ”I think it is the worst invasive species that Florida has faced in a very long time,” says Cheryl Millett of the Nature Conservancy. Millett considers herself on the front line of the fern’s march north. She is part of a team of government agencies and private landowners monitoring its spread in central Florida. She steps among the pine trees of an   conservation area in a residential neighborhood near Orlando. The fern flows from trees like a waterfall. Crews control the fern by spraying it with herbicide and hacking at it with machetes, leaving the vines overhead to die. It’s exhausting work. Back in Loxahatchee, the South Florida Water Management District’s Rodgers says biologists are trying other ways to corral the fern  —   including experimenting with a moth and mite found where the fern originates and that feed only on the plant. A longer version of this story is available at WMFE."
536,"Early in the morning of March 24, 2016, a    Palestinian shoemaker named Imad Abu Shamsiyeh was having coffee with his wife, Fayzia, at their home in the West Bank city of Hebron. They heard shots being fired outside. Instead of seeking cover, they grabbed Abi Shamsiyeh’s video camera and ran to the roof of their house. He immediately started filming, zooming on the street below. ”I saw someone lying on the ground,” Abu Shamsiyeh says. ”I wasn’t sure if he was Israeli or Palestinian. Blood was gushing from him.” The man was Abed Fatah   a    Palestinian who had been shot and badly wounded after he stabbed an Israeli soldier. Sharif lay nearly motionless. Then a soldier shot him in the head from close range. Abu Shamsiyeh sent his video to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, which verified and published the video on its website. ”One of the aspects of the video that is quite shocking is seeing how apathetic the other soldiers are, like nothing has happened,” says B’Tselem spokesman Amit Gilutz. ”Like a very casual thing to take place, shooting a Palestinian who is laying on the floor motionless in the head.” The video went viral. It was shown during the trial of Sgt. Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier who shot Sharif. A military court convicted Azaria of manslaughter earlier this month. The court will hear arguments on sentencing Tuesday. The case deeply divided Israelis. Polls show most want Azaria pardoned. Abu Shamsiyeh, a father of seven, says he’s been filming violence in Hebron for five years, spurred by what’s happened to his own family. ”My daughter was injured by settlers, my two sons and wife were attacked and put in jail, I was attacked and put in jail,” he says. ”We’ve been the target of a lot of violence by the sheer fact that we live here.” They live practically adjacent to an enclave of Jewish settlers near the center of Hebron, a sprawling city of more than 200, 000, the largest in the West Bank. The proximity breeds conflict between the two sides, but Abu Shamsiyeh tells young Palestinians that cameras are much more powerful weapons than stones, knives or fists. ”We want to change that in our children,” he says. ”We tell them, use your camera to show what’s happening here. Do not use violence.” Abu Shamsiyeh uses a video camera donated by American activists and volunteers with a Palestinian group called Human Rights Defenders. He used to volunteer with B’Tselem, which he admires for archiving the work of volunteer videographers like himself. At a recent training session at his home, Abu Shamsiyeh shows two young girls how to film a steady video using their phones. Nida Abu Haikal, an    in a glittery red sweater, lives near a military checkpoint. She says she had a revelation after she got into a fight with a settler boy a couple of years older than her. ”[He] said bad words to me,” she says. ”I got mad and hit him. But what did that do? Nothing. He actually hit me back and pulled my hair. I should have just taken a picture.” But the videography now works both ways. Just down the street, Israeli settler Tzipi Schlissel is also taking video. She’s zooming in on a Palestinian man arguing with an Israel soldier who’s asking for his ID. ”This Arab man getting close to the soldiers, it could be some provocation,” she says. The Palestinians ”come and try to yell at the soldiers and doing some provocation, so I’m prepared. Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s really things that are not good.” Schlissel’s father, a prominent rabbi, was stabbed to death in 1998 by a Palestinian. ”I see what they’re doing, taking pictures and videos of us, taking things out of connections,” or context, she says. Schlissel posts her own videos on YouTube. She says she wants more settlers here to document violence, especially after Abu Shamsiyeh’s video of the soldier got so much attention. ”I can’t do it all the time and I can’t be everyplace always, but I think this is part of the war now,” she says. Abu Shamsiyeh says he’s received death threats because of his video but will keep on filming. In the coming weeks, he’s also training students at four schools in the Hebron area to use cameras to document conflict."
537,"It is a very attractive truffle. It’s made of the usual ingredients  —   cocoa butter, sugar, chocolate  —   with a    addition. Thirty grams of dried tomatoes from Nigeria. And it was served at the World Economic Forum last week in Davos, Switzerland, with a very specific goal in mind: ”to raise awareness on food waste and hunger,” as stated in a press release. That’s a big job for a bonbon  —   and it’s the reason for the tomatoes. According to U. N. sources, up to 75 percent of the 1. 5 million tons of tomatoes harvested in Nigeria each year are ”lost.” That can mean a number of things, from rotting in the field to falling off the truck on the way to market. The Roca brothers, three Spanish chefs who are U. N. goodwill ambassadors, created the chocolate. ”We are exploring food preservation techniques, such as the dried tomatoes used in this chocolate that can reduce food waste and create new market opportunities for young farmers,” explains Joan Roca, one of the brothers. ”Preserving tomatoes is our first goal.” They named the candy ”Bombon Kaduna.” Bombon is the Spanish spelling of bonbon. Kaduna is a big   region in Nigeria. We interviewed some experts on food and hunger to get their thoughts on the candy campaign. ”It strikes me as a kind of silly representation of concern about global hunger,” says Christopher Barrett, a professor at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and author of a paper titled ”Food loss and waste in   Africa.” We got a similar reaction from Mark Bittman, the cookbook author who is now a lecturer at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, specializing in health policy and food issues: ”I mean, come on!” Bittman finds no fault with the recipe. Using food that might otherwise be wasted is a good thing, he agrees. And tomatoes can be sweet and chewy, so why not add them to a truffle? But, he says, ”This is not a recipe that is going to have any impact on world hunger and on poor and starving people. What they need is money to buy food.” The U. N. defends its candy: ”There is nothing trivial” about finding new ways to use local ingredients and, in the process, cutting down on food waste, a spokesman said. But does reclaiming ”lost” food really help feed hungry people? ”As stated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” the U. N. spokesman told Goats and Soda, ”up to   of all food in the world is spoiled or squandered. This is unacceptable at a time where almost a billion people suffer from hunger.” Barrett isn’t sure statistics about food loss can ever be 100 percent accurate because food is lost or wasted in so many ways that are hard to track. If a bag of tomatoes falls off a truck, who notices? And sometimes food loss is unavoidable, he points out  —   say, if the product becomes unsafe to consume. He also does not think reclaiming lost food is a top priority in the war against hunger. ”We couldn’t find a single study demonstrating that dollars spent on food waste reduction after harvest are dollars well spent,” says Barrett. Why not spend the money on other   goals that will help farmers and hungry people, he suggests: say, breeding   into rice or paving a road so farmers can more easily get their food to market. But despite these concerns, maybe the chocolate fulfilled its mission. Its aim was to get people talking about hunger  —   and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this blog post."
538,"For a man with a mural of an oil refinery in his office, deciding to sue the oil and gas industry wasn’t an easy choice. But it was a necessary one for Guy McInnis, the president of Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish, just south of New Orleans. On a recent day, McInnis stands overlooking Lake Borgne. Now an open lake, the area was once prime wetlands and marshlands that protected St. Bernard from storm surge. It took a big hit during Hurricane Katrina. Oil companies would dig through the marshy area to get to their shallow water wells. ”They would dig a ditch to get their boat to the oil well, and that ditch was not replaced or filled in at the end of the time that they used that oil well,” McInnis says. These small channels created mazes through the marshes that eventually eroded into open water. New projections say Louisiana is losing land much faster than officials thought. Each mile of land that washes into the Gulf of Mexico costs the state industry, infrastructure and populations are all disrupted. Now, it has a plan to fight coastal land loss, but needs an estimated $90 billion to do it. An oil and gas state, Louisiana has long relied on money from offshore sales to fund part of its budget. But the $90 billion price tag will require support from Congress. That’s why the state’s new Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, is urging officials like McInnis to sue oil and gas companies for that damage. ”Before we can ever have any hope of asking taxpayers around the country to come to Louisiana and help us restore our coast, we have to be able to show them that we did everything that we could, reasonably, that is within our power,” Edwards says. ”And certainly, you can’t do that if you don’t hold those people accountable who damaged the coast to begin with.” Edwards has said all the coastal parishes should file suits, or he’ll do it for them. But the governor’s controversial idea is facing roadblocks. Some parishes are resistant to suing the companies, which include powerhouses like ExxonMobil and Shell. On top of this, the state attorney general is attempting to stop the process. Gifford Briggs, the acting president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, an industry lobbying group, says he doesn’t think the lawsuits are necessary. ”We believe these lawsuits are driving investment out of Louisiana into other states and other communities [and] that it’s harmful to Louisiana,” he says. Briggs says the state should do its job by enforcing its own   permit requirements, rather than turning to the courts. It’s bad for business, he says. Gov. Edwards’ top lawyer, Matthew Block, disagrees. ”This is not about demonizing the oil and gas industry,” he says. Although oil and gas is the most important industry in the state, ”that does not mean that we cannot hold the oil and gas industry responsible for destruction of the coast,” Block says. By some estimates, oil companies cause 60 percent of Louisiana’s land loss. If one or more of the suits succeeds, the industry could owe billions of dollars. Rob Verchick, an environmental law professor at Loyola University, says these suits could set an example. Many other states face problems like land loss and erosion. ”And they are struggling right now to address these issues,” he says. ”And so these lawsuits are going to occur whether our lawsuits in Louisiana go forward or not.”"
539,"  people have been arrested across Europe for allegedly trafficking stolen art and archaeological relics, according to Spanish police who led the investigation. Interpol and the U. N.’s culture agency, UNESCO, helped in the investigation, as did the European policing agency Europol and the World Customs Organization, according to a statement by UNESCO. The statement noted the arrests took place back in November, but were not made public until late last week. Neither Spanish authorities nor the international bodies involved in the investigation said why they had not previously disclosed the arrests. Lauren Frayer reported for NPR from Madrid: ”Spanish police say the suspects are members of criminal gang that trafficked stolen art and archaeological relics. They have been under investigation for months, by law enforcement from 18 countries, led by Spain and Cyprus. ”Altogether, police say they have recovered about 3, 500 pieces of stolen art  —   including Byzantine relics and an Ottoman tombstone in Greece. Among those found in Spain were 19 artifacts stolen from an archaeology museum three years ago. Police have not issued a complete inventory, but said most of the artifacts were taken from countries at war.” UNESCO said authorities in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria,   Herzegovina, Cyprus, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland and the U. K. all participated in the investigation. The operation was known as ”Pandora.” Spanish authorities recovered some of the coins pictured above by tracing online sales, but ”would not confirm where the arrests were made,” The New York Times reported. ”In the southern Spanish city of Murcia, the police recovered about 500 archaeological pieces, including 19 stolen from the city’s archaeological museum in 2014,” the Times wrote. UNESCO said 92 new investigations had also been opened, following searches conducted as part of the Pandora operation."
540,"For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we’ve been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we’re running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. I have always loved Westerns. When I was a kid, I’d watch them with my dad. Saturday afternoons on the couch in the living room. In the weird formlessness of Sunday nights. He had a kind of magic, my dad. This ability to squirm around in the upper reaches of the cable channels and, like he had some kind of personal   deal with the gods of static and strangeness, pull down all kinds of oddities. I watched Jeremiah Johnson with him a dozen times, and A Man Called Horse. I saw Duck, You Sucker! when I was too young to understand anything more than the motorcycles and the dynamite and The Missouri Breaks when I was too young to understand anything at all. I still consider The Outlaw Josey Wales one of the most perfect American stories ever told. But it isn’t my favorite. No, my favorite Western of all time? The grand horse opera that eclipses them all? That would be Red Dead Redemption. No, really. I’m at least 95 percent serious here, and I will fight you. Among all video games, it remains (at six years old now, with a sequel in the works) one of the most physically gorgeous and emotionally layered. Look, if we take as fact that Westerns are the American literary counterpoint to the   and circular repetition of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey in European high fantasy  —   that, like jazz or cubism, the Western exists to turn classical form inside out in an attempt at telling a truer story by beginning with the hero, broken by his labors, and attempting (almost always) to get a fresh throw of fate’s dice  —   then Red Dead is a bonafide masterpiece. As John Marston  —   tragic hero,   farmer’s son, a thief and murderer trying to buy forgiveness by thieving and murdering now for different masters  —   I have ridden with Mexican revolutionaries and been betrayed by my best friends. I have watched the buzzards circle over men dead by my hand and the sun rise over distant mountains, played   poker with an ace always tucked in my boot, and crouched behind a Gatling gun, sighting through the smoke. Red Dead Redemption is my favorite Western because it is all Westerns  —   because there is no trope, no archetype, no theme or motif that it doesn’t lift, polish and spin into its huge tale of love, violence, revenge and salvation. It begins (in an opening chapter called, aptly, ”Exodus In America”) with a train ride. With the embodiment of Western modernity carrying the scarred and sullen gunslinger into an onrushing future he is unprepared to face. Marston is being escorted against his will by government agents to the frontier town of Armadillo where his task  —   the sole driving force of a   plot  —   is laid out. As a young man, Marston ran with a gang of outlaws. Bad men who did bad things. He escaped, married, had a son. But now, if he ever wants to see his family again, he must hunt down and kill or capture his former friends at the behest of the government. Which he attempts, straight off. He finds one of them and offers him the chance to surrender. At which point Marston is killed. Or nearly killed, anyway. Shot in the belly and left to die, he is rescued (by a   packing rancher’s daughter) and set on his path with a pure and righteous fury. No child set   to gain knowledge, slay monsters and bring home boons, Marston is a monster himself,   now seeking an honest vengeance against other monsters. The game milks this simple plot architecture across hours and days and months. But rather than appearing thin, Red Dead uses every opportunity to deepen the connections between characters thrown together by circumstance and to gild its skeletal frame with what eventually becomes a remarkable tale of freedom versus servitude and the senselessness of violence used to solve violence begetting only more violence. And it does it all with dialogue  —   or most of it, anyway. What the game can’t accomplish with beautiful, mournful music cues and   gunslinging, it does with a series (dozens, hundreds) of conversations on horseback or front porches, brilliantly written, blazing with style and instantly recognizable voices. The acting is stellar, but Red Dead lives and dies by its words  —   by the lilt of the drunken Irish   and the gruff, bloody philosophy of the grizzled old sheriff. Even knowing how it ends (as Marston does, right from the story’s first moments) Red Dead, like all great Westerns, has a velocity of narrative that is, ultimately, undeniable. There is badness in the world, and it must be met with badness. There is innocence, and it must be defended fiercely. There is a world out there that is moving on  —   spawning revolution upon revolution, a glorious modernity that will outpace us all  —   and it must be met  . In talking of his son, Marston says it himself, speaking his wish for a future beyond the pixels of his narrative universe: ”He ain’t gonna to be no frontier gunslinger, killing and running in no gang though. That way’s over. Railroads and government and motor cars and everything gone and done away with all of that.” And of course, by the end of his story, it has gone and done away with John Marston, too. Jason Sheehan is an   a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book."
541,"Every day, Border Grill restaurant at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas uses a case of tomatillos and at least a case of cilantro. The tomatillos go into dishes like the pozole verde, a spicy stew with chicken and hominy. The cilantro goes into the green rice, the guacamole, the Yucatan pork roasted in banana leaves and just about everything else. ”The Mexican kitchen is very produce heavy,” says Border Grill    Mary Sue Milliken. A lot of the ingredients that she and partner Susan Feniger use most frequently also suffer the greatest in transit. Radishes, jicama, that delicate cilantro, they all die so fast, Milliken says. Nearly every last piece of produce in the kitchen and on the plate at Border Grill’s two Las Vegas locations comes from somewhere else. Most of it is trucked in from California  —   farm to table, with some freeway in between. But as winter takes hold across the country, a new farm is working to change that. Come spring, Milliken and other chefs like her will be able to source fresh fruits and vegetables harvested blocks from the Las Vegas Strip. Last July, Urban Seed broke ground on its first farm, an assemblage of   greenhouses located on a small plot of land smack in the center of Las Vegas. Eventually the space will hold six    greenhouses  that will produce 25 different crops, from bell peppers to beets to alpine strawberries. If an agriculture company launching in the desert sounds counterintuitive, that’s entirely the point. ”The whole world thinks Vegas can’t grow food,” says Rachel Wenman, vice president of Urban Seed. ”We really feel that if you can grow food in Las Vegas, then you can grow food anywhere.” Urban Seed will be the largest local farm in terms of yield, but isn’t the first company to attempt farming in the desert. An Australian farm made headlines last fall for growing produce using   greenhouses and seawater desalinated onsite. The Sahara Forest Project has constructed   greenhouses in Qatar and is working on a new farm in Jordan. In Las Vegas, the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension has a   outdoor research orchard, and Las Vegas Herbs grows hydroponic microgreens in a    greenhouse.  Urban Seed, however, is taking a different approach. The company’s strategy for growing in Las Vegas, where summer temperatures regularly top 110 degrees and annual rainfall amounts to just over four inches, is based around a proprietary aeroponic system focused on producing large amounts of food using limited space and resources. The growing system layers plants vertically, but unlike the vertical indoor farms catching on in other cities, its Las Vegas location will be single story and will rely on the area’s plentiful sunlight  —   not artificial LED lights. To develop Urban Seed’s technology, a team of growers and engineers spent years in research and development, testing various indoor farming methods like aquaponics and hydroponics. Eventually they arrived at their current model, where plants are stacked inside of   and grown aeroponically, with roots suspended in the air and water and nutrients delivered via fog. Each varietal gets its own custom nutrient mix, a   smoothie to mimic optimal growing conditions. ”They get the exact environment, the exact nutrients that they need,” says Wenman. Each   is also a closed loop that recaptures and recycles excess moisture. While a conventionally grown head of lettuce uses about 13 gallons of water to reach maturity, in an Urban Seed greenhouse, lettuce will grow on just 22 ounces, based on testing of the technology at facilities in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Arizona. Stacking the plants also maximizes growing space. In a    area, Wenman projects that Urban Seed will be able to grow more than 500 heads of lettuce in 30 days, compared with roughly 50 lettuce heads that might grow during that time on a traditional outdoor farm. That number might sound hyperbolic, but it’s actually pretty conservative when you compare it to estimates for vertical indoor farms currently getting lots of buzz. In Newark, for example, AeroFarms claims    yields that are 130 times those of field farms. ”In the same amount of space indoors, you can raise 10 to 100 times what you can do outdoors,” says Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and author of The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century. Although Urban Seed’s founders call their model a vertical farm, Despommier  —   who literally wrote the book on the subject  —   doesn’t think the term applies because its buildings in Las Vegas are single story. The key benefit to growing indoors is the controlled environment: no variance in weather, water, temperature or humidity, no pesky insects, no pests raiding the field for free snacks. When that indoor farm is placed in an urban center, there’s also no   shipping, cutting down on the carbon footprint and allowing food to be harvested at peak ripeness, when it tastes the best and packs the most nutritious punch. With about 42 million annual visitors and a local population of around 2 million, as a test market, Las Vegas is ripe for new sources of produce. ”The longer the produce has to sit in the field and then in the warehouse and then [go through] three or four middlemen and then, finally, getting into the hands of chefs, the more flavor that is lost along the way,” says Border Grill’s Milliken, who is part of Urban Seed’s culinary advisory board. When the company begins harvesting in spring or early summer, its first customers will be chefs who’ll turn the morning’s harvest into the evening’s menu. ”Just by virtue of the proximity and the freshness it should be better than everything I’m buying, says Milliken. ”Having that proximity gives us an opportunity for the flavor to be enhanced so much.”"
542,"The American Library Association announced its annual children’s book awards Monday. While the Caldecott and Newbery medals are the best known of these honors, this year, one of the   awards might attract the most attention. That’s because the Coretta Scott King Award for best   author went to Rep. John Lewis and his collaborator Andrew Aydin for March: Book Three, the third installment in the civil rights leader’s graphic memoir. Lewis’ book also won three other awards from the library association  —   the first time an author has won that many awards in a single year. In November, March won a National Book Award. But more recently, it was in the news after Lewis questioned the legitimacy of President Trump’s election. Trump later tweeted that Lewis is ”all talk  —   no action.” That provoked a passionate defense of the congressman from Georgia who has worked his entire life for civil rights  —   and helped push his book to the top of Amazon’s   list. A Coretta Scott King Award is also given to the best   illustrator, and this year’s went to Javaka Steptoe for Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist   Basquiat. Steptoe also won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book. His book tells the story of Basquiat who began his career as a graffiti artist, rose to prominence in the 1980s and died at the age of 27 from a drug overdose. The Newbery Medal for outstanding contribution to children’s literature went to Kelly Barnhill for The Girl Who Drank the Moon, a fantasy novel for middle school readers. A review in The New York Times compared it to such classics as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Books that win the Newbery and the Caldecott sometimes do go on to become children’s classics. Past winners of the Newbery include A Wrinkle in Time and Bridge to Terabithia. Caldecott winners include Make Way for Ducklings, Where the Wild Things Are and The Polar Express."
543,"BADBADNOTGOOD made a name for itself by reworking songs from the likes of Nas and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, eventually catching the attention of Odd Future leader Tyler, the Creator. The masses took notice in 2015 when the group produced an entire LP for Ghostface Killah, Sour Soul. BADBADNOTGOOD has been called a   ensemble, but its foundation is clearly jazz, which provides a gateway to countless genres. On IV, the group allows that gateway to widen, adding soul and funk to the repertoire. Still only in their 20s, the band’s members never seemed intimidated by the intimate nature of the Tiny Desk if anything, it accentuated their enthusiasm. This was their zone. They played three selections from IV  —   including ”Cashmere,” which only slightly veered from the studio version, and ”In Your Eyes,” which features Charlotte Day Wilson’s vocals. The tight arrangement allowed Wilson to hover gently above the instrumentation, showing off the band’s most promising work to date. It was a pleasure to have BADBADNOTGOOD at the desk for IV  —   and exciting to imagine what’s in store for V, VI and beyond. IV is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) ”And That, Too.” ”In Your Eyes” (Feat. Charlotte Day Wilson) ”Cashmere” Alexander Sowinski (drums) Chester Hansen (bass) Leland Whitty (sax, flute, guitar) James Hill (piano) Charlotte Day Wilson (vocals). Producers: Bobby Carter, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Colin Marshall, Kara Frame Production Assistant: Jenny Gathright Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
544,"As congressional Republicans begin work on repealing the Affordable Care Act, many of the nation’s governors want to make sure that their state budgets don’t take a hit during the dismantling process. They’re most concerned about Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor that’s run jointly by the states and federal government. As a result of a Supreme Court decision, states were allowed to decide whether they would expand Medicaid under the ACA 14 million people have gained health insurance coverage through Medicaid since eligibility for the program was expanded. While 19 states declined the expansion, primarily because of the opposition of Republican governors and lawmakers, 11 Republican governors did choose to expand the program. Now they’re lobbying to keep their citizens covered and billions of dollars of federal Medicaid money flowing. Among them is Ohio Gov. John Kasich who, along with several other Republican governors, met with GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee last week for a   discussion about the health care law. Kasich has been anything but quiet on the subject. In a letter to congressional leaders, Kasich recommended that Medicaid expansion not be repealed, while indicating he’s open to some changes, such as in income eligibility. Kasich urged Congress in an   on Time. com to pass an Obamacare replacement at the same time as a repeal. ”For the millions of Americans who have gained health coverage since 2010, it’s safe to assume that their idea of fixing Obamacare does not involve ripping away their own health care coverage without a responsible alternative in place,” wrote Kasich. ”If I had to pay for my medical costs, I wouldn’t be taking no medicine” Evelyn Johnson is among those who would be affected were the ACA repeal to also roll back the Medicaid. She sat in the back of the cafeteria at a social services   center in Cleveland last week as a pair of health care navigators made calls to help people sign up for Medicaid. ”So far I’ve got a pair of glasses. They’re going to do my teeth,” she said of the benefits she has received since getting health insurance. Johnson, who lives with a friend, does not have children and works as a baby sitter, would not have been eligible for   insurance before the Medicaid expansion, when it was limited largely to   children, parents and people with disabilities. Now, anyone whose income is at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty line, about $16, 000 a year for a single person, is eligible. Without insurance, Johnson said she would not be able to afford the prescription drugs she needs. ”If I had to pay for my medical costs, I wouldn’t be taking no medicine,” she said. ”There’s no way. I take too many pills.” About 700, 000 Ohioans have signed up for expanded Medicaid since January 2014. Since the Affordable Care Act came into effect, Ohio’s uninsured rate has fallen to 6. 5 percent from 15 percent in 2012. Unpopular position with Republicans  Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid was unpopular with Republicans. He fought his own party and sidestepped the state Legislature to get the expansion done. At an event with business leaders this month, Kasich argued that it has been a good deal for the state. ”If they don’t get coverage, they end up in the emergency room, they end up sicker, more expensive. I mean, we pay one way or the other,” Kasich said. ”And so this has been a good thing for Ohio.” Also defending their decisions to expand Medicaid are such Republican governors as Rick Snyder of Michigan, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Gary Herbert of Utah. ”So if all of a sudden, that goes away, what do we tell these 700, 000 people? We’re closed? Can’t do that,” Kasich said at the business event. Medicaid covers about 1 in 4 people in Ohio. If the expansion is rolled back, it will mean fewer payments to doctors and hospitals. ”You pull on one thread, you topple the whole tower,” said John Corlett, who ran the Medicaid program in Ohio under the previous Democratic governor. ”There’s nothing to say that the program can’t be improved, that it can’t be made better,” said Corlett, who now runs a think tank in Cleveland called the Center for Community Solutions. ”But just to say we’re going to get rid of all of it, and then we’ll figure out how to make it better, I think would be really disruptive. It’d be disruptive to healthcare providers, to patients, to insurance companies.” Changes coming? Even if the Medicaid expansion remains, the new Trump administration may make major changes to it in the future. Last year, Ohio asked the federal government to require beneficiaries to pay into health savings accounts, a request the federal government denied. ”I think that with the constellation in Washington the way that it is, that there’s going to be an awful lot of opportunities,” said Greg Lawson, a senior policy analyst with the Buckeye Institute, a conservative think tank in Ohio that opposed expansion. Lawson would like to see limits on federal spending per state, and he hopes Ohio will be able to add a work requirement for some beneficiaries. ”I don’t think you’re going to see the light switch probably just get turned, and one day it’s all going to just disappear,” he said. ”I think what you’re more likely to see is major structural changes to the program that over time that will have budgetary impacts.” But it’s not clear yet what shape those changes will take or whether the governor who expanded Medicaid here will support them."
545,"When Ali Andrew Li was born on Jan. 7, he was gently placed on his mother’s chest, where doctors cleaned and examined him and covered him with a warm blanket. ”I just loved it,” his mother, Salma Shabaik, a family physician who lives in Los Angeles, says. ”It was really nice to have the baby right there beneath my eyes where I could feel him, touch him, kiss him.” That was different than the birth of her son Elias two years ago he was whisked away to a bassinet to be examined. And unlike Elias, who cried a lot after delivery, Shabaik says Ali stopped crying ”within seconds” after being placed on her chest. Kangaroo mother care has been widely used worldwide to care for premature babies, and it’s gaining popularity in caring for healthy full term babies like Ali as well. It is as it sounds: Like a kangaroo’s pouch, mothers hold their naked newborns on their bare chest for the first few hours of life. At Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center where Ali was born, the technique is routinely practiced for healthy mothers and newborns. The baby gets to know their mother immediately, says Dr. Larry Gray, behavioral and developmental pediatrician at Comer Children’s Hospital, University of Chicago Medicine. ”The baby gets landed in a trusting environment,” he says, reassuring them that life outside the womb can also be ”soft, comfortable and warm.” The benefits are many, according to Dr. Lydia   Lee, an   at UCLA. Not only is the baby happier, she says, but his or her vitals are more stable. Body temperature, heart and breathing rate normalize more quickly. The close contact also allows the baby to be exposed to the same bacteria as the mother, which can protect against allergies and infection in the future. Infants who receive kangaroo care breast feed more easily, Lee says, and their mothers tend to breast feed for longer periods of time, which is ”all good.” Babies also seem to suffer less pain. Almost 20 years ago, Gray studied how babies respond to a heel prick to draw blood, a procedure that screens newborns for genetic disorders. He found that when healthy newborns had kangaroo care, there was less facial grimacing and crying suggesting pain, compared to babies who had been swaddled and had the procedure in their bassinets, ”sort of alone.” One of the first places to show how this technique can help preemies was Colombia in the 1990s. There, hospitals with no access to incubators and other equipment often sent home preemies with no expectation that they would live. But doctors were surprised to see that babies whose mothers carried them close, skin to skin, not only survived but thrived. This was a ”serendipitous magical finding,” says Gray, suggesting that    contact acted something like a ”natural incubator.” Gray also points to the work of Myron Hofer, a psychiatrist with Columbia University Medical Center who studies attachment between mother and infants. Hofer coined the term ”hidden regulators” that pass between mother and baby. It’s not just that mother and baby are together, Gray says, but also that the mother is in some way ”programming the baby, the breathing, temperature and heart rate.” That ”magic” can also happen between baby and father, too, says Gray, if there’s    contact. And if mothers or babies are very sick and have to be isolated, Gray suggests mothers take any opportunity to hold their infant skin to skin. Even a little bit of kangaroo contact, he says, can be beneficial."
546,"The main players in Syria’s   civil war are meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, Monday for talks that were arranged by Russia. The discussion seeks to bolster a   agreement that hasn’t ended violence in Syria, but officials say they don’t expect a breakthrough. U. N. envoy Staffan de Mistura is playing a role at the talks, which will run through Tuesday. As the meetings got underway Monday, Russia’s Tass news agency reports that Russia, Iran and Turkey plan to sign an agreement to ”create a trilateral mechanism” that will enforce the   that was reached at the end of December. From Beirut, NPR’s Alice Fordham reports: ”The talks are the latest of many in Syria’s nearly   civil war, but they’re unusual in that they do not have significant presence from the United States or the United Nations. Regional powers Russia and Turkey, with backing from Iran, arranged the discussions. The talks are meant to build on a recent   although representatives of the government stress they don’t have high expectations for a breakthrough.” The American ambassador to Kazakhstan is at the talks at Russia’s invitation, the AP reports. The news agency adds, ”For the first time in internationally sponsored talks, Syrian armed groups  —   not political  —   are leading the opposition. Thirteen rebel factions, including from the   Free Syrian Army, sent delegates.” As the talks in Astana begin, the U. N. is launching a conference in Helsinki aimed at supporting Syrian refugees and delivering humanitarian aid to some 13. 5 million people in Syria. From Moscow, NPR’s Lucian Kim reports that the Kremlin has sought to depict the talks as complementing the U. N.’s attempts to end a crisis that it says has affected more than 22 million people. ”Russia says the main goal of the talks in Kazakhstan is to firm up a   that went into effect at the end of December,” Lucian says. According to Tass, Russia and its partners in the Syrian talks say they’ll also support the upcoming U. N. talks between the two sides of the conflict those sessions are scheduled to be held in Geneva on Feb. 8."
547,"On his first day on the job, President Trump made some changes to the Oval Office he installed gold drapes and moved some statues. First Families have some leeway to make changes to the White House, and that includes changes to its art collection. It can take many hands  —   or eyes  —   for one work of art to make it into the White House. Take, for example, the large painting the Obamas hung in what’s called the Treaty Room. ”It’s an unbelievably energetic, beautiful sort of thing, in which a black horse whose body is only somewhat defined is seen running across a kind of crimson field,” says curator Mark Rosenthal. Titled Butterfly, the painting is one of a series of horse paintings by American painter Susan Rothenberg. Rosenthal had admired it since the   and when he became a curator at the National Gallery of Art 20 years later, he remembered the painting and set out to acquire it. But for that, he needed money. So he convinced Texas donors Nancy and Perry Bass to purchase it for the museum. ”I had met them once or twice  —   barely knew them,” Rosenthal says. But what he did know was that they were ”revered conservationists.” Rosenthal thought the picture of the horse might speak to them. It did, and the painting entered the National Gallery’s collection. So how did the painting end up in the private quarters of the White House nearly 15 years later? The National Gallery’s current staff preferred not to be interviewed. But Rosenthal says, typically, the new first family sends someone there, and to other museums, to pick out art for their private living quarters. ”It might be a friend, it might be a decorator . .. but it was someone designated by the president and first lady to come to the National Gallery of Art and choose work . .. ” Rosenthal explains. ”It’s very much [like] a kid in a candy store.” When it comes to the public spaces in the White House, the rules are different. In the early 1960s, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy helped bring some order to the process of how art should enter the White House and be paid for. For decades, it was pretty haphazard, says art historian William Kloss. ”In the 19th century in particular, one of the ways Congress had to express their unhappiness with a particular administration incoming was to give them little or no funding for new furniture or new rugs or anything that was needed,” Kloss explains. ”So on more than one occasion, they held a big sale on the White House lawn so they could raise funds for new furnishings.” Today, those funds come from The White House Historical Association, a   that raises money from private donations and the sale of merchandise such as books and Christmas ornaments. Former White House curator Betty Monkman started out at the White House in 1967, a few years after President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order establishing the curator position. She says the goal is to collect work by and about Americans, and there were gaps in the collection. ”We only had copies of a lot of 19th century paintings,” Monkman says. She was always on the lookout at auctions for rare life portraits of people like John and Abigail Adams. (”Which we still have not acquired because there are so few of them out there,” she says.) As curator, she was also looking for paintings that represented the nation’s different regions. A New Mexico gap, for example, was filled in during the Clinton administration with a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. First ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama also modernized the collection. Obama acquired a vibrant abstract work by the late Alma Thomas, the first   woman in the permanent collection. Bush acquired a painting by   artist Jacob Lawrence for the White House Green Room. In 2008, Bush told   that the White House should showcase American traditions, but also stay relevant. ”The White House goes on, and history continues to be made here,” she says. ”I also want the White House to reflect more modern presidents and more modern times.” It’s too soon to say what impact Donald and Melania Trump will have on the White House art collection. But former curator Mark Rosenthal says these decisions are worth watching. ”What a person or family chooses to live with is incredibly telling about their openness to visual experiences,” he says. ”One ought to be expanding one’s horizons all the time.” The White House is actually an accredited museum, with a curatorial staff and a committee dedicated to its preservation. So if the Trumps do decide to add to its collection, they’ll have plenty of help."
548,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. At his best, Ty Segall is a master songwriter trapped in the body of a punk  —   although the limitations of his   rock actually keep him grounded and focused rather than restricted. The California bandleader’s prolific output over the past decade has grown increasingly ambitious in its own humble and   way at the same time, he refuses to set aside the gnarled riffs, spilled booze and busted knuckles of his most blistering work. That hasn’t changed on his latest album (his second, after one in 2008, to bear the name Ty Segall). What’s different is an even more ardent attempt at confining chaos and squeezing catchy, catastrophically massive pop gems out of it. ”Break A Guitar” busts the album wide open right at the outset, as it harnesses a thunderous   stomp that barely conceals huge hooks and Segall’s supple,   melodies. ”Take my guitar   I’ll be at the bar,” he sings at the end, adding a   twist to an otherwise swaggering demonstration of rock ’n’ roll overconfidence. The distortion grows even more corrosive in ”The Only One,” whose dueling guitar leads (between Segall and his longtime second guitarist Emmett Kelly) erupt gloriously into a fugue of frenzied abandon. ”Thank You Mr. K” ups the ante even further, succumbing to a    attack that chugs along at the breakneck speed of a bad, bleak trip. But Ty Segall does more than throttle and thrash. ”Talkin’,” a pointed parable about   is wrapped in softly strummed acoustic guitars. ”Orange Color Queen” picks up on the same vibe, but with a more reflective bent like a daydream on a rowboat in the middle of a   river, the song meanders through a vivid landscape of heartache while Segall does his best impression of a warbling angel. Mikal Cronin, the group’s bassist (and an excellent bandleader in his own right) joins Segall on vocals in ”Take Care (To Comb Your Hair),” another acoustic song whose plaintive, plucky tendencies shift deliriously from folky tenderness to needling,   riffage by song’s end. The album’s most ambitious moments, though, appear in ”Warm Hands (Freedom Returned).” At   minutes, it’s a break from Segall’s standard      hand grenades heroically, it doesn’t waste a second in its pursuit of   synthesis, starting out as a   ball of snarling menace before dissolving into a wonderfully sparse, spacious jam. ”Papers” may not be as ambitious, lengthwise, but it stretches Segall’s canvas in a different way. Keyboardist Ben Boye’s piano is given a more prominent spot in the complex arrangement, and the entire song reflects a   sense of sophistication, complete with cryptic lyrics and elusive melancholia. Segall’s role models are still as plain as day  —   Marc Bolan, Ray Davies and Syd Barrett chief among them  —   but on Ty Segall, he’s taken yet another strong step toward turning retroactive garage rock into high art."
549,"Samsung announced the results of a   investigation into why its Galaxy Note 7 phones spontaneously caught fire last summer, pinning the blame on faulty batteries. The bungled launch led to a recall of 2. 5 million devices and losses totaling more than $2 billion. The root cause, according to an internal investigation conducted with the help of outside experts, was battery short circuits. Both companies that supplied batteries for the Galaxy Note 7 had separate issues leading to the fires, Samsung says, in part due to the rush to replace the originally exploding phones with new ones. The company did not name its battery suppliers. ”The comprehensive responsibility lies with us. We did not thoroughly vet the parts that were assembled for us,” said DJ Koh, the head of Samsung’s sprawling mobile unit. In a packed press conference at its offices in southern Seoul Monday, the world’s biggest smartphone maker again apologized to customers around the world for the bungling of its product release. Phones were initially recalled and replaced, but the replacement devices also began to catch fire. Presentations at the announcement by outside investigators backed up Samsung’s findings, which indicate batteries from supplier A were shorting because of a design flaw or in some cases a lack of insulation tape. And batteries from supplier B  —   which were issued in the replacement phones following the initial recall  —   were catching fire because of a separate manufacturing defect. ”We wanted to proceed quickly to change the batteries swiftly, out of concern for the consumers,” Koh said, explaining why the company rushed to replace the faulty phones. ”We are very sorry to the consumers for not having vetted the B batteries thoroughly. At the time the B batteries didn’t exhibit the problems that A batteries did, but in retrospect the B batteries had a different issue.” U. S. safety authorities are conducting their own investigation into this matter. Customers and investors will be closely watching how the company adjusts to prevent another fiasco of this size. Samsung announced a new ” ” product safety protocol that it says will ensure quality of its products going forward. It is set to release the Galaxy S8 device, the closest competitor to the Apple iPhone, in the coming months. The Note line may be forever discontinued. Meanwhile, tomorrow the South Korean giant will announce its   earnings, which is expected to be the company’s best performance in three years, despite the loss on the Note 7 devices. The uptick is thanks to robust sales of chips and screens, analysts say. Haeryun Kang contributed to this post."
550,"The Los   singer known as MILCK knew she wanted to do something memorable for the Women’s March in Washington, D. C on Saturday. So she contacted a small group of other singers from across the country to coordinate a flash mob performance of MILCK’s song ”Quiet,” an emotional rallying cry for   and unity. The group of women rehearsed together via Skype and rendezvoused in D. C. where they performed a cappella versions of ”Quiet” several times during the march. Israeli director Alma Har’el captured part of one of the performances and posted it to her Twitter account and Facebook page, where it’s accrued more than 8 million views. The performance is unadorned and profoundly moving, capturing at least part of the mood that settled on the march, with a balance of defiance and love. MILCK says she wrote the song as a way of exorcising her own history of physical and sexual abuse. ”With this song, I feel like I’m finally allowing my truest inner self to be expressed,” she said in a prepared statement announcing the song, which was officially released days before the weekend marches. ”In this time of fear, propaganda and discrimination, it is critical for our individual and collective voices to be heard. With this song, I’m saying I am NOT the woman who is going to stay quiet where there are figures who promote oppression. I want to encourage others to give a voice to whatever they may have silenced, political or personal.” Here’s the official studio version of ”Quiet.”"
551,"The Trump administration is pushing forward with plans for two major oil pipelines in the U. S. projects that sparked nationwide demonstrations and legal fights under President Barack Obama. President Trump signed documents inviting the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline to resubmit a proposal for the project, which the Obama administration rejected in 2015, and instructing the Army to expedite the review and approval process for the section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that hasn’t been built. ”We’re going to renegotiate some of the terms, and if they’d like, we’ll see if they can get the pipeline built,” Trump said of the Keystone XL pipeline. ”This not a done deal,” Bill McKibben of the group 350. org, which has lobbied against pipelines for years, said in a statement. He called the pipelines ”unwise and immoral” because they contribute to climate change. Trump also signed a document requesting a federal plan to incentivize the use of U. S.  pipes for pipeline projects. The lobbying group representing the petroleum industry issued a statement in favor of the policy reversal. A spokesperson for the TransCanada company, which proposed the Keystone XL project, said the company was preparing to resubmit a proposal. Energy Transfer Partners, which is building the nearly completed Dakota Access Pipeline, did not immediately comment. Both the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline provoked protests from a diverse group of citizens concerned about the climate impacts and potential environmental contamination from the projects, as well as the safety of their routes across large swaths of the country and the mechanisms by which the federal government approved those routes. McKibben promised to fight the president’s move, saying, ”The last time around, TransCanada was so confident they literally mowed the strip where they planned to build the pipeline, before people power stopped them. People will mobilize again.” A portion of the Dakota Access Pipeline is under review by the Army Corps of Engineers, which announced last week that it was gathering information for an environmental assessment of a crossing under the Missouri River in North Dakota  —   an area that the nearby Standing Rock Sioux tribe says is sacred land. Demonstrators, sometimes numbering in the thousands, set up several camps on occupied land near the proposed crossing site beginning last summer, in support of the Standing Rock Sioux. The tribe filed a lawsuit against the federal government to block the pipeline, which was retracted earlier this month. The protests diminished after the Army Corps blocked the final permit in December and announced it would reassess the pipeline route, taking into account concerns about the risk of water contamination and allegations that the tribe was not adequately consulted about a route that violated sacred land. On Tuesday, the tribe released a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, promising to take legal action against the federal government. ”Trump’s decision to give the   for the Dakota Access Pipeline is a slap in the face to Native Americans and a blatant disregard for the rights to their land,” it stated. The tribe also addressed the president’s stated plan to streamline what he called the ”incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process” for environmental reviews of pipeline and manufacturing projects. ”The Trump administration should allow careful environmental impact analysis to be completed with full and meaningful participation of affected tribes,” the Standing Rock Sioux wrote in its statement. Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota released a statement praising the president’s actions, calling the pipelines ”crucial energy infrastructure projects” and saying they would create jobs. Amy Sisk of Prairie Public Radio was at the site on Tuesday and reports that demonstrators remain camped on the North Dakota prairie near the site where the Dakota Access Pipeline’s slated to cross under the Missouri River. ”They’re living in winterized tents, tepees and wooden structures, many keeping warm by fireplaces installed inside their makeshift homes,” she tells us. ”Demonstrations have slowed this winter in the wake of the December announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers would launch a new environmental review of the pipeline. Word that Trump has begun the process of expediting this review and advancing the project spread quickly through camp Tuesday. For many, this did not come as a surprise. ”Protesters vow to continue their stand against the pipeline. But the camp’s future is in limbo, amid flooding concerns after a heavy winter snowfall. And the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has asked protesters to leave. Some I talked to are moving to higher ground so as to avoid the floodplain, yet continue the fight as the Trump administration weighs in.”"
552,"President Trump on Tuesday gave the   for construction of two controversial oil pipelines, the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access. As he signed the paperwork in an Oval Office photo op, Trump said his administration is ”going to renegotiate some of the terms” of the Keystone project, which would carry crude oil from the tar sands of western Canada and connect to an existing pipeline to the Gulf Coast. The pipelines had been stopped during the Obama administration. The State Department rejected a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, and President Obama ordered work halted on the Dakota pipeline after Native American groups and other activists protested its route near culturally sensitive sites in North Dakota. Trump said the Keystone XL pipeline will mean ”a lot of jobs, 28, 000 construction jobs, great construction jobs.” In a statement, TransCanada, the pipeline’s owner, said it ”appreciate( s) the President of the United States inviting us to   for KXL. We are currently preparing the application and intend to do so.” Trump also signed a decree that the pipelines will be built with American steel, ”like we used to in the old days,” and two others: one that he said will streamline ”the incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process and reducing regulatory burdens for domestic manufacturing,” and another he says will expedite environmental reviews and approvals ”for   infrastructure projects.” ”We can’t be in an environmental process for 15 years if a bridge is going to be falling down or if a highway is crumbling,” Trump said. The president’s actions quickly reignited the debate over the pipelines supporters say the pipelines will lead to lower energy costs and create jobs, while environmentalists argue they will lead to the release of more   carbon into the atmosphere. The reaction from lawmakers was swift. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Trump’s actions to advance the pipelines will ”put the   profits of the fossil fuel industry ahead of the future of our planet.” But North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said Trump’s actions ”are a needed step” toward the goal of an     North American energy strategy. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which protested the Dakota Access pipeline, said it will take legal action to fight Trump’s decision, saying the pipeline ”risks contaminating tribal and American water supplies while disregarding treaty rights.” In remarks to automakers on Tuesday morning, Trump proclaimed himself an environmentalist, but added, ”It’s out of control, and we’re going to make a very short process, and we’re going to either give you your permits or we’re not going to give you your permits, but you’re going to know very quickly.”"
553,"Hundreds of people around the country are still suffering from complications linked to injections of tainted medicine produced at a Massachusetts pharmacy in 2012. A nationwide outbreak of fungal infections was tied to the shipment of nearly 18, 000 contaminated vials of   methylprednisolone, a steroid, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Barry Cadden, an owner of the pharmacy, is now on trial in U. S. District Court in Boston. He faces federal charges that include racketeering and   murder. He pleaded not guilty. The trial, which began Jan. 9, is expected to last two or three months. Federal prosecutors say the steroids were mixed in unsanitary conditions with expired ingredients. Bruce Singal, Cadden’s attorney, declined to comment. In court, he has said that Cadden oversaw the company’s operations, but didn’t work in the facility’s ”clean rooms” or mix the drugs that harmed people. ”He is not a murderer and he is not responsible for their deaths,” Singal said, according to the Associated Press. The outbreak of fungal infections tied to injections with contaminated medicines killed at least 64 people and sickened about 700 more. A report about the public health investigation and response published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, said the outlook for ”patients remains uncertain. Although many case patients have completed antifungal therapy and their conditions are currently stable or improved, relapses of infection are possible.” Many people who got sick after the injections are still waiting for compensation checks from a legal settlement with the compounding pharmacy. Several people who became sick after injections talked about their lives since then. None has testified in the case but some have plans to attend the trial. Here are excerpts from conversations with them. Bill Thomas, 62, of Lowell, Mich. The last injection  —   the steroid injection that I got in my spine  —   was for pain in my legs, pain and numbness, due to spinal cord injuries. During the course of the next few days, I felt like I was coming down with the flu . .. I had trouble remembering things. I came down with an incredible headache that didn’t go away. I had terrible neck pain, and my eyes were very sensitive to light. I’ve gone from being a person who walked two or three miles a few times a day. . .. I used to go out a lot in wilderness areas and did backpacking. And now I only leave the house a couple times a week. I’m always tired and always in pain, I can’t think. I get confused easily. . .. I can’t read like I used to. Justice needs to be done here. Tremendous harm was done to a great many people, and that should not be forgotten. Angela Farthing, 46, of Maryland, I had fungal meningitis and was admitted to the hospital. When I was released, I ended up having a stroke and developed a brain aneurysm. I was readmitted, and I was there for almost another two months. . .. I got very sick. I was vomiting all the time, had horrible headaches every day. I lost a good 30 pounds I went down to 100 pounds. . .. I missed about a year of work. And it was discovered later that I’d developed an abscess in my spinal cord. I had to have that surgically removed. But they could not get all of the abscess out, because they said if they would have sliced any deeper, they could have paralyzed me or I could have lost bowel or bladder function. [My husband] really suffered quite a bit when I was diagnosed. He had to take care of me, he had to bathe me, he had to change me, he had to do my IV. . .. He had to take over cleaning the house and cooking and taking care of our dogs. . .. He was a recovering alcoholic, and unfortunately, he stopped going to AA meetings and he succumbed to his addiction. Kathy Pugh, daughter and caregiver for her mother, Evelyn March, 85, of Pinckney, Mich. [My mother had] an abscess in her back on her spine at the site of the injection of the tainted medicine. Now she’s not doing well at all. It’s pretty much   pain. She went from being a very vital woman with just sporadic problems with her back, to where she’s bedridden in a hospital bed on oxygen, looking up at the ceiling. That’s her life  —   occasionally trying to watch TV, but she finds it hard to concentrate for a very long length of time. That’s one of the side effects of the antifungal medication, which it was ’take or die.’ ” Evelyn March,  My life’s   compared to what it was. I don’t understand why things can be allowed to happen like that. Getting old is bad enough, but then to put something else on to it. . .. I hope [Barry Cadden] gets his butt burned. I mean he, he, . .. well, I’d better shut up, because I’d probably say more than I should say."
554,"It might have been the first place they looked. When federal authorities raided an apartment in Westborough, Mass. earlier this month, they found money hidden under the mattress  —   approximately $20 million. Photos show a box spring stuffed with bricks of cash that were seized during a Homeland Security investigation linked to a pyramid scheme involving a company called TelexFree. Agents found the money after they arrested a Brazilian national named Cleber Rene Rizerio Rocha, who was charged with one count of conspiring to commit money laundering. The    admitted to federal agents that he was in the U. S. to facilitate a money transfer to a founder of the company, court documents state. TelexFree, which sold    phone service, ”was really a massive pyramid scheme,” according to court documents. ”It make little or no money from selling VOIP, but took in millions of dollars from people signing up to receive financial bonuses from advertising and recruiting.” Federal authorities executed search warrants against the company in 2014  —   and court records state that ”about 965, 225 people lost money when TelexFree collapsed, their losses totaling about $1, 755, 927, 755.” One of the founders fled to Brazil another pleaded guilty and admitted the company was a pyramid scheme. In the aftermath of the Massachusetts company’s collapse, TelexFree executives in Brazil allegedly plotted to retrieve money left behind. Rocha is said to be one of those people, sent from Brazil. He traveled to the U. S. in January and June 2016, but money   were cancelled both times, according to court records. On New Year’s Eve, Rocha arrived in New York, allegedly for another attempt. He was arrested in Massachusetts on Jan. 4 after he met a ”cooperating witness at a restaurant in Hudson, Mass. and allegedly gave him $2. 2 million in a suitcase,” according to the Department of Justice. Later that day, agents found the cash in an apartment Rocha had visited. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. On Monday, a federal magistrate judge said he posed a flight risk and ordered him detained pending trial. ”There is no incentive for him to remain in the United States, and every incentive for him to flee given the strength of the case against him,” she wrote."
555,"On a frigid winter night, a man wearing two coats shuffles into a brightly lit brick restaurant in downtown Madrid. Staff greet him warmly he’s been here many times. The maître d’ stamps his ID card, and the hungry man selects a table with a red tablecloth, under a big brass chandelier. The man, Luis Gallardo, is homeless  —   and so are all the diners, every night, at the city’s Robin Hood restaurant. Its mission is to charge the rich and feed the poor. Paying customers at breakfast and lunch foot the bill for the restaurant to serve dinner to homeless people, free of charge. It’s become Spain’s most   lunch reservation. The restaurant has poached staff from luxury hotels. Celebrity chefs are lining up to cook once a week. For paying clients, the lunch is fully booked through the end of March. The restaurant opened in early December, and is run by an    Catholic priest, Ángel García Rodriguez, whom everyone knows simply as ”Padre Ángel.” ”I want them to eat with the same dignity as any other customer,” Father Ángel says. ”And the same quality, with glasses made of crystal, not plastic, and in an atmosphere of friendship and conversation.” Outside, there’s a sign listing the house rules: Patrons are allowed to sing as they please, as long as it doesn’t disturb other customers. They can use the free wifi and borrow a cell phone if they need to make a call. They’re free to bring their own food and order only drinks, if they prefer. Or they can take over the kitchen for a birthday party or other special celebration. As founder of Messengers of Peace, a local charity, Padre Ángel has also converted an abandoned church nearby into a sort of community center. It’s the only church in Madrid that’s open 24 hours a day  —   with free coffee, television and places for patrons to sleep. He or a colleague celebrates Mass there daily. On the night NPR visited, the Robin Hood waiters served mushroom consommé, followed by roast turkey and potatoes. For dessert, there’s a choice of vanilla pudding or yogurt. Gallardo, the man in two coats, says the meal reminds him of Christmases past, before the accounting firm he ran went bankrupt and he had to lay off 60 employees. He shows NPR some photos on his cell phone of a dining table holding a huge spread of sweets and a bottle of French wine. He says the photos were taken two years ago at his home, which he has since had to sell to pay debts. ”We were just like any other family,” says Gallardo, 48, shaking his head. His wife has now left him. He lives on the street now, sleeping in ATM machine alcoves. As for his future, he says: ”My future is now. I can’t even talk about tomorrow. I’d like to know, but I don’t what it holds.” Spain’s economy may be out of recession, but its effects are lingering. Unemployment still hovers near 20 percent. The Robin Hood Restaurant feeds more than 100 needy people each night, in two shifts. Back in the kitchen, the restaurant’s dishwasher has just broken down. A volunteer plunges her hands into the sink and starts washing plates by hand. ”Some of our diners are very educated, and some are a bit ashamed to be here,” says Nieve Cuenca, a retiree who comes to help out in the kitchen once a week. ”I love this work. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says,   in soapy water."
556,"Like any college student, Vanessa Ramirez never expected chemotherapy would be part of her busy school schedule. ”I don’t have any history of cancer in my family, so it wasn’t something I was on the lookout for,” Ramirez says, sitting outside the library of her alma mater, Arizona State University, in Tempe. Ramirez was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she was 23. Now, more than a decade later, she’s healthy and so are her children. ”But there are also emergencies that happen,” Ramirez says, explaining the priority she places on health insurance. ”I have two young kids who are running around. They are rambunctious. I have a daughter that loves to climb trees.” After dealing with her own serious illness at such a young age, Ramirez doesn’t take health care for granted. And the Affordable Care Act made her feel secure that she and her kids would be covered. She bought insurance through HealthCare. gov, even with her   condition, and her children got covered, too. ”I want them to be able to have health insurance and doctors to monitor them, in case something unfortunate comes up,” Ramirez says. Ramirez has coverage via the exchange, and her kids are covered through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is for working families who don’t quite qualify for Medicaid. Arizona’s version is called KidsCare. State lawmakers froze KidsCare enrollment back in 2010 Arizona was the only state without an active program. But last year Obamacare helped revive the program by covering the entire cost in Arizona and a handful of other states, at least through 2017. ”A lot of people don’t realize that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act could wipe out KidsCare, that we just got back,” says Dana Wolfe Naimark with advocacy group Children’s Action Alliance. In the months since Gov. Doug Ducey and the legislature reopened KidsCare last year, enrollment has already surpassed 13, 000. But now Naimark worries about the fallout if the ACA is repealed. ”It would be up to the state legislature whether they could invest state dollars to keep it going, or whether the coverage would go away,” Naimark says. In recent years, Arizona has had one of the highest rates of uninsured children in the country. But Obamacare has begun to change that, bringing coverage to thousands of kids. Arizona was also one of the   states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA  —   but only after fierce infighting among Republicans in the Arizona legislature about growing federal influence. Conservative critics of KidsCare also retained some control over the budget of the program when they reinstated it state law will halt or shut down Medicaid expansion and KidsCare anytime federal funding dips too low. ”Whenever you take a look at some of these   Washington approaches, you really do lard up these insurance policies with a lot of benefits that individuals and families really would not go out and buy on their own,” says Naomi Lopez Bauman director of health care policy for the conservative Goldwater Institute. Her organization sued to stop the state’s Medicaid expansion. One of the proposals favored by Republican leadership is giving states a fixed amount of money, called a block grant, and letting them have more say in who and what they cover, in terms of health care. Bauman says the state, if given enough flexibility, could save money with such a system. The question, she says, would be, ”How do you make it easier and better for individuals and families to get the coverage and care that best meet their own needs and preferences?” But other conservatives say changing how these programs are funded could backfire. Heather Carter, a Republican state representative who lives in north Phoenix, voted for Medicaid expansion and for restarting KidsCare. ”What I hope does not happen is that decisions are made nationally that actually penalize us for being efficient and effective, long before the Affordable Care Act was in place,” Carter says. Arizona already has one of the   Medicaid programs in the country, she says. And Medicaid officials in Arizona caution that block grants could actually shortchange the state, because it has a fast growing population and a large share of people living on incomes that are around the poverty line. Less federal funding would likely force lawmakers to cut back services. ”We will have to make very difficult decisions in Arizona on who will  —   and who will not  —   receive coverage,” Carter says. If states lose the extra federal funding they received to expand Medicad and KidsCare, it would cost Arizona hundreds of millions of dollars to keep everyone on Medicaid covered to the same degree they are now. And even Democrats who support broad health coverage  —   including Senate Minority Leader Katie Hobbs  —   concede that’s not realistic. ”I don’t see anyone in the state coming forward and saying, ’Oh, we’ll cover this,’ ” Hobbs says. ”Because we don’t have the money to do it.” Arizona has more children enrolled in the federal marketplace than almost any other state. If you add in Medicaid and KidsCare, roughly 130, 000 kids or more could be at risk of losing their health care coverage if Congress doesn’t come up with a replacement that is similar in scope. This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with KJZZ and Kaiser Health News."
557,"At the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Clinic in Scarbro, W. Va. oxygen tubes dangle from the noses of three miners slowly pedaling on stationary bikes. All of these men have black lung  —   a disease caused by breathing in coal dust. Over time, the dust coats the lungs and causes them to harden. Hard lungs don’t easily expand and contract, and that makes it difficult to breathe. ”You try to get air in them, and they don’t want to cooperate with you as they did before,” says retired miner James Bounds, speaking with great effort. Not every coal miner gets black lung, just as some smokers don’t get cancer. But for those who do, Bounds says, the disease is devastating. ”There’s no cure at all,” he says. ”It keeps getting harder and harder until one day, I guess, you take your last breath and they won’t expand for you no more.” Bounds is one of about 38, 000 miners or eligible survivors  —   usually a spouse  —   currently receiving black lung benefits. The benefits are compensation for the physical damage Bounds sustained while doing his job. It took him 4   years to get approved, despite the fact that his lungs are so bad he has to stop moving to talk. But now the qualification process is supposed to move faster. The Affordable Care Act includes special provisions that make the process of getting black lung benefits easier for coal miners. If the ACA is repealed, gaining these benefits could become much more difficult, effectively harming a group of people that President Trump has promised to protect. Debbie Wills coordinates the black lung program for Valley Health primary care system. She says that prior to the ACA, it was almost impossible to qualify for the compensation benefits. Coal companies pay the benefits, and also pay into a federal trust fund that pays when coal companies can’t. Wills says the process of getting benefits was arduous for miners. ”Coal company lawyers would doctor shop around the country and find two, three, four, five, seven doctors to say, ’Yes this miner is disabled, but it’s not because of black lung,’” she says. The Affordable Care Act includes something called the Byrd Amendments. One shifts the burden of proof  —   instead of miners having to prove that mining caused their black lung, the coal companies have to prove that mining didn’t. ”You still have to prove the 100 percent disability, which is hard,” says Wills. ”But if you can prove that, and if you’ve worked 15 or more years or longer in the mines, then you’re entitled to a presumption that your disease arose from your coal mine employment.” Another part provides lifetime benefits to certain dependents who survive the death of a miner, if the miner had been receiving the benefits before death. If the ACA is repealed without a replacement, cases that were approved after the ACA went into effect could be reopened, leaving the miner or survivor vulnerable to losing the benefits. And, the burden of proof may shift again, making it difficult for applicants to qualify. Earlier this month, both the House and the Senate introduced resolutions to preserve the Byrd Amendments from a broader ACA repeal. Rep. Evan Jenkins   . Va. an ACA opponent, introduced the measure in the House. ”I am a firm believer that Obamacare is already in a death spiral and desperately needs to be fixed,” Jenkins says. ”While we are going to work to improve our health care system, I feel strongly about my resolution to make sure that the presumption relating to black lung is contained in whatever is the end product of this work this year.” This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Kaiser Health News."
558,"Over the years, music fans have slowly filled in details about a   mostly anonymous collective of Detroit studio musicians known as The Funk Brothers, who were the backing band for many of Motown’s hit songs. Less documented is what these musicians did when they were not in the studio. Recently, the archive label Resonance found a tape of Funk Brothers guitarist Dennis Coffey playing live with a trio at a Detroit nightclub in 1968. They’ve now released the recordings as Hot Coffey in the D: Burnin’ at Morey Baker’s Showplace Lounge, an album that offers one answer to the question, ”How did Motown happen?” Detroit in the 1960s was alive with music. When the musicians of Motown finished recording for the day, they could often be found performing in local nightspots. Label founder Berry Gordy has said that the city’s musically diverse club scene was essential to the label’s success: Musicians like Coffey used these recurring gigs to develop not just skills, but also a sensibility. If there is a ”Detroit sound,” it has to do with the way the rhythm players interact: They lay back, follow each other’s moves and even seem to breathe together. This approach didn’t originate in the Motown studio. It developed over countless nights, in small venues the one where Hot Coffey was recorded. These live tracks are some distance from the   Motown  . Still, you can hear the shared DNA: As Coffey and his trio dig in and work the groove, they bring the energy that was expected in the Motown studio to an ordinary night in a club."
559,"Sen. Jeff Merkley,  . tried to test whether President Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget believed in facts or ”alternative facts” during a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. With the incoming Trump administration repeating falsehoods about the size of crowds at the president’s inauguration, Merkley asked Rep. Mick Mulvaney,  . C. to look at two    photos  —   taken at roughly the same time during former President Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and Trump’s just last week  —   to gauge which, in fact, was bigger. ”I’m not really sure how this ties to OMB,” Mulvaney said, somewhat puzzled. But he did concede that ”from that picture, it does appear that the crowd on the   side [for Obama’s first inauguration] is bigger than the crowd on the   side.” Merkley assured Mulvaney there was a reason behind his riddle  —   he wanted to know if, as OMB director, the South Carolina Republican would be truthful in his budget presentations and recommendations to the president. ”The reason I’m raising this is because budgets often contain buried deceptions. . .. This is an example of where the president’s team, on something very simple and straightforward, wants to embrace a fantasy rather than a reality,” Merkley said. ”Are you comfortable as you proceed as a key budget adviser presenting falsehoods as simply an ’alternative fact’?” the Oregon senator continued, referring to Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway’s assertion on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that White House press secretary Sean Spicer was simply giving ”alternative facts” to rebut evidence of smaller crowd sizes for Trump’s inauguration. What Spicer presented were assertions riddled with inaccuracies. Mulvaney, still sounding somewhat perplexed over the unusual line of questioning, assured Merkley that he was ”deadly serious about giving you hard numbers I intend to follow through on that” if confirmed as OMB director."
560,"Updated 10:57 a. m. Updated 9:53 a. m. Updated 9:25 a. m. When the nominees for the 2017 Academy Awards were announced this morning, La La Land racked up 14 nods, tying records held by Titanic and All About Eve. Martin Scorsese’s Silence received only a single nomination for cinematography, while the small but critically praised   film Hell or High Water performed above expectations, with nominations for best picture, best supporting actor (Jeff Bridges) and original screenplay. Call it Oscars Slightly Less White: Unlike last year, when no people of color managed to secure acting or directing nominations, the Academy nominated Denzel Washington for lead actor in Fences, Mahershala Ali and Dev Patel for supporting actor in Moonlight and Lion, respectively, Loving’s Ruth Negga in the lead actress category, and Viola Davis (Fences) Naomie Harris (Moonlight) and Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) were nominated for best supporting actress. Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins was also nominated for best director. ABC will telecast the 89th Annual Oscar Awards ceremony on Sunday, Feb. 26. BEST PICTURE, First Impressions: If you loved La La Land and were worried that the buzz around it was peaking too early for it to make a strong showing at the Oscars, the raft of nominations it received this morning will either allay your fears, or cement them. One the one hand, it shows, yet again, how much Hollywood loves movies about movies  —   on the other, we’ve now got 33 whole days for the film’s detractors to feed the palpable, and growing, backlash. Otherwise, no particular surprises here. Except: Notable Snubs?: The poor showing of Martin Scorsese’s Silence isn’t a surprise, if you’ve been following Oscar prognosticators, but it’s striking. ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE, First Impressions: If there’s a surprise here, it’s Mortensen, if only because Captain Fantastic came and went so quickly. This is likely shaping up into a battle between Affleck and Washington. Notable Snubs?: Joel Edgerton’s performance in Loving was powerful but inwardly directed, and there may be room for only one   performance (Affleck) on this list. ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE, First Impressions: Florence Foster Jenkins is a chewy role, and Streep attacks it with Streepish verve, while Portman’s performance as Jackie O. risks something by running right up to the edge of satire before retreating to find something smaller, and real. Negga ensures that audiences register the love between Richard and Mildred Loving in a nuanced, grounded way that never feels cloying, and Stone makes the most of some lovely moments in La La Land. But in Elle  —   a challenging, uncompromising film  —   Isabell Huppert is icy and ferocious, and she earns our sympathy while remaining unlikable. That is, as they say in acting conservatories, a neat trick. Notable Snubs?: Just about everyone expected to see Amy Adams in here for her quiet but hugely emotional performance in Arrival. And personally, I’d have loved to see Annette Bening in here, because she does so much in 20th Century Women that’s small and quiet, unshowy and true. ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE, First Impressions: Hedges is a slight surprise here, but you can’t say he didn’t earn his place. Ali is heavily favorited. Notable Snubs?: Many expected Hugh Grant to earn a nod for Florence Foster Jenkins. ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE, First Impressions: Williams made the very, very most of her relatively brief screentime, as did Harris, Kidman and Spencer. But screentime doesn’t matter to Oscar voters (ask Judi Dench) emotional weight does. And by that metric, there’s no contest  —   this is Davis’s to lose. ANIMATED FEATURE FILM, First Impressions: Kubo has a great story, The Red Turtle is achingly beautiful, Zootopia is wildly popular (which doesn’t hurt) and delivers a message (ditto) Moana is the juggernaut that is Moana, and My Life as a Zucchini . ... I haven’t seen My Life as a Zucchini. Notable Snubs?: Many expressed surprise this morning that Finding Dory failed to make a showing here, which makes it the second Pixar film in a row (after 2015’s The Good Dinosaur) to fail to earn a nomination. CINEMATOGRAPHY, First Impressions: Silence’s only Oscar nomination this year. COSTUME DESIGN, DIRECTING, First Impressions: Jenkins is only the fourth   director to be nominated for an Oscar in the   history of the ceremony. Notable Snubs?: Directors of four of the nine films nominated for best picture  —   Fences, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures and Lion  —   didn’t make the cut, here. Neither, as noted, did Scorsese. DOCUMENTARY (FEATURE) First Impression: Depending on whom you talk to, the O. J. doc is either heavily favorited or  —   because most people saw it on T. V. not in a movie theater  —   a longshot. That may depress its votes, allowing the widely praised I Am Not Your Negro to take home the Oscar. DOCUMENTARY (SHORT SUBJECT) FILM EDITING, FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, First Impressions: A Man Called Ove is a   while The Salesman is . .. not particularly interested in pleasing crowds. This will be interesting to watch. MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING, First Impressions: The West Coast just woke up to a world in which the phrase ”the   Suicide Squad” is a thing people can say, with their mouths. MUSIC (ORIGINAL SCORE) First Impressions: Probably La La Land’s to lose, particularly if the voters don’t go for it in the major categories. MUSIC (ORIGINAL SONG) First Impressions: Two songs from the same movie hasn’t happened in a while, so they might split the vote. But the real story here is that   Miranda, of ”How Far I’ll Go,” is one O short of an EGOT. Voters might want to be a part of that milestone. PRODUCTION DESIGN, First Impressions: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! makes its only appearance in the 2017 nominations. SHORT FILM (ANIMATED) SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION) SOUND EDITING, SOUND MIXING, VISUAL EFFECTS, WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY) First Impressions: The screenplay categories offer a chance for both Moonlight and La La Land to get a victory on Oscar night, in case one or the other runs the table  —   but don’t count out the goodwill that’s still gathering behind Hidden Figures. WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY) First Impressions: I love that The Lobster got a nod  —   but then, the screenplay categories are historically where films too weird for the Academy get recognized. 20th Century Women isn’t weird, exactly, but it’s pleasantly shaggy and unconventional in structure. That said, if La La Land takes this award, you’re probably looking at a sweep."
561,"”I never thought I can make a film for Oscar!” says Khaleed Khateeb. Khateeb is a volunteer for the Syria Civil Defense forces, rescuing those caught in the crossfire of the civil war. He began filming scenes of the rescue missions and posting them on YouTube. When filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel decided to make a documentary about the group, he got in touch with Khateeb, gave him training and better camera equipment and told him to keep on filming. Today, it was announced that the   Netflix film, which features Khateeb’s footage, has been nominated for an Oscar in the short documentary category. ”I feel we let all the people around the world . .. know what is going on in Syria,” he told us after hearing of the nomination. We spoke to Khateeb last September about his work on the film and we interviewed von Einsiedel as well. That story is below."
562,"With so much focus in the early days of the Trump administration centered on GOP plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, it’s easy to forget that Republicans are planning another ambitious goal this year  —   overhauling the entire federal tax code. ”Very few predicted President Trump’s election with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate would move us to closer to   tax reform than at any point in the last 30 years,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady,   said Tuesday in a speech previewing the House GOP’s strategy at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. The last major overhaul of the tax code was in 1986, under President Reagan and a split control of Congress. Brady chairs one of the more powerful committees in the House, with vast jurisdiction over the tax code, trade bills and health care. His panel is also working on legislation to repeal certain aspects of Obamacare, and it will play a key role in whatever the replacement plan ultimately looks like. But Republicans are arguably more prepared for a potential tax overhaul, which they have been formulating for years. Former Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp,  . authored an overhaul in 2014, but it was lobbied into defeat and never received a vote in Congress. Brady sees lawmakers ”moving forward aggressively” to enact tax reform in 2017. ”Tax reform is truly one of those     opportunities. We are committed to seizing it in a very bold way,” he said. The broad outlines of the plan include dramatically lowering corporate and business tax rates to the lowest in history. It would also allow businesses to write off the full cost of new capital investments, meaning   returns on purchases related to new software, equipment, technology and the like. Republicans also want to end what they call the ”Made in America” tax on U. S. exports, also known as the border adjustment tax. President Trump has criticized this GOP proposal as ”too complicated.” The controversial proposal seeks to boost U. S. manufacturers by taxing imports but exempting exports from taxation. ”It will be a   for our businesses and our economy as a whole,” Brady said. He voiced frustration often aired by lawmakers that border adjustment taxes mean, for instance, that it is cheaper for companies to buy Chinese steel than American steel or to buy foreign oil over American oil. House Republicans also want to lower tax brackets for individuals and families, and Brady reiterated a   GOP pledge to create a tax system where most people can file a single page of paperwork the size ”of a postcard.” Brady also called for a ”bust up” of the Internal Revenue Service, and to redesign the agency into three service units designed to provide customer service for individual, family and business tax questions. The House GOP plan, of course, faces several roadblocks. The most significant is the U. S. Senate, where top Senate Republicans are moving more cautiously and have indicated they would like Democratic   for a legislative overhaul of this magnitude. Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch,   is expected to offer his vision of tax reform in a similar address next week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also indicated he prefers any tax overhaul to be revenue neutral, meaning new tax laws would shift the tax burden but would not change the amount of money coming in to the federal government. The House GOP’s plan, as outlined, would add to the deficit in that it would very likely result in less revenue coming in, but Republicans believe their tax overhaul would generate significant economic growth to make up the difference. But deficit hawks were also given a fresh cautionary warning from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office Tuesday. Its latest   budget outlook forecasts deficits will continue to grow over the next decade, adding an additional $10 trillion to the public debt if no changes are made. Maya MacGuineas, head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, which advocates for centrist budget reforms to balance the budget, said in a statement that the current trajectory is ”an unsustainable path” and requires   policymaking in Washington. ”Policymakers should not go into debt denial with hopes that unrealistic growth and rosy projections will save the day,” she said."
563,"The Women’s March, which drew millions of demonstrators to city streets on every continent (including Antarctica) this past Saturday, was historic for its numbers and deeply striking in its planetary solidarity. The various marches were a flare for a new movement, galvanized by a shift to the right in national and international politics. The video for ”Work,” a song released by Toronto singer Charlotte Day Wilson late last summer on her CDW EP, is a minimalist piece that alludes, silently and elegantly, to the nascent movement quickly calcifying around it. Its simple premise, ”people commuting to work as a moving portrait” as director Fantavious Fritz puts it, amounts to a soundless scream washed  —   outside of Wilson’s striking red  —   in earthen hues tuned lovingly to Wilson’s wide, bright, humid voice. (Joining BADBADNOTGOOD for a song during the band’s recent Tiny Desk concert, her innate talent, laid bare and uncorrected, is made plain.) It’s worth examining how interpretations of the song were likely far different around its release than at the present moment. For example, the line, ”I won’t let go   till I’ve got what’s mine” shifts and glides, in retrospect, to accommodate and address this new, maybe darker, reality. It likely won’t be the last time. ”I really wanted to use shooting the video as an opportunity to organize an afternoon of camaraderie with an amazing group of women, genderqueer and trans folks from my community in Toronto,” Wilson, who identifies as queer, writes. ”People got to know each other, make new friends and bask in the powerful energy that occupied an otherwise ordinary, mundane space.” It’s simply, beautifully, the latest example."
564,"At first glance, the snapshots featured on yolocaust. de look like any other ordinary selfies. People are smiling, dancing, juggling or striking a yoga pose. But if you move the mouse over an image, the background switches to    stills showing scenes of Nazi concentration camps. Suddenly, the pictures become profoundly disturbing. People are pictured dancing on corpses or juggling in mass graves. The photo montage series is   Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira’s response to visitors snapping what he sees as frivolous selfies at Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Germany’s national Holocaust memorial site. His project has sparked a debate over where to draw the line in an age in which most experiences are filtered through the lens of a smartphone and shared online. The name of his website  —   ”Yolocaust”  —   is yet another provocation, with its reference to the acronym ”you only live once.” Shapira, 28, was born in Israel and emigrated to Germany at 14. His maternal grandfather narrowly escaped the gas chambers when Polish Christians hid him from the Nazis. His paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was one of 11 Israeli athletes murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972. Shapira takes umbrage at what he sees as the mindless behavior of posting selfies at a site marking the extermination of 6 million Jews. His aim, he tells NPR, is not to shame people or join the rampant backlash culture that dominates social media  —   but to ”make people stop and think about where they are in the moment” and what it means to visit a memorial. Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, an unrelenting grid of 2, 711 concrete slabs located near the Brandenburg Gate, is ”a place for reflection,” Shapira says, ”not just another backdrop for goofy selfies.” Shapira had been thinking about the Yolocaust project for about a year before he launched it last week  —   the day after Bjoern Hoecke, a member of the   populist Alternative for Germany, or AfD party, called the memorial a ”monument of shame” and called on Germans to stop atoning for the Nazi past. Hoecke’s remarks sparked widespread outrage in a country where facing up to Nazi crimes is ingrained in the culture and education system. Even Frauke Petry, the AfD’s leader, has distanced herself from Hoecke, describing him as a ”burden for the party.” But she did not overtly criticize his remarks, and on Monday, the AfD leadership decided against throwing Hoecke out. Hoecke’s rhetoric is widely considered an election campaign tactic, part of an AfD strategy of ”targeted provocations.” Although the AfD is not represented in Germany’s federal parliament, this could change when voters go to the polls in September. Shapira says his website is not a direct response to Hoecke’s outburst but is propelled by his own concern about the political shift to the right in Europe and the U. S. In this vein, Shapira’s uncomfortably tweaked selfies recall the   photo montages of Berlin artist John Heartfield, who, wanted by the SS, fled Germany in 1933. Heartfield’s    political art appeared on the covers of   publications in Germany, ridiculing Hitler and condemning the horrors of the Third Reich. Like Heartfield’s jarring montages, Shapira’s images are intended to shock, to agitate and challenge behavior  —   in this case, unthinking selfie habits. They’ve certainly received attention. Shapira’s website immediately went viral, receiving more than 1. 2 million hits within its first 24 hours. Shapira says he has received thank you emails from Jews around the world who lost family members in the Holocaust, as well as emails from history teachers and Holocaust researchers planning to use the website in their lessons and lectures. The German tabloid BZ Berlin called the idea ”as simple as it is ingenious,” but praise has not been universal. Some newspapers, like the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, questioned the acceptability of using images of the dead in such a fashion. The British   weekly New Statesman voiced similar concerns  —   but about the   not victims of the Holocaust. Calling the project ”worryingly sensationalist if not censorious,” it asked whether publicly shaming visitors to the memorial  —   which is what many see Shapira as doing, regardless of his insistence otherwise  —   ”risked shutting people out.” The memorial’s architect, Peter Eisenman, told Der Spiegel when it opened in 2005 that he didn’t expect visitors to be overly reverent. ”People are going to picnic” at the monument, he told the magazine. This week, in reaction to Shapira’s website, Eisenman seemed unperturbed by selfies taken at the site. He told the BBC: ”People have been jumping around on these pillars forever. I think it’s fine.” While Berlin’s Holocaust memorial lists behavior it deems inappropriate for visitors  —   including jumping off the concrete slabs  —   some have questioned the ethics of Shapira’s own online conduct, since the selfies he has altered on his site have been plucked from people’s public social media profile pictures without permission. Those who find their photos on his site can request to have the images taken down. As of Tuesday, most people had done so, and Shapira says he has complied with the requests. ”Almost everybody apologized,” he says. Shapira hopes the remaining selfie owners get in touch. He expects the site to be empty in a couple of days. That, he says, will be its ”ultimate success.”"
565,"Saying she doesn’t want other kids to suffer the way she did, supermodel Hanne Gaby Odiele has announced that she was born intersex  —   and she wants to ”break the stigma” that can lead to intersex children having surgery to align them with the male or female gender. ”I’m excited to let the world know I’m intersex,” Odiele says, in a sequence of videos produced with the advocacy group interACT. In them, she tells intersex children to ”embrace your uniqueness.” She also urges parents and doctors to allow intersex children to determine their own identities. ”People want to put us in a box  —   male or female  —   but in reality sex is on a spectrum,” she says. ”Intersex is just proof of that.” Odiele was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome  —   a condition in which a person is born with both X and Y chromosomes, but the person’s body does not respond to male hormones, according to a description by the National Institutes of Health. ”Like most intersex kids, I’ve been subjected to irreversible, unconsented, unnecessary surgeries,” Odiele says. ”These surgeries have caused way more harm than good.” Discussing her surgeries in an interview with USA Today, Odiele says she underwent a procedure when she was 10 to remove undescended testes and then had vaginal reconstructive surgery eight years later. According to the NIH, undescended testes ”have a small chance of becoming cancerous later in life if they are not surgically removed.” In her message about AIS, Odiele says such surgeries shouldn’t be carried out at an early age. Odiele, 29, has been among the world’s elite models for the past 10 years, appearing on the cover of Vogue and walking in fashion shows for Marc Jacobs, Chanel and Prada, among others. Along the way, she has also won fans for her enigmatic style that draws on street fashion. Last summer, the Belgian model married her longtime boyfriend, John Swiatek. ”Intersex people should be able to make their own choices about their bodies,” Odiele says in one interACT video. ”I’m speaking out because it’s time this mistreatment comes to an end. It caused me way too much pain.” Saying that being intersex is roughly ”as common as being born with red hair,” the supermodel discussed being intersex in an Instagram video, leading many viewers to praise her for her bravery. Some of them had never heard of Odiele, or of being intersex. But one comment came from another person who was born with AIS. Here’s what that person had to say: ”I have AIS and I’ve hidden it from most of my family and all my friends  —   from the outside I look like any normal girl but feel ashamed of this secret because of society  —   I’ve learnt to love me and my body, but I can’t control what others think so I hide it from the world. .. I admire you so much for this, you are amazing xxxx.” In another video, Odiele addresses the parents of intersex kids: ”Just love your child. There’s no rush. Take your time, get informed. Get connected with other parents that’ve been in your shoes. Don’t make any drastic decisions. Let your own child decide for what it wants to do or be.” In that video, Odiele also speaks to intersex children, telling them, ”You can be whoever you want, whatever you want. Just be you.” As for how common it is for babies to be born intersex, estimates generally range from 1 in every 1, 500 to 1 in every 2, 000. As the American Psychological Association notes, intersex children are sometimes misdiagnosed  —   ”and government agencies do not collect statistics about intersex individuals.” In a recent publication about intersex children, the group also acknowledged that there’s a wide range of opinions on performing surgery to alter children’s genitals to make them less ambiguous. The APA adds, ”At this time, there is very little research evidence to guide such decisions.”"
566,"This week, Donald Trump told members of Congress that he would have won the popular vote, were it not for 3 to 5 million votes cast against him by ”illegals.” And when asked about it at the Tuesday press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer affirmed that ”the president does believe that.” But there is no evidence. No, you’re not having deja vu. Yes, he has made this claim before. Yes, many outlets (NPR included)   it. And other   Republicans have not come to Trump’s aid in defending his   claims. ”I’ve seen no evidence to that effect. I’ve made that very, very clear,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters, according to The Hill. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Tuesday offered a sharper rebuke, saying that he wants Trump to either say that the election was fair, or provide evidence that it was not. ”I am begging the president, share with us the information you have about this or please stop saying it,” he said, adding: ”As a matter of fact, I’d like you to do more than stop saying it I’d like you to come forward and say, ’Having looked at it, I am confident the election was fair and accurate, and people who voted voted legally.’ . .. If he doesn’t do that, this is going to undermine his ability to govern this country.” In the era of persistent misinformation and conspiracy theories  —   some of them repeated by the president himself  —   repeating the ( ) facts is important. So here’s a   our fact check again, starting with some bold typeface: The Trump team has yet to provide evidence of widespread voter fraud. Back in November, Donald Trump tweeted something similar to what he told lawmakers this week, saying (without providing evidence) that he ”won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He later also alleged, once again without evidence, that there was ”serious voter fraud” in three states. Those are some heavy accusations. When asked for evidence shortly thereafter, Jason Miller, a senior communications adviser for Trump’s campaign, did provide two sources. However, those proved to have some major problems. One, an analysis of survey data published on the Washington Post’s   blog, Monkey Cage, estimated that ”6. 4 percent of   voted in 2008 and 2. 2 percent of   voted in 2010.” However, that study drew heavy criticism from other scholars, who both saw weaknesses in the authors’ methods and the survey they used. In addition, one of the authors of that heavily criticized study himself later rejected attempts to use that study to prove fraud. ”On the right there has been a tendency to misread our results as proof of massive voter fraud, which we don’t think they are,” wrote Old Dominion University political science professor Jesse Richman in a blog post. In another post, he further pointed out that even if one did extrapolate from his study, it does not imply that illegal votes would have affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, because it simply was not a close election. Though Trump won the electoral vote, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Miller also cited a 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts report on the state of states’ voting systems. And that report did reveal some troubling statistics. For example, it found that 2. 8 million people are registered to vote in more than one state and that 24 million registration records ”are estimated to be inaccurate or no longer valid.” That means voting systems could definitely be modernized in some ways. However, that is not at all evidence of fraudulent voting, as the study’s main author pointed out on Twitter (highlighted by the Washington Post’s Fact Checker): And importantly, while voting systems could be (and have been) improved more, there are rules in place that keep people from being quickly purged from registration lists  —   simply moving from one state to another or dying won’t instantaneously remove a person from the list. ”So what has happened is that this notion that voter registration lists can possibly be 100 percent accurate at any point in time is a complete fiction,” Lorraine Minnite, author of The Myth of Voter Fraud, told NPR in November. ”It’s not allowed under federal law to be that way.” This is not to say that voter fraud doesn’t happen it does. However, it is not widespread. Bigger problems to come? Trump’s willingness to make (and repeat) untrue claims, demonstrated in just the first few days as president, have provided a taste of the challenges the media could face in holding the administration accountable in the coming years. As I wrote in September, repeated false claims create a difficult situation for journalists. On the one hand, we could continue to write refutations every time one of these inaccuracies is repeated  —   but that means repeating an untrue claim. On the other hand, we could refuse to repeat the claim  —   but that means allowing one of the most powerful voices in the nation to make the claim repeatedly unchecked. Aside from the   remarks, press secretary Spicer gave other false statements about the inauguration over the weekend. Photos of the National Mall from 2009 and 2017 clearly show Obama’s first inauguration with far more attendees. To explain the lower attendance at the Trump inauguration, Spicer made untrue claims about Mall ground coverings and inauguration security, offering   explanations for that attendance to anyone who wants them. He also later said he was referring to audience overall, including online streaming of the event. And for anyone who is firmly dug into their positions, those positions can be remarkably immovable. Beliefs, as political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote in a 2016 paper, ”seem to be closely linked to people’s worldviews and may be accordingly difficult to dislodge without threatening their identity or sense of self.”"
567,"President Trump’s inner circle got one more member  —   CIA Director Mike Pompeo. The Senate confirmed the former Kansas congressman’s nomination to the post Monday night. It came after Trump went to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Saturday to laud the spy agency and blast Democrats for delaying a vote on Pompeo’s nomination. (That was the same event where the president said he was at ”war” with the media and falsely claimed to have 1 million to 1. 5 million people in attendance for his inauguration.) Technically, CIA director is not part of the president’s Cabinet, but it is a   important position. Currently, just two of Trump’s Cabinet nominees have been confirmed  —   his Defense and Homeland Security secretaries. His Cabinet moved a few more steps closer to being rounded out Tuesday when four nominees got approval votes from Senate committees: Ben Carson to head Housing and Urban Development, Elaine Chao for Transportation, Wilbur Ross for Commerce and Nikki Haley for U. N. ambassador, who went on to be confirmed by the full Senate. Two key nominees, which faced questions from Democrats over personal finances, testified Tuesday: Rep. Tom Price,  . for Health and Human Services secretary before the Senate Finance Committee and Rep. Mick Mulvaney,  . C. to be the president’s budget director before the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Despite the lack of confirmations at this point  —   and despite some controversies  —   all of Trump’s nominees are expected to sail through with little difficulty. That’s thanks to a rules change implemented, ironically, by Democrats when they were in the majority. In 2013, Democrats were frustrated by Republican obstruction of   federal court appointees. So   Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada eliminated a rule requiring 60 votes to move a nominee to a vote by the full Senate. (The move does not apply to Supreme Court nominees or legislation.) There are a handful of these Trump nominees one could point to who might not have been able to gain enough Democratic votes to be in Trump’s Cabinet if the   threshold were still in place. Think: Betsy DeVos, who showed little depth on education policy, for Education State nominee Rex Tillerson because of his oil company background Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions, due to questions about his views on race and his commitment to voting rights Labor nominee Andy Puzder because of his   chains’ employee policies Steve Mnuchin, now in line to be Treasury secretary, for profiting off the foreclosure crisis and possibly others, whom Democrats might have voted down, might have been pulled or possibly never brought forward. The process can be confusing, so here’s a quick primer on the steps it takes to become a member of the president’s Cabinet, followed by where each nominee is in the process: 1. Nominated by    2. Senate hearings before relevant Senate committee, 3. Voted out of committee  —   if a majority of the committee votes for the nominee, it goes to the Senate floor for a vote by the full body. (A caveat here: the Senate majority leader can bring a nominee to the floor for a full Senate vote even if they do NOT get the approval of the relevant committee. It’s rare, but it’s happened in the past.) 4. Confirmed by full Senate in floor vote, For more on each nominee, check out NPR’s list of Who’s In The Trump Administration. Note: Director of National Intelligence and CIA director are technically not considered   according to the Presidential Transition Guide put out by the Center for Presidential Transition, but because they are important posts, they are also listed below for where they are in the process. Confirmed, Voted out of committee, Senate hearings complete, Nominated"
568,"Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer in 2013, is coming back to life  —   on television. A new   series, from Sony Pictures Television, recounts how Chavez rose from obscurity to carry out a socialist revolution in his homeland. But even before hitting the airwaves, the series, called El Comandante, has sparked controversy  —   because it shows how Chavez set the stage for Venezuela’s current crisis. Colombian actor Andres Parra plays Chavez, the firebrand leftist who ruled Venezuela for 14 years. To prepare for the role, he listened to 400 hours of Chavez’s speeches and worked with a voice coach. His bulky frame,   wig and prosthetic chin make him a dead ringer for the Venezuelan strongman, right down to his mimicking of Chavez’s insults of former President George W. Bush as a ”donkey” and ”the devil.” In an earlier Colombian TV series, Parra played drug lord Pablo Escobar. But he finds Chavez even more fascinating. While the Venezuelan leader was dying of cancer, ”He made this speech,” Parra says. ”It was [a] nine hours, 46 minutes speech. Without pee or drinking or anything. It was a way, like, to show people, ’I’m here. I came back. And I’m strong.’ ” In El Comandante, Parra first depicts a young, idealistic Chavez escaping poverty by joining the army and being elected president with the backing of Venezuela’s poor. Eventually, Chavez morphs into a   authoritarian. The series suggests his rule laid the groundwork for the food shortages, hyperinflation and political polarization plaguing Venezuela today. Looking back on the Chavez years has proved highly emotional for Henry Rivero, the series director, who grew up in Venezuela. ”It’s been very hard for me,” he says. ”I cried a lot, most of the time. Because, you know, you understand how tough [was] the situation we went through all those years.” The 60 episodes of the series  —   which premieres in Latin America this month and on Telemundo in the U. S. in the spring  —   are being filmed in Colombia due to the hardships of working in neighboring Venezuela. What’s more, that country’s socialist government has branded the project a hatchet job. ”They are going to emphasize the bad and make the world think that Hugo Chavez was a barbarian,”   lawmaker Diosdado Cabello said in a recent speech. Meanwhile, Venezuelans who despise Chavez have also come down hard on the actors. ”They say I should be ashamed of myself for acting in this series,” says Vicente Peña, a Venezuelan who plays a military attache in El Comandante. But for Parra, playing Chavez is the role of a lifetime. ”It shows you so much things about the human tragedy,” he says. ”Of how we change. You see ambition but at the same time you see compassion. He has everything. For an actor, that’s delicious.”"
569,"Father John Misty is back with another opus. Like his previous two solo albums, Pure Comedy is epically orchestrated and vast in its scope, with   observations on fame, social media, technology and the overall state of humanity. In announcing the new album, Father John Misty shared a video for the title track, a lengthy dissection of what he calls ”the comedy of man.” While the video includes images of politicians and scenes from the past presidential election, Father John Misty says ”Pure Comedy” is about so much more. ”There’s nothing political about ’Pure Comedy,’ ” he tells NPR Music in an email. ”Unless that’s what the viewer wants, even with all the gratuitous footage of political figures. The video is only ’about Trump’ in that the video is about human beings.” ”Pure Comedy” also appears to take on everything from big pharma, global warming and natural disasters to religion, gluttony and human folly in general. Pure Comedy is due out April 7 on Sub Pop Records."
570,"You’ve probably heard of antibiotic resistance  —   germs that can resist the drugs designed to wipe them out. Now there’s a new kind of resistance to worry about  —   fungal infections that are resistant to treatment. The fungal infection in question is Candida auris, which can cause infections in the mouth, genitals, ears, wounds or, worst of all, the bloodstream. While other species of Candida can lead to the same kinds of infections, Candida auris is getting worldwide attention because, according to a study in the February 2017 journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, some cases have proved to be resistant to all three classes of drugs available to treat fungal infections. The first reported case was in Japan in 2009 but it has now been found on five continents. Fungi like yeast and mold develop resistance to the antifungal medications used to treat them in the same way bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics: Drugs kill most germs, but some resistant germs are left to grow and multiply. Misuse of antibiotics and antifungal drugs promotes the spread of these resistant germs. The problem with antibiotic resistance is   and widespread. But resistance to all available antifungal drugs ”is something we haven’t seen previously,” says Dr. Cornelius J. Clancy, chief of infectious diseases at the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System. All species of Candida can trigger a potentially   infection, says Dr. Riina   researcher at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester, England, and an author of the study. The danger occurs when the fungal infection enters the bloodstream, leading to sepsis  —   the body’s overwhelming response to an infection, which can slow blood flow, damage organs and sometimes cause death. It appears that C. auris puts people at greater risk of sepsis than other species of Candida, says Richardson.  The microscopic spores produced by fungi are present in the air and soil, so most infections begin on the skin or in the lungs. They’re largely harmless, but they can be dangerous for people with weakened immune systems, like cancer or AIDS patients. The infection can spread in health care settings if beds and medical equipment have been contaminated, though it rarely spreads directly from patient to patient. No one knows whether C. auris has spread by traveling with patients or on object surfaces, on planes, for example  —   or developed simultaneously in various parts of the world. Because microbes can react to changes in the environment, says Richardson, it’s possible that other species of the Candida bug, stressed perhaps by exposure to radiation or antibiotics or disinfectants, changed their form and became C. auris. ”It appears they might have emerged independently in different places,” says Clancy, author of an editorial, ”Emergence of Candida auris: an International Call to Arms,” in the Jan. 15 journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.  So far, there have been relatively few cases of C. auris around the world, 24 of them reported in the States. Richardson said the death rate after infection approaches 60 to 70 percent, though the patients also had other serious medical problems, like cancer, so may have died of their underlying disease. Some of the patients were treated successfully with antifungal medications. But a study of 54 samples of C. auris from patients found that 50 of the samples, in lab tests, did not respond to fluconazole, an oral medication that is the   treatment for other species of Candida and the most commonly used antifungal drug. Overall, 22 of the samples were resistant to both fluconazole and a second line of defense, injection of a drug called amphotericin B. And two of the samples were resistant to all three available classes of antifungal medications, including echinocandins, the newest class of drugs administered by IV. The new bug has other traits that make it hard to stop. Most bugs dry up and die without moisture, so they’ll die if a hospital room is cleaned and left empty for a day or two. C. auris can survive a day or more of dryness ”and when it wakes up with moisture, it’s still normal,” Richardson says. And traditional cleanup strategies like wiping surfaces with conventional disinfectants failed to clear hospital rooms and equipment of the fungal infection. In the United Kingdom, one disinfectant, a form of bleach, was found to work. ”You have to wash and scrub, and not just put alcohol gel on equipment,” Richardson says. The CDC urges hospitals to contact state public health authorities if they suspect cases of C. auris and to initiate infection control techniques such as patient isolation. That’s possible in developed nations, but most poor countries lack the DNA sequencing equipment to even diagnose C. auris, says Clancy. This new species of fungal infection has the potential to become a serious public health challenge  —   a threat similar to that of antibiotic resistance. ”There’s no reason for panic,” Richardson says  —   but there is reason to give full respect to this potential threat."
571,"Rarely has a U. S. president been so willing to use his platform as both bullhorn and cudgel to exert public pressure on individual companies. But one of the hallmarks of President Trump’s approach to economic policy since his election has been his willingness to publicly endorse  —   and shame  —   companies in order to advance his message. The new president’s frequent use of social media has created an entirely new kind of   channel, one that companies are trying to exploit, in particular by touting their hiring announcements. Last week, Trump publicly thanked Walmart for its ”big jobs push” after the retailer last week released details of a hiring and capital spending plan that it had originally announced in October before the election. Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son parlayed his Dec. 6 meeting with the   elect into several supportive tweets from Trump. Ford, General Motors, Hyundai Motors and its affiliate Kia, have all made investment announcements referencing Trump’s tax or economic policies. ”They’re using Trump as a marketing channel,” says Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He says it’s a new paradigm, both for the president and for major company brands. ”Companies didn’t used to feel like they could curry favor with a president through making some moves like this, but today’s day and age it seems like a possibility so companies are exploring it,” Berger says. Trump’s prime focus has been the auto industry, where he has named individual companies and brands as possible targets for higher tariffs on cars made in Mexico. On Monday, during his first meeting with business leaders, Trump called out Ford CEO Mark Fields and the company’s decision to scrap plans for a $1. 6 billion in Mexico in favor of expanding in Michigan. ”Mark was so nice with the plant, I wanted to sit next to him,” Trump told the business executives. Trump criticized Ford’s rival, General Motors, earlier in the month because it manufactures some Chevy Cruzes for U. S. sale in Mexico. But then last week, GM said it would invest an additional $1 billion in the U. S. and Trump thanked the company in a tweet. GM spokesman Patrick Morrissey acknowledges that with U. S. job creation in the spotlight, ”this was good timing for us to share what we are doing.” It is not yet clear how Trump’s Twitter account might shape decision making for companies going forward. Many of the investment plans Trump has tweeted were planned  —   or even originally announced  —   well before the election. Take, for example, Fiat Chrysler’s announcement to increase its U. S. investment by $1 billion  —   which garnered a ”thank you” tweet from Trump this month. CEO Sergio Marchionne told reporters that investment decision was made more than a year ago, and that the attaboy from Trump wasn’t anticipated. ”None of us have had a tweeting president before,” Marchionne said at a Dec. 9 press conference. ”It’s a new way of communication, and I think we’re going to have to learn how to respond.” In most cases, companies are capitalizing on investment and hiring decisions that were set in motion well before Trump’s election. Berger, the Wharton marketing professor, says it’s not clear that companies will change investment decisions based on favorable tweets. ”Whether we’ll see companies actually changing their behavior, you know, actually doing different things or moving jobs in one way or another because of him, that’s a little bit more costly, and I think we will see some of that, but not as much as firms taking advantage of old news and recycling it,” Berger says. But the new president’s approval ratings are already low, so could companies see a backlash for trying to curry favor? It’s certainly possible, Berger says, but if Trump is endorsing the companies, and not the other way around, there’s less chance it could backfire."
572,"After a presidential campaign that divided the country on immigration, some of the most fervent   advocates say their views and agenda have now moved into the mainstream under President Donald Trump. His appointments, including top White House advisers and his nominee for attorney general, are powerful allies who support suspending the U. S. refugee resettlement program  —   the largest in the world  —   or an outright ban on accepting refugees from ” ” countries. From now on, ”I think you are going to see a very different attitude to the whole program and the whole problem,” says Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy and a leading   advocate. In Barack Obama’s Washington, Gaffney  —   described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as ”one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes, gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the West from within”  —   was considered on the fringe of the refugee debate. But no longer. ”I would put the work we do up against anybody who is in the mainstream,” Gaffney says. He bristles about charges that he is Islamophobic, saying, ”The Southern Poverty Law Center is being used to suppress people who are telling the truth.” A book rack outside Gaffney’s office displays more than a dozen of his center’s publications and pamphlets, with titles like Shariah, the Threat to America and Refugee Resettlement and the Hijra to America, claiming to document Muslim colonization of America. See No Shariah argues that the Muslim Brotherhood has gained undue influence over American policy makers, including the White House, FBI and Justice Department. These publications supply the talking points for a national   and   campaign. ’Do The Right Thing’ One battleground is in Rutland, Vt. where some 25 Syrian refugee families are on track to resettle this year. The first two Syrian families arrived earlier this month. The controversy surrounding their resettlement has attracted widespread domestic coverage and reporters from Denmark and Canada. Rutland became a microcosm of the national debate after Mayor Christopher Louras, the grandson of Greek immigrants to Rutland, announced in April that his town would become a host community for refugees. The   mayor says he saw an opportunity to ”do the right thing” and rebuild the community, which he describes as ”96 percent white and very much trending older.” The town of nearly 16, 000 has lost residents since 2000, and seems unable to attract new jobs or young people. An opioid crisis has crippled some neighborhoods. Louras says Syrian refugees would be a boost for the aging town, just as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe boosted Rutland’s fortunes a century ago. But there is opposition, and not just locally. ”The   people heard about it and they came to stir the pot. It was nasty and we are sorry it got so ugly,” says Lavinia Limon, who heads the U. S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants, one of nine private agencies contracted by the State Department to resettle refugees. ”This is a definitely a national campaign,” she says, referring to the wave of   activists who came to Rutland. ”Smaller towns seem to be their target.” Rutland has also attracted the attention of the influential conservative website Refugee Resettlement Watch. The site claims 6 million readers and its editor, a Maryland woman named Ann Corcoran, says resettlement of refugees is a form of ”infiltration” and is ”seeding” the country for the promotion of Islamic law, or sharia. Several state legislatures are considering bills to ban sharia. The whole issue is ”spurious,” Limon emphasizes, because elected lawmakers, not refugees, write the laws. ’Rutland First’ A month after Rutland’s mayor announced the town would welcome Syrian refugees, the ”Rutland First” group appeared on Facebook. The group’s aims were contained in a bold,   manifesto: ”Rutland before Refugees.” Timothy Cook, a Rutland physician and one of the group’s founders, contests the mayor’s view that Syrian refugees can remedy the town’s economic woes. ”It seems a little delusional,” he says as he stands in front of his medical office on a cold and foggy January night and points out businesses long closed along Rte. 7, a major thoroughfare in town. In May, soon after the mayor’s announcement, Cook invited James Simpson, a national   and   activist, to speak at the local library. Simpson, a former analyst for the White House Office of Management and Budget, spoke to a full house at the library in an event livestreamed by Rutland’s public access channel. His book, Red Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America, charges that the ”progressive left and Muslim extremists” aim to undermine and ultimately abolish the U. S. Constitution through Muslim resettlement and immigration. He calls the vetting of refugees and immigrants by U. S. security agencies a ”sham.” ”I am not Islamophobic,” Simpson insists. ”I am concerned about national security and the costs of the [refugee] program. I’m concerned about the secrecy and the unilateral way it’s imposed on communities.” Louras  —   who says there was nothing secret or imposed about Rutland’s application to host refugees  —   says the conversation in Rutland changed after Simpson’s visit. The language got rougher, more xenophobic. ”It certainly provided some false narratives and alternative facts that some people here locally glommed onto to justify their own positions.” But he also says the debate in Rutland was ”reflective of the national mood and the national level of discourse that Donald J. [Trump] was peddling.” ’Rutland Welcomes’ The roughness, for now, has somewhat abated. When refugees arrive in Rutland, they are likely to note signs around town featuring a white heart pierced by a thin black arrow. It is the symbol for ”Rutland Welcomes,” a   group with hundreds of volunteers who have pledged to help in any way they can and organized as soon as the mayor announced that refugees would arrive. Since the State Department approved the arrivals in September, volunteer committees have filled warehouses with donated household goods, clothing and kitchen supplies. They organized school registrations for the children and lined up translators for the adults. Recently, they set up Arabic classes taught once a week by linguists from nearby Middlebury College. ”I see no reason to believe that they won’t be successful, ”says Louras. ”They want to integrate into the workforce and that’s the story of our community. That’s what the southern and eastern Europeans did 100 years ago. ” Tim Cook, the local physician, sees these newcomers and thinks about Rutland’s past. His family arrived here more than 200 years ago. He acknowledges immigrants shaped Rutland for good. But this time, he believes it’s different. ”We have a community that is steeped in   culture,” he says. ”The idea of having a bizarre chess game where you are just going to drop people here, I have a problem with that.” For now, though, Cook accepts that Syrian refugees will become part of the community. ”I will do everything I can to help them succeed,” he tells me a week after the first families arrived. ”I’ll offer medical care. I will do whatever I can do.” He knows his position will surprise those who’ve followed his vocal opposition, but says those who are surprised should note New England culture. ”That,” he says, ”is what Vermonters do.” But he’s still hoping the new president will abolish the refugee program before more Syrians arrive."
573,"After her tweet about President Trump’s youngest son sparked anger and resulted in her suspension, Saturday Night Live writer Katie Rich has apologized. Rich says she regrets the tweet that she now calls ”inexcusable.” Rich, who’s one of around 30 writers listed in Saturday Night Live’s credits, issued her apology Monday about the tweet that was evidently meant to be humorous but was widely criticized for attacking a   . A person familiar with the situation tells NPR that the suspension was levied shortly after Rich’s tweet during Friday’s presidential inauguration, and that the suspension is indefinite. Rich deleted the tweet a few hours after it was published. ”I sincerely apologize for the insensitive tweet,” Rich wrote Monday. ”I deeply regret my actions  offensive words. It was inexcusable  I’m so sorry.” The tweet prompted an online campaign calling for Rich to be fired. On Monday, media news site Deadline was the first to report that Rich had been suspended from her job writing for the ”Weekend Update” news segment on Saturday Night Live, the NBC show that’s often traded barbs with President Trump. By trying to make a joke about Trump’s son, Rich broke a longstanding convention that places the children of politicians  —   and especially those of presidents  —     to ridicule or attacks. In the era of social media, that convention has been tested more frequently in recent years. In 2014, Republican congressional staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigned after she posted comments on Facebook that sharply criticized Malia and Sasha Obama for their appearance as their father conferred the traditional presidential pardon upon a turkey at Thanksgiving. After Trump took the oath of office on Friday, those who came to Barron Trump’s defense over the weekend included Chelsea Clinton, who wrote, ”Barron Trump deserves the chance every child does  —   to be a kid.”"
574,"I would argue that the most successful novel of the First World War is not A Farewell to Arms, or even All Quiet on the Western Front, but rather one that’s rarely classified so: The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. Like several other British veterans of the trenches  —   CS Lewis and David Lindsay come to mind  —   Tolkien chose to explore the inhuman horrors of the Great War through the allegory of mythology. In fiction, poetry, or memoir, he never explicitly addressed his time on the Somme. And neither does a new novel by his grandson, no matter the ”inspired by the   experiences” copy on the dust jacket. Simon Tolkien dedicates No Man’s Land to his grandfather, inviting the question: Is this the book that J. R. R. was unable to write? In style, theme, and tone, the answer is no. But who can blame Simon for not even trying to put words in the mouth of his legendary relative? Our protagonist is Adam Raine, no   for J. R. R. except in the most basic ways. Raine grows up on the streets of London, moves to coal country in northern England, and then is taken in by the landed lord of the manor. His story is one of serial strife  —   the picket lines, union strikes, mining accidents, grinding want, and Downton Abbey politics of early 20th century Britain  —   even before he enters the war. ”Luck ain’t a word we knows the meanin’ of,” says a working class friend. This is not a war book, then, but rather David Copperfield Goes to War. Only in its central third does this novel of manners and civil discord do an about face and march directly to the front lines in France. The shift is sudden, as if the book, like British society, didn’t believe the war would really come until it did. Simon Tolkien is at his best capturing the jingoism of   England, the smothering sense of duty and obligation heaped on young men, the peer pressure and public calls of cowardice, old women in the streets lecturing   boys to get to the front. It is a sentiment completely foreign to contemporary American culture  —   now, we deem not enlisting the smart choice, like Donald Trump (as he declared in an election debate) is smart not to pay his taxes. But Raine and every one of his friends eventually sign up, if only because ”anythin’s better than that bloody mine,” as one says. Raine’s victimhood shifts, from class and poverty to idiot generals and the guns trapped in the system, one tragedy after another befalls him. Raine finds the Great War by turns grisly and romantic. The soldiers on   duty vomit in their gas masks because the flies, ”clustered so thickly on the rotting flesh that they looked like black fur, were so drunk from feasting that they crawled rather than flew away, leaving their white maggot progeny behind.” And yet, at the same time, he sees his fellow soldiers ”go over the top again and again, inspiring their men with a nonchalant bravery that left him   with admiration.” There is truth in this duality, no matter how    it feels today, knowing how two world wars will turn out. In the book’s last third, coincidence and cliché play an unfortunately large role. But such quibbles miss the point. This is a   an opera, a costume drama to binge watch. Simon Tolkien knows how to keep a story moving, and he does it well. Brian Castner’s newest project is The Road Ahead,”a   anthology of short stories featuring veteran writers. "
575,"As the Beijing Kunlun Red Stars hit the ice to face off against a team from Moscow, tension is high. A win tonight is crucial to make it to the playoffs in the Kontinental Hockey League, or KHL, Russia’s top professional hockey league, second only to the U. S. National Hockey League in talent. But hardly anyone in the   Beijing arena understands the stakes. In fact, there’s hardly anyone here a vast majority of the seats are empty. Zhang Cuihua, a   old granny, takes up three seats with bags of knitting supplies. Someone gave her free tickets, and she figured a hockey game was a good excuse as any to knit a sweater. ”I tried to get my son’s family to come with me, but they weren’t interested. I haven’t seen a hockey game in 20 years  —   I forget the rules. I can’t figure it out. One team is Russian, but who’s the other team?” she asks me. That’s your Beijing team, I tell her. She looks up from her knitting and squints through oversized spectacles. ”Oh. But they’re all foreigners! China’s no good at hockey,” she concludes, returning to her knitting. After China won its bid to host the 2022 Olympics, President Xi Jinping vowed to get 300 million of his people ”on the ice,” an initiative to encourage winter sports. Energy tycoons in China and Russia quickly made a deal to create Beijing’s first professional hockey club, and Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing for the signing ceremony with Xi last June. Kunlun Red Star was born  —   the first Chinese club to join Russia’s premier KHL league. China’s team has 18 players from Russia, Finland, Canada and the United States. There are a few Chinese nationals, but none of them can compete at this level and they rarely see ice time. Team CEO Emma Liao says sponsors, many with close connections to China’s government, have already covered the $30 million cost needed to run the Red Stars. Now comes the hard part: educating the public about the team  —   and about hockey, for that matter. ”Nobody really knows what is hockey,” Liao says with a sigh. ”So our job is to educate the audience [about] what is hockey, why it’s so attractive and why they should come to watch the hockey game.” Few people have done this more than Mark Simon, a Canadian hockey coach who’s worked for years to raise awareness about the sport in China and now volunteers as an assistant for the Red Stars. On this particular day, he’s juggling an order for new jerseys with a hospital visit to the team’s goalie, who’s out with an injury. Simon says he wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard about the team. ”Great idea  —   KHL. China, Russia, you know, the Communist brothers and all the stuff. I mean, I get it,” he says. ”But I still thought, you know, it’s early. To expect that you’re going to fill an   rink is insane.” Simon says the Red Stars have already broken a KHL record for lowest attendance at a single game  —   550 people. The sparse crowds can make for an awkward   experience, when the team’s   cheerleading squad’s cheers are swallowed by the void of a   arena. Or when the announcer  —   who Simon complains doesn’t know a thing about hockey  —   begins an exuberant cheer for the Red Stars two seconds after the opposing team scores. A group of spectators from Finland is amused, and a little confused. They say the game would be better if they were drunk. But tight security rules prohibit alcohol inside the arena. They’re the only audience members I meet who’ve actually bought tickets. Peter Solonen, one of the Finns, says he’s never seen a hockey game with such good talent attract so few fans. ”They’ve still got something to learn,” he says with a laugh. ”You don’t see hockey anywhere else but inside the stadium. Nowhere else. That is weird.” It may be weird, but for Red Stars player Zach Yuen, it’s a dream come true. He was the first   defenseman drafted by the NHL, and he’s chosen to come here now, to play in his homeland. ”When I was growing up, I never had a role model,” says Yuen. ”It would’ve been cool to have a role model to look up to. Just to know that it’s possible. Because the entry to hockey is tough for sure, culturally. In China, there are kids that watch our games and hopefully, I can live up to that and be a role model for them.” Kids like Yuan Zhongfan, who’s practicing with his team in Shanghai, could use a role model. The    loves hockey, but he’s not sure how supportive his parents will be when he gets older. ”My mom wanted me to learn swimming, but I wasn’t tall enough. There was a hockey rink nearby, so we picked that,” he says. Yuan says his dream is to play for the Chicago Blackhawks. I ask him what his parents think about this. ”They don’t think it’s possible,” he says, ”because no Chinese player has made it to the NHL.” Yuan’s parents have never heard of Zach Yuen, and they don’t know much about the Red Stars  —   who, as it happens, lost their big game and have likely lost their chance to make it to the playoffs. But China’s government is dreaming big about hockey. And no matter how obscure the sport is today, if he works hard, this    from Shanghai may someday get a shot at his dream, too."
576,"The Dow Jones industrial average cruised past another milestone Wednesday  —   the 20, 000 level, further evidence of the long bull market that has lifted share prices since the depths of the financial crisis. The index closed at a record 20, 068. Since the November elections, the Dow and the broader SP 500 are up 9. 5 percent and 7. 4 percent, respectively. The stock market rally has been remarkably durable so far, withstanding the banking crisis in Europe, the Brexit vote, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, periods of disappointing growth in the U. S. and the polarizing U. S. presidential election. Crossing the 20, 000 threshold isn’t significant in itself. It’s simply a number. But it’s a round one with all those juicy zeroes. So let’s take a moment to examine why stocks have done so well in recent years, why the Dow is an imperfect proxy for the market and why the bull market hasn’t changed the economic fortunes of most Americans. The crisis, the Fed and the corporate moneymaking machine, Over the long term  —   meaning decades or even a century  —   stocks are by far the   financial asset. Adjusted for inflation, stocks have returned an average of 7 percent a year. That’s better than bonds and far preferable to stashing money in a savings account or under a mattress. But in 2009, the depths of the financial crisis, the stock market was a terrifying spectacle, a place where money went up in flames. After topping 10, 000 for the first time in in 1999, the Dow plunged to 6, 547 on March 9, 2009. Fear permeated markets everywhere. It seemed plausible that the banking system might never recover, putting financial capitalism at mortal risk. Almost no one wanted to be in the market. But by then, the seeds of recovery had already been planted. The TARP rescue, whatever its faults, stabilized the banking system. And the Federal Reserve had put in place an extraordinary policy  —   keeping interest rates near zero  —   that ultimately made stocks extremely attractive. The basic idea behind the Fed policy was simple. If the interest rate you get on safe assets such as bonds is essentially zero  —   who wants that?  —   investors will eventually put their money back into real estate and stocks. And that’s exactly what has happened. The great stock market rally roughly coincides with the Fed’s   policy, which has been in place since 2008. At the same time, corporate profits have come storming back since the financial crisis, and company earnings are closely correlated to stock market performance. So if you want to understand Dow 20, 000  —   the Fed and corporate balance sheets are the best place to start. Why the Dow? The Dow isn’t the entire stock market. Not even close. It’s a weighted average of just 30 major stocks, including Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Apple and  . Financial professionals pay closer attention to broader indexes such as the SP 500 or the Russell 2, 000. But for much of the media and in everyday conversation, the Dow is often the default, the old standby, cited by force of habit. It’s even used as shorthand for how the market is doing. That’s a mistake. Because it only represents the fortunes of 30 big companies, the Dow doesn’t tell an investor anything about the world of startups or the midsize firms that employ so many Americans. The Dow doesn’t include Facebook, Amazon or Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The stock market isn’t the economy, The stock market has recovered a lot better from the financial crisis than the overall economy. Economic growth has been sluggish since the Great Recession, averaging only about 2 percent. Wages have been stagnant. But the stock market has yielded handsome returns, benefiting institutional investors and households with the means to invest in stocks. All this has contributed to the growing disparities between affluent Americans and everyone else. For those who have maxed out contributions to 401( k)s or socked away money in a brokerage account, the stock market has been a godsend. But only 52 percent of Americans have money in the stock market, matching the lowest rate in 19 years, according to a Gallup Poll from April. In 2007, according to that same poll, 65 percent reported investing in the market. Based on those Gallup numbers, many Americans lost faith in the market at exactly the wrong time  —   just as it was staging a powerful comeback. Another discouraging side note: The stock market rally could be sweetening the retirement portfolios of ordinary Americans. But those portfolios tend to be skimpy, meaning ordinary investors don’t get much bang from their stock market bucks. In 2015, the median balance in retirement accounts was just $26, 405, according to Vanguard, one of the largest managers of retirement plans. What about that crazy election? The stock market was jittery in the days immediately before the election. And according to research by two prominent economists, the market dipped when Donald Trump’s election prospects improved in betting markets. They even predicted that the SP 500 would be 12 percent lower with a Trump victory than a Clinton win. And for a few hours after Trump clinched the presidency, stock market futures plunged, falling by as much as 5 percent. But prices quickly recovered, and the market has enjoyed an unanticipated Trump rally that began Nov. 9, the day after his victory. It’s impossible to pinpoint a single reason for the   bounce. Some analysts point to Trump’s promises to spend big on infrastructure and cut taxes, moves that could juice the economy. How long will it last? Trick question. Only fools say they can predict where the stock market is going. What is known is that a single event can trigger a stock market    —   like a military confrontation, a bank failure or a big jump in oil prices. But this market rally has withstood many unsettling events. So who knows?"
577,"Politics may be at play in the appearance of a draft presidential order that could revive the CIA’s ”black site” prisons, one former CIA director says. The appearance of the document, first reported by the New York Times, drew an immediate outcry from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, as well as CIA veterans. The draft order calls for a review of the interrogation practices permitted under current U. S. law and whether the CIA should reopen its   network of overseas prisons. But former CIA Director Michael Hayden says he thinks it is more about sending a message than laying serious plans. ”My instinct is this is a way of reflecting the tough language from the campaign, not a commitment to change anything,” Hayden told NPR. ”I cannot imagine a CIA director saying, ’It’s going to be OK to open a future black site.’ I mean, we’re not doing this again.” President Donald Trump endorsed outlawed interrogation methods during the presidential campaign, telling a crowd in South Carolina: ”Torture works, OK, folks? Believe me. It works, OK? And waterboarding is your minor form, but we should go much stronger than waterboarding.” Trump repeated his support for waterboarding in an interview with ABC News scheduled to air on Wednesday evening, according to previews released by the network. But he also told anchor David Muir that he would defer to Defense Secretary James Mattis and CIA Director Mike Pompeo about whether to use it. Lawmakers who oversaw the CIA’s previous interrogation and detention programs were quick to criticize the proposals. ”The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. ”But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who oversaw the production of a   classified report on CIA detention and interrogation programs during her tenure as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also offered a scathing response. ”Reconstituting this appalling program would compromise our values, our morals and our standing as a world leader  —   this cannot happen,” she wrote. ”I encourage President Trump to not sign the damaging and dangerous executive order that has been circulating. Read the [Senate] report, declassify it and let the American people see for themselves how the program failed to work  —   I believe they will never want to go there again.” Rebuilding the CIA’s network of secret prisons would very likely meet resistance from the agency itself, where many officers feel they were hung out to dry after being asked to take on the job of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. At Pompeo’s Jan. 12 confirmation hearing, senators grilled him, demanding to know whether the CIA was definitively out of the torture business. ”If you were ordered by the president to restart the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside of the Army Field Manual, would you comply?” asked Feinstein. ”Absolutely not,” Pompeo replied. ”Moreover, I can’t imagine that I would be asked that by the   or  .” But in written answers to   questions by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pompeo steered a somewhat different course. Pressed  —   again by Feinstein  —   on whether he would commit to refraining from any steps that would bring back waterboarding or other   enhanced interrogation techniques, Pompeo wrote: ”I will consult with experts at the Agency and at other organizations in the U. S. government on whether the Army Field Manual uniform application is an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country or whether any rewrite of the Army Field Manual is needed.” In other words, Pompeo says he will confer with the CIA officers who now report to him on whether the current interrogation rules work. And if not, he’s open to changing them. That review could get underway if Trump signs the draft order revealed on Wednesday. The president argues that U. S. national security officials have their hands tied. On his visit to CIA headquarters on Jan. 21, he told the assembled intelligence officers and analysts that ”we’re going to do great things. . .. We have not used the real abilities that we have. We’ve been restrained.” Supporters say the time is right for the U. S. to take another look at the restrictions Congress imposed during the tenure of President Barack Obama, which limit soldiers, intelligence officers and other interrogators to the techniques spelled out in the Army Field Manual. ”I support very much the idea that we’re going to review  —   and that’s what the executive order does,” said Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican in the House and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Her father was a key member of President George W. Bush’s administration when it ordered the use of torture after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. Terrorism suspects were jailed in secret in foreign countries  —   including Afghanistan, Thailand and Lithuania  —   and chained, beaten and subjected to other such treatments as interrogators demanded information. ”I do support enhanced interrogation,” Liz Cheney told reporters in Philadelphia. ”I think that it’s something that clearly has helped us in the past to prevent attacks and save lives and so I was glad to see President Trump take that step.” People still caught up today in the aftermath of the   decisions, however, called that a bad idea. James Connell, an attorney for alleged Sept. 11 plotter Ammar   said at the Guantanamo Bay detention center on Wednesday that one reason the trials there are taking so long is the complications caused by the use of brutal interrogations. Defendants like Baluchi argue the government cannot use evidence it extracted from them by torture, but U. S. national security officials say such men are too dangerous to let go. So they have languished in limbo in Guantanamo for years. ”What this case has demonstrated, if it’s demonstrated anything, is that torture makes criminal cases virtually impossible to prosecute,” Connell said. ”In fact, it’s fair to say that torture and due process are mutually exclusive.” NPR Correspondents Susan Davis and David Welna contributed to this report."
578,"Updated at 5:50 p. m. ET, President Trump has signed two executive orders related to immigration and border security, moving ahead with his plans to build a wall along the U. S. border with Mexico and to deport people who are in the country illegally. Trump signed the orders at the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday, shortly after the agency’s new leader, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, was sworn in. ”Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said in an address at the Homeland Security Department. The move comes less than one week before Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is slated to visit Trump in Washington on Jan. 31. Trump emphasized that the actions were in partnership with Mexico. ”The secretary of homeland security, working with myself and my staff, will begin immediate construction of a border wall,” Trump said. News that the border wall plan is moving forward was criticized by Amnesty International USA, whose executive director, Margaret Huang, said, ”This wall would say that those from outside the United States, especially from Latin America, are to be feared and shunned  —   and that is just wrong.” Trump said in an interview with ABC News that the U. S. will be ”reimbursed at a later date” by Mexico for the costs of building the wall  —   an idea that Peña Nieto flatly rejected earlier this month. The cost of building such a wall has been estimated at at least $12 billion and perhaps $15 billion for a   barrier. Roughly a third of the U. S.  border is currently blocked by a fence, as NPR’s John Burnett has reported: ”According to an    estimate by the Government Accountability Office, the border fence cost the government $3 million to $4 million a mile to build. Estimates for additional fencing  —   in harsher terrain  —   could surpass $10 million a mile.” The border wall is included in an executive order titled Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements. It calls on Kelly to ”identify and, to the extent permitted by law, allocate all sources of Federal funds for the planning, designing, and constructing of a physical wall along the southern border.” The directive calls for hiring more Border Patrol agents and prioritizing the prosecution of criminal offenses related to the Southern border. It also expands detention capacity  —   a move that could increase the use of private   prisons. The Justice Department had already beefed up border prosecutions under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The new action suggests law enforcement will be more empowered to prosecute for minor offenses and remove those in the country illegally. A second executive order, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, directs the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to withhold federal funds from   sanctuary cities. In that action, Trump is also restoring the Secure Communities Program  —   which had ceased to operate in 2014 after being used by both the Bush and Obama administrations to force state and local governments to share fingerprints and other data to help federal officials identify unauthorized immigrants. Several states and cities sought to opt out of that system, which was also criticized for sometimes resulting in cases of mistaken detention of U. S. citizens. One critic of Trump’s executive orders, Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said there are better ways to keep the country safe than to crack down on sanctuary cities. ”Pressuring local law enforcement to take on immigration responsibilities undercuts the very oath they take to ’serve and protect’ the entirety of their community. Smart law enforcement is built on intelligence gathering and trust, which are dramatically undermined once the cop on the corner is asking victims of crime about their immigration status,” he said. Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors immigration limits, said in an email that the administration’s battle with sanctuary cities is just beginning. ”Who will blink first —  cities or the federal government? Cutting off their money is step one. LA and New York will not change their policies. This will play out for years,” he said. Wednesday’s executive order also seeks to force other nations to take back criminals in the U. S. illegally by using leverage such as withholding U. S. visas. And it will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to more aggressively arrest, detain and remove people from the U. S. It also calls for the hiring of 10, 000 additional immigration officers. The order also will create an ”Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens,” aimed to support these victims and their families. The order does not detail exactly how these victims will be supported but states that the office will ”provide quarterly reports studying the effects of the victimization by criminal aliens present in the United States.” The actions come one day after the president tweeted about new immigration policies, saying Tuesday night, ”Among many other things, we will build the wall.” Construction of a border wall was a keystone of Trump’s presidential campaign. Questions still surround the details of the plan for a wall  —   chief among them, how the undertaking would be paid for. A law already exists that experts say gives Trump the authority to start building the wall. It is the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It was bipartisan and overwhelmingly supported during the Bush administration. The 2006 law envisions both physical barriers and   features, like sensors and cameras. It also mentions a   fence  —   but that fence was never built, and the legislation didn’t include money to pay for one. Ten years later, the process could begin in earnest."
579,"From the start of his campaign, after he descended the golden escalator to give his announcement speech, Donald Trump promised to build a wall along the U. S.’ Southern border. Now, Trump is taking the first steps toward keeping that promise, with an executive action that calls for building that wall. In line with his campaign theme of tightening laws on immigration, that action will call for other measures, such as hiring more Border Patrol agents and expanding detention space. Here’s a quick primer on Trump’s wall  —   how long it would have to be, how much it will cost and what Americans think about it. The situation right now, Trump is no stranger to   and he has voiced different opinions on how he wants the border barrier to look. When CBS’s Lesley Stahl asked him if he would ”accept a fence,” he answered, ”For certain areas I would, but certain areas, a wall is more appropriate.” Then at his Jan. 11 press conference, he took a harder line: ”On the fence, it’s not a fence it’s the wall,” he told reporters. ”You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall.” Remember, for the record, he said  —   ”For certain areas I would.” Should he decide to accept some fencing, he has existing fencing to add onto: As of late 2015, there were 652. 7 miles of border fence along the roughly    border. Along with that head start on the barrier, he also appears to have a head start on the legislative side. When Republican Rep. Luke Messer recently claimed that the fence is authorized, and that it only needs to be funded, PolitiFact ruled it ”True.” A November 2016 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service bolsters that finding: ”DHS’s current policy not to deploy a substantial amount of additional fencing, beyond what is expressly required by law, appears primarily premised on policy considerations and funding constraints, rather than significant legal impediments,” writes the author (whose name was redacted from the report). Still, there are other logistical hurdles. For example, there’s the pesky issue of private land ownership. When the U. S. government was building the fence from 2008 to 2010, the Border Patrol ”had to enter into negotiations or begin condemnation proceedings with landowners,” as NPR’s John Burnett reported in  . And even then, years after the construction, some lawsuits were still ongoing. Another potential legal barrier exists in a    treaty, as the AP reported on Wednesday: ”The Trump administration also must adhere to a   border treaty with Mexico that limits where and how structures can be built along the border. The 1970 treaty requires that structures cannot disrupt the flow of the rivers, which define the U. S.  border along Texas and 24 miles in Arizona, according to The International Boundary and Water Commission, a joint U. S.  agency that administers the treaty.” The cost: high. An actual wall could cost $15 billion to $40 billion, A member of President Trump’s own party criticized the cost of a wall on Wednesday. Texas Republican Rep. William Hurd, who represents a district featuring a lengthy border with Mexico, said in a statement, ”The facts have not changed. Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.” Here are some basic facts on cost: Trump will need to find funding, and he very well may need a lot of it. While Trump at one point estimated the cost of his wall (or   combination) to be $8 billion  —   which he later revised to $10 billion to $12 billion  —   it could easily be much higher. Were he to, in fact, try a wall, the cost could be much higher. One estimate from MIT found that a   wall would cost anywhere between $27 billion and $40 billion. Another estimate from research and investment firm Bernstein put it at $15 billion to $25 billion. Of course, a fence could be far cheaper than a wall. The nearly 653 miles of wall built thus far cost around $2. 3 billion, the DHS said in 2015 congressional testimony. That comes out to around $3. 5 million per mile. Multiply that out across 1, 300 more miles, and it comes to around $4. 6 billion. But there’s a big caveat here: That could easily be a very conservative estimate. Estimating how much a border fence costs isn’t simply a matter of miles times dollars, because some miles of border fence cost far more than others. A 2009 analysis from the Government Accountability Office found that as of late 2008, pedestrian fencing had cost the government an average $3. 9 million per mile  —   but that costs ranged from $400, 000 to $15. 1 million per mile. Likewise, vehicle fencing averaged $1 million per mile but ranged from $200, 000 to $1. 8 million per mile. And costs vary depending on who’s doing the estimation. One 2009 analysis from the Department of Homeland Security estimated that as of late 2008, it would cost $6. 5 million per mile for pedestrian fencing  —   that is, fencing primarily meant to block people attempting to cross the border on foot. Vehicle fencing came out to $1. 7 million per mile. Prices can vary for a number of reasons for example, the fence is far taller in some places than others, and different materials are used in different spots. Geography also plays a part in determining cost. Along some stretches of the border, like rough mountain ranges, costs could exceed $10 million per mile, as Burnett has reported. The cost also depends upon who is doing the building. Commercial builders are more expensive than if the U. S. depends upon the military to build the fence. And then other costs could easily arise  —   for example, the cost of legal proceedings from all those dealings with landowners mentioned above. Cost considerations are less of a worry if Mexico will pay for the wall, as Trump has claimed it would. But he is unlikely to be able to make that happen without a massive fight, as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto seemed to indicate earlier this month. ”It is evident that we have differences with the new United States government on some issues, such as a wall that Mexico absolutely will not pay for,” Peña Nieto said, as quoted by the Guardian. ”At no time will we accept anything that goes against our dignity as a country and our dignity as Mexicans.” Most Americans are opposed to the wall, Many Trump supporters were fervent supporters of a border wall (as evidenced by the loud chants of ”Build the wall” at his campaign events). However, polls suggest that Americans as a whole aren’t thrilled about a border wall. A recent ABC News poll found that only 37 percent of Americans are in favor of building it. It’s not that Americans aren’t concerned about immigration, of course 72 percent of Americans want to ”deport undocumented criminals,” according to the ABC News poll. Likewise, a Pew Research Center poll from late November and early December found that large majorities of Americans support a variety of immigration policies: 77 percent said it’s ”somewhat” or ”very important” to have stricter enforcement of visa overstays, and 73 percent said the same of preventing unqualified immigrants from receiving government benefits, for example. Meanwhile, only 39 percent said the same of building a border wall. Indeed, majorities supported other policies that run counter to the Trump immigration agenda, including allowing people who entered the country as children to stay, as well as supporting a path to legal status."
580,"Mary Tyler Moore played the girl who could turn the world on with her smile. The actress is beloved for two TV roles: the single young professional Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and before that, the earnest homemaker Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Moore died Wednesday at the age of 80, her longtime representative told NPR. ”Today, beloved icon, Mary Tyler Moore, passed away at the age of 80 in the company of friends and her loving husband of over 33 years, Dr. S. Robert Levine,” Mara Buxbaum said in an email. ”A groundbreaking actress, producer, and passionate advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Mary will be remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her smile.” In 1995, 25 years after The Mary Tyler Moore Show first aired, the actress clearly recalled shooting the scenes for its memorable opening credits. ”It was freezing cold,” she told WHYY’s Fresh Air. ”It was in Minneapolis in January, I think. We didn’t know what we were doing  —   we were just there to grab a lot of footage that shows a young woman’s exuberance [over] being in a new city.” The final opening credits showed Moore’s character tossing her hat in the air. With it, she’s tossing out all the baggage of her last life and starting over in the newsroom of Minneapolis’  . Moore plays Richards as young, polite and very determined. In the first episode, when crotchety news director Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, asks Richards about her age and relationship status during a job interview, she challenges his line of questioning. ”You’ve been asking a lot of very personal questions that don’t have a thing to do with my qualifications for this job,” she says. ”It was the most powerful moment in theater I’ve had, because she played it so beautifully,” Asner told NPR in 2001. ”The audience was going ’  ’ at that moment.” By the time Moore appeared in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she was already an experienced comedic actor and producer. Her production company MTM Enterprises (formed with her second husband, Grant Tinker) was also responsible for the sitcoms Rhoda, The Bob Newhart Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. Moore had learned her craft while playing homemaker Laura Petrie for five seasons on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Her chemistry with her   husband, played by Dick Van Dyke, was so electric that CBS insisted her character had to be a single woman on her later show  —   the network didn’t want viewers to think they had divorced. Van Dyke cheerfully admitted this to NPR in 2011: ”Around the second season, we would try to rehearse and begin to giggle for no reason. And a psychiatrist said, ’You have a crush on each other.’ And I realized that’s true! And I think it showed on the screen. I think that’s why people thought we were really married because we had a wonderful connection.” Laura Petrie also wasn’t the typical 1960s housewife people were used to seeing on TV. ”Laura actually had opinions of her own,” Moore said. ”And while she was asserting herself, she also didn’t make Dick Van Dyke look like a dummy. I mean, society’s expectations at that point still said, ’Hey, wait a minute, lady, you only go so far here.’ But I think we broke new ground.” The character also wore capri pants in a time when skirts and heels were the height of TV fashion. Moore proved she could wear what she wanted and also sometimes take the comic lead to Van Dyke’s straight man. She said she had always been a fan of the comedian Nanette Fabray, and she channeled Fabray to conjure up those trademark comic tears. ”There was definitely a cracking in the voice and an inability to maintain a tone and a certain amount of verbal yodeling that took place,” Moore said. In her real life, the actress was not the single,   Mary Richards that America embraced. The real Mary was married by the time she was 18. She was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. but she grew up in Los Angeles with a mother who battled alcoholism, a problem that later afflicted Moore and both her siblings. ”I probably never was really    drunk,” Moore recalled. ”And I certainly never drank during the daytime, but I wasted a lot of my time and I forgot a lot because I didn’t remember much of what happened the night before.” Moore channeled some of that unhappiness for her role as a grieving mother in 1980’s Ordinary People, a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination. To this day, however, it’s her comedy that endures. In downtown Minneapolis, there’s a statue of her as Mary Richards twirling her cap  —   a moment of hope and promise, frozen in time."
581,"An article in an online publication accusing Facebook of suppressing the Women’s March in its trending topics caused a little tempest on social media over the weekend. Facebook says it did not intentionally block any story and is revealing a new way its   algorithm will now operate. Paul Bradley Carr, writing for online outlet Pando, on Saturday posted what he said were screen shots of his Facebook pages at the height of the worldwide marches, which brought more than a million people into the streets around the globe to protest the agenda of the Trump administration. Despite images and stories from the marches filling many people’s personal Facebook feeds and the day’s media coverage, Carr’s screenshots showed no signs of the march in Trending Topics  —   a feature supposed to reflect popular discussed topics. And Carr says he discovered he was not the only one who didn’t see the Women’s March reflected on Trending Topics, accusing Facebook of trying to cozy up to the Trump administration. A very unscientific poll by this reporter found that among people in my Facebook and Twitter network most did see the Women’s March or something related trending on their page. However, a few did not. According to Facebook, the Trending Topics  —   seen to the right of the main news feed on desktop and in search on mobile  —   are ”based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.” (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams.) Facebook representatives told NPR that the reason why some people did not see the march as trending had to do with the algorithm behind the feature. Although it took into account major news events and what’s popular on the site, it also accounted for the preferences of each person. It’s possible that Carr’s algorithmic profile indicated he wouldn’t be interested in the Women’s March. In addition, some people may have seen trending topics they didn’t realize were about the Women’s March. For example, Ashley Judd and Madonna were trending  —   both women gave speeches at the main march in Washington, D. C. And, Facebook says, none of this will happen in the future. As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms. Personal preferences are now out of the equation. ”Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone’s interests,” Facebook says in a press release. ”Everyone in the same region will see the same topics.” For now, a region is considered a country, so everyone in the U. S. should see the same topics. The latest algorithm changes are part of Facebook’s ongoing effort to curtail the spread of fake news. Some fabricated stories show up in Trending Topics, despite often originating on sites with no history of visitors and getting no coverage from legitimate news media. It’s a lucrative business, explored by NPR in November, when we tracked down one notorious   creator. The new algorithm would make hoax articles less likely to trend because it will look at ”the number of publishers that are posting articles on Facebook about the same topic,” accounting for coverage by multiple news outlets, Facebook says. According to Facebook the new algorithms will also make it easier for those who did not realize that the trends for ”Ashley Judd” or ”Madonna” were related to the marches to understand the context around those posts. Trending topics will now feature a headline below each topic name. The company says the changes are not a response to complaints about trending during the Women’s March. Facebook says they have been in the works because its users  —   like Carr  —   actually expect and want to see trending topics related to the most     events. Of course, algorithms are programs. While Facebook may hope that its new approach will appease critics such as Carr, the proof will be what happens in the real world of people’s Facebook pages. ”I do give them credit for acknowledging, at least, users’ concerns over this,” says Carr, who called Facebook’s change ”a positive step.” But, he added, ”we’ll see how it works in practice.”"
582,"Bangladesh. Myanmar. Benin. Somalia. Haiti. Ireland. South Sudan. Iraq. One by one, 59 immigrants from 29 countries rise before a federal judge in a Kansas City, Mo. courtroom and proudly state their country of origin. Some have brought their young children, who watch from the audience. All look eager and intent. This is a big moment: They are about to become U. S. citizens. In 2017, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are expected to be naturalized as U. S. citizens in ceremonies around the country, much like this one. Judge Arthur Federman looks out at the rows of faces and smiles. ”It’s rare that we have an occasion in the courthouse where everyone leaves happy,” he tells them. ”Hopefully, this will be one of those days.” Erkin Rahimov, 54, and his wife, Limara, 42, are sitting in the front row, along with Erkin’s    daughter from his first marriage, Sabikha. Erkin and Limara immigrated to the U. S. from Uzbekistan Sabikha came from Ukraine, where she was raised by her mother. All three will become citizens today. The evening before the ceremony, the Rahimovs invite us to join them for dinner at their home, a spare, tidy duplex in Kansas City, Mo. Limara has prepared a feast: the flavors of Uzbekistan, transported to the Midwest. There’s rice pilaf studded with beef: ”The Uzbek national dish!” Limara explains. Also on the table: a tangy beet salad, pickled cabbage, eggplant and homemade bread. Limara pours green tea from a beautiful Uzbek teapot   and enameled deep blue and gold. ”We don’t have guests often,” their son Murad says, ”but when we do, we give it our all.” And the Rahimovs have much to celebrate. In 2009, after many years of trying, Erkin and Limara won the green card lottery to immigrate to the U. S. So, in March 2010, they left behind their life in Uzbekistan, a harsh authoritarian state. They landed in Kansas City with their two sons  —      Rasool and    Murad  —   and not much else. ”I remember when we came to Kansas City with two small kids and three suitcases. It was challenging,” Erkin recalls. ”The first days we were sleeping on the carpet. We just put sheets on it.” For pillows, they used their clothes. Then, he says, ”slowly, slowly we started to work and buy some stuff.” Now, after seven years in the U. S. the Rahimovs own their home. They recently bought property outside the city where they plan to go on weekends and grow fruits and vegetables. They just leased a new car, a Hyundai Elantra. Erkin is a civil engineer. He works for a Canadian company that makes harvesting equipment, traveling throughout Missouri and Arkansas to train dealers and mechanics. Limara taught math and physics in Uzbekistan. Now she works with children at an   program, and she is studying for a degree in computer science. Their sons are thriving. Rasool, now 7, is a Pokémon fiend and has test scores above grade level.    Murad, who spoke no English when he arrived in the U. S. is an honors student on an accelerated track through high school. He loves astronomy his dream is to work for NASA. ”It’s amazing that my parents managed to get me and my little brother here for us to have a really bright future ahead of us,” he says. ”I’m really proud of my parents!” When Erkin and Limara become U. S. citizens, their children, Rasool and Murad, will automatically become citizens, too. The Rahimovs say they’ve always felt welcome in this country. By way of example, Erkin tells this story: One day, soon after the family arrived in Kansas City, Murad missed the bus to elementary school and came home crying. The school principal, hearing about the mishap, came by in his own car to pick Murad up and ferry him to school so he wouldn’t miss a day. ”It was amazing,” Murad says. ”He’s just a really good person.” Even though the Rahimovs came to the U. S. as legal permanent residents with green cards, the step of becoming citizens carries real meaning for them. They’ll be able to vote, and, as Limara puts it, ”take part in the fate of the country.” Looking forward to the ceremony, Limara says, happily, ”We will be, I think, real Americans, right? We will be part of the United States.” Asked what America symbolizes to him, Erkin replies instantly: ”Freedom. Freedom! Even my name means freedom.” He explains that erkin, in Uzbek, is translated as independent or free. Erkin and Limara Rahimov share a family history etched with sadness. They each have parents who were Crimean Tatars. They were among the Tatars who were forcibly deported from Crimea in 1944 in a mass expulsion, on orders of Josef Stalin. The Rahimovs know well that freedom is something to be cherished. On the morning of the naturalization ceremony, the Rahimovs arrive at the courthouse. Erkin is wearing a somber suit and tie Limara, an elegant black wool dress. Sabikha has flown in from New Jersey late the night before to join them in becoming citizens. She is a financial analyst with an M. B. A. and recently took a job with a company in New Jersey. ”Almost to the finish line, right?” Sabikha says as they approach downtown. ”Well,” she adds, laughing, ”maybe just new beginning actually!” Inside courtroom 8C at the Charles Evans Whittaker U. S. Courthouse, the 59    wait expectantly. They’ve already been through months of preparation: They’ve been fingerprinted, had background checks, been interviewed and have taken an English and civics test. Now the final step of the process has come. They raise their right hands and in unison, recite the oath of allegiance, pledging to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States. A chorus of global accents fills the room. ”Congratulations!” says Federman. With that oath complete, they are officially U. S. citizens. For Federman, conducting these ceremonies has special resonance. As he tells the immigrants, he is himself the child of naturalized citizens. His parents survived the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps and went on to forge a new life together in America. ”We need to recognize that we are a nation of immigrants,” Federman tells the courtroom. ”And in the same way I told you my family story, I hope that you will tell your story to us and to our children, so that we can all appreciate the great diversity that makes up our country.” As Erkin Rahimov listens to the judge’s words, he gently dabs away tears that roll down his cheeks. ”Thank you very much for being my fellow citizens,” Federman concludes, ”and for pledging today as you did to uphold our Constitution and the freedoms it guarantees to each of us.” Soon after, the Rahimovs leave the courthouse, their eyes sparkling. They’ve already registered to vote and are holding copies of the Constitution and small American flags. ”I’m so excited!” Sabikha says, gleefully. ”I want to make this country better. It gave so much to me. I want to give back.”"
583,"Opponents who spent months resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline were disheartened by President Trump’s decision Tuesday to ”expedite” construction of the controversial project. Dave Archambault, the chairman of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, called the move ”reckless and politically motivated.” Jamil Dakwar of the American Civil Liberties Union said it was ”a slap in the face to Native Americans.” Earthjustice, the law firm that represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, described it as ”legally questionable at best” and vowed to take the Trump administration to court. But as much as Trump’s move has been criticized, opponents of the pipeline say it wasn’t a surprise. ”It’s disappointing, but it’s not unexpected,” said Ruth Hopkins, a reporter at Indian Country Today who was born on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and has been part of the resistance for months. ”This is not the     just because he signed those orders. . .. Our hearts have been in this continuously, and we’ve just been waiting to see what would develop, and trying to prepare ourselves the best we can.” Trump signed an executive memorandum that supersedes the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers’ decision in December to halt construction. He also signed a memorandum inviting the company TransCanada to resubmit an application for building the Keystone XL  —   a proposed pipeline that   Barack Obama vetoed in 2015. Environmental activists and thousands of protesters, including Native Americans from more than 100 tribes, have resisted both pipelines. They have argued that the Dakota Access Pipeline, a   project cutting through North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois, would jeopardize the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the millions of people who get their drinking water from the Missouri River. They also say that pipeline construction would damage sacred sites, violating tribal treaty rights. Energy Transfer Partners, the construction company responsible for the Dakota Access Pipeline, has contended all along that the pipeline is safe and passes through no land owned by the Standing Rock Sioux. On Sunday, the company shared an article on its website headlined ”Even the Standing Rock tribe is sick of the Dakota pipeline protesters,” which predicted that DAPL would ”finally have an ally in Washington and we can get back to business.” A White House press release on Tuesday said that Trump’s executive orders were in line with his campaign promise to ”reduce the burden of regulations and expedite high priority energy and infrastructure projects that will create jobs and increase national security.” The statement said that construction and operation of Keystone XL would create tens of thousands of American jobs, and that the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline and other pipelines is ”critical to a strong economy, energy independence, and national security.” For months, environmentalists, activists and tribes from across the country have been opposing construction of DAPL through lawsuits, demonstrations and civil disobedience. But while protesters considered the Army Corps of Engineers’ actions last month a victory, celebrations came with an asterisk. The people engaged in the fight against the pipeline knew that whatever reprieve they were getting was likely to be temporary. When construction was halted, Hopkins tweeted, ”Those at camp are being encouraged to stick around because it’s expected that Dakota Access will drill anyway, without permit.” There are still ways for people to fight the pipeline, Hopkins said Tuesday. People can call their senators and members of Congress to express their opposition, she said. They can take their money out of the banks that have financed DAPL. They can spread awareness in their communities and on social media. And, she said, there are still people living in weatherized tents at the Sacred Stone Camp in North Dakota, where snow and ice cover the land. Allison Renville is one of those people. A member of the Lakota Nation, she’s a media consultant and   activist who has spent a lot of time at the camp over the past year. Renville agrees that divestment and community engagement are going to be key to preventing DAPL construction from going forward. ”Not only do I have faith in God, but I have faith in my people,” she said. ”On the ground, we’ve had 10, 000 people come in and learn to be organizers, [and by] . .. taking courses in nonviolent direct action and learning to set up a camp, utilizing tools, they’ll be able to get anything accomplished.” Following the massive women’s marches held around the country over the weekend, some   activists remain optimistic that political mobilization will be a safeguard against any actions the president might take. ”Coming off of the weekend where so many gathered to send the message . .. that President Trump and all that he stands for cannot be normalized, I think that resonates in the air for many people,” Nellis   said. A Navajo woman, she is the director of the Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Program for the Sierra Club. She said Trump’s actions affected her personally, and that his presidency is a threat to the rights of Native people across the country. Trump, she said, will ”run into confrontation every step of the way.” ”And people are feeling stronger to fight back against bad decisions like this,”   said. ”There’s a strength and there’s a solidarity that’s brewing that will rise up and put President Trump on notice: That we deserve better, we demand more, and we’ll do everything we can to get it.”"
584,"Like millions of Americans, I watched the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, as he tried to convince reporters and viewers last weekend that President Trump’s inauguration was the most watched ever  —   ”both in person and around the globe, period!” Spicer made his case even though photos of the National Mall show that attendance was much smaller than at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, which  —   incidentally  —   I covered. The next day, on NBC’s Meet the Press, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway tried to persuade host Chuck Todd that Spicer was using ”alternative facts.” When Todd pressed Conway on Spicer’s falsehoods, she responded: ”Chuck, if we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think we’re going to have to rethink our relationship.” To most viewers, that sounded like a threat. To me, all this sounded like standard operating procedure in authoritarian China, where I’d spent a decade as a reporter. The White House seemed to be using the same tactics the Chinese government routinely uses against the foreign press corps: Make false claims to support an alternative narrative. When challenged, threaten reporters  —   and then try to delegitimize them. Like the new White House, the Chinese government has tried over the years to convince citizens not to believe their own eyes. For instance, when smog enveloped Chinese cities, the government would insist it was really just fog. This tactic grew increasingly absurd as air reached staggeringly toxic levels and people faced   scenes that no propaganda campaign could overcome. The Chinese government is much more candid about its air pollution crisis these days, but still tries to manage reality and mislead citizens. Earlier this month, the government ordered provincial officials to halt smog warnings and then censored news of the order when it leaked. The continued mendacity only angers Chinese people and makes them more cynical. Some people have turned to demonstrations, with government responses varying from tolerance to crackdowns. People put surgical masks on sculptures in December to protest smog in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The government countered by deploying riot police. When under fire, another favored tactic of the Chinese government is to misdirect and then try to discredit the press corps. Conway took a similar approach last weekend. Faced with repeated questions on Sunday about Spicer’s false statements, she went on the offensive, criticizing a Time correspondent who had mistakenly reported that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. Conway’s criticism was legitimate. The reporter, Zeke Miller, explained that the bust had been obscured from his view and corrected his report. He publicly apologized. But Conway wouldn’t let it go and insisted the mistake reflected a deeper journalistic bias against Trump. ”Why was it said in the first place?” she asked. ”Because everyone is so presumptively negative.” Since Saturday’s debacle, Spicer has tried to improve his relationship with reporters, but continues to complain that the press is unfair. On Tuesday, he repeated that President Trump maintains he would have won the popular vote had not 3 million to 5 million ”illegals” voted. There is, once again, no evidence that happened. Even as the president keeps making false claims that many fellow Republicans reject, he continues to attack the integrity of the reporters who challenge him. In a speech last weekend at the CIA, he called members of the news media ”among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” This reminds me of the way the Chinese government has spent years impugning the honesty of the international media and suggesting it is part of a broad Western conspiracy to keep China down. Last year, Wang Qiu, a member of China’s legislature and head of   broadcaster China National Radio, claimed that 60 percent of Western media reports smeared China. In 2013, Li Congjun, the president of the   New China News Service, urged the country to fight against   plotting by foreign reporters. ”Some hostile Western forces and media do not want to see a prospering socialist China,” Li wrote in the Communist   People’s Daily. This relentless assault on the image of foreign reporters has been very effective.  In 2012, I interviewed a man named Zhang about a bridge collapse, which everyone in town attributed to government corruption. Zhang’s mother insisted on attending the interview and repeatedly told him not to speak with me because she thought my sole motive was to malign China and the Communist Party. ”An opportunist like you is what they need,” she told her son. I responded to all of this the way I’d recommend journalists covering President Trump do: Get out of the office as much as possible, report and spend a lot of time listening to ordinary people about their concerns. To help overcome distrust, I even created a free taxi cab service in Shanghai so I could randomly meet Chinese and interact with them outside the framework of a traditional interview.  Reporters in China are accustomed to    threats from the government. So when Conway told Chuck Todd, ”We’re going to have to rethink our relationship,” that felt familiar to those who’ve been warned by Chinese authorities to be more ”objective” or risk not having their visas renewed. Since 2012, China has expelled two foreign reporters, but long waits for visa renewals have improved. Pressuring journalists is common in other authoritarian states in Asia, too. Nguyen Phuong Linh, who spent five years as a reporter for the Financial Times and Reuters in Hanoi, said Vietnamese authorities phoned her frequently about stories they didn’t like. ”Every time I quoted someone who said something against the official statement, they said, ’No, your fact is not fact,” says Nguyen, who now lives in Singapore, where she’s a political risk analyst. Government officials also pressured her. They’d say, ”’I think we have to reconsider our relationship,’” Nguyen recalls, ”exactly like Kellyanne Conway just said.” Nguyen, who grew up in Haiphong, in northern Vietnam, always thought the United States was a ”dream journalism environment” for someone like her who’d grown up under a repressive government. But when she watched Meet the Press on Sunday, she was shocked. ”I was telling myself: ’Jesus, this is America! It’s not Vietnam. ’” Frank Langfitt is NPR’s London correspondent. He served as NPR’s Shanghai correspondent from 2011 to 2016 and as the Baltimore Sun’s Beijing bureau chief from 1997 to 2002."
585,"There’s an active debate inside newsrooms, and particularly within the NPR newsroom, about how to characterize the statements of President Trump when they are at odds with evidence to the contrary. That debate began during the presidential election campaign. For example, in 2015, candidate Trump claimed that when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, ”I watched in Jersey City, N. J. where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” The claim was never substantiated and NPR said so. But we didn’t call him a liar. In September 2016, Trump got into a tiff with an   pastor, the Rev. Faith Green Timmons of Bethel United Methodist Church in Flint, Mich. Timmons had criticized Trump for failing to keep his remarks to her congregation, as promised, nonpartisan. Trump later had his own version of that event. Our reporter Scott Detrow was there. He reported what he saw and heard, and that didn’t back up Trump’s account. Back then some listeners asked why NPR didn’t just report that Trump was a liar. This week that same question is being posed to NPR. This time, NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported on Trump’s   visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va. the day after his inauguration. Despite his tweets comparing the intelligence services to those of Nazi Germany, Trump told his audience he is with them ”a thousand percent.” He also said that the media were to blame for making up the feud between him and the intelligence services. Kelly said, ”It’s provably not true. In that same speech out of the CIA this weekend, Trump also falsely inflated the size of the crowd at his inauguration.” Now many listeners want to know why Kelly didn’t just call the president a liar. On Morning Edition, Kelly explains why. She says she went to the Oxford English Dictionary seeking the definition of ”lie.” ”A false statement made with intent to deceive,” Kelly says. ”Intent being the key word there. Without the ability to peer into Donald Trump’s head, I can’t tell you what his intent was. I can tell you what he said and how that squares, or doesn’t, with facts.” NPR’s senior vice president for news, Michael Oreskes, says NPR has decided not to use the word ”lie” and that Kelly got it right by avoiding that word. ”Our job as journalists is to report, to find facts, and establish their authenticity and share them with everybody,” says Oreskes. ”It’s really important that people understand that these aren’t our opinions. . .. These are things we’ve established through our journalism, through our reporting . .. and I think the minute you start branding things with a word like ’lie,’ you push people away from you.” Oreskes acknowledges that other news organizations have made a different decision, most notably The New York Times, where he worked for more than two decades. The Times uses the word ”lie” in this headline about Trump’s repeated claim that millions of votes cast by immigrants who are in this country illegally prevented him from winning the popular vote. As the Times and NPR have reported, there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud."
586,"There have been no executive orders yet to undo President Barack Obama’s signature climate plan, but many officials and environmental groups consider it as good as dead. The Clean Power Plan is on hold while a legal battle plays out, and even if an appeals court upholds it  —   a decision could come any day  —   the Trump administration is likely to appeal to the Supreme Court. The state of New York decided to forge ahead anyway. Like a number of other mostly liberal states, it is continuing with efforts to drive down the carbon emissions that drive climate change. In the upstate village of Canton, dairy farmer Rick Moore shows off the solar thermal array tucked next to his slouching red barn. It’s a cloudy, slushy day, but ”you still get rays that still help heat it up,” Moore says. The system warms the water that runs through the solar tubes. Moore then uses the water to spray down his milking equipment. He says it will save him $1, 000 a year, and help reduce the carbon emissions he says are changing the climate here. ”We had winters when I first started, that you had three feet of snow and cold for two weeks at a time,” he says. ”You’re not seeing that nowadays.” New York state paid for nearly the entire system. It sees Moore as a tiny piece of a puzzle that adds up to getting half of the state’s power from renewables by 2030, even without a federal mandate. The Clean Power Plan would have required energy plants to cut their carbon emissions, leaving it up to each state to figure out how to reach a specific reduction target. The plan was supposed to be the main way the U. S. carried out its commitment under the historic Paris climate deal. But after it was announced in 2015, about two dozen mostly conservative states sued the Obama administration to block it. Still, New York has not only stuck with its own plan to reduce carbon pollution, it’s now doubling down on its goal. ”We are not going to stop until we reach 100 percent renewable because that’s what a sustainable New York is really all about,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said earlier this month. New York is pouring billions into everything from solar to smart power grids, electric car charging stations to huge offshore wind farms. In fact, Cuomo just announced the nation’s largest offshore wind project. The state already gets almost 25 percent of its power from renewables, mostly from hydropower dams. Critics say the next 25 percent is the big lift. Cheap natural gas has driven down power prices. So much, says Gavin Donohue of the Independent Power Producers of New York, that existing renewables, like wind, hydro and biomass, need more state help to stay in business. ”What’s guiding all of our policy development here in New York is not cost, not efficiencies, not reliability, but what gets us to some magical CO2 number to show that we’re a national leader,” he says. Another complication could be Cuomo’s recent announcement to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, near New York City. But the state says it plans to replace that with another kind of   power, including more wind farms. It also plans to add transmission lines to carry hydropower from Quebec. North Dakota looks to clean up coal,  North Dakota led the legal challenge against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and many there were happy to see it put on hold. The state gets   of its electricity from thousands of tons of lignite coal, among the most polluting sources of energy. For that reason, the climate plan would have required bigger emissions cuts than almost any other state, some 45 percent. ”North Dakota had to be   of that way by 2022,” says Randy Christmann with the North Dakota Public Service Commission. ”That’s only a few years away and there’s no way we were getting there.” The state would likely have had to add hundreds of wind turbines and shut down coal mines and plants. Jason Bohrer, with North Dakota’s lignite coal trade group, says it’s great the Clean Power Plan is likely gone with the new administration. But ”Donald Trump is not the   for the coal industry,” he says. ”This doesn’t fix everything. It just gives us the opportunity to provide solutions.” Bohrer says public demand and market forces are fueling a boom in cleaner energy. Cheap wind power has grown into North Dakota’s   electricity source. So even though the pressure’s off to curb emissions, the state is looking to clean up coal as a way to save jobs. The state and the coal industry have sunk millions into developing a coal plant that reuses the carbon dioxide it creates. The aim is zero emissions. If it works, Dave Glatt with the state health department thinks this could bring the state close to that ambitious 45 percent reduction target. ”We may not hit it necessarily on the exact timelines that the Clean Power Plan was looking at,” he says. ”But I do think that that’s something we should look at. Can we achieve that or even go beyond that?” This year, North Dakota will craft its own energy plan, hoping coal and renewables can  . Paris Climate deal not enough, It’s not clear if market forces can get the U. S. all the way to its goals under the Paris climate deal. They may take a long time to play out, and climate scientists say a   shift to clean energy needs to happen urgently. Still, few energy experts can imagine building another U. S. coal plant. Operators must plan decades into the future, they say, and even if the Trump administration won’t tackle carbon emissions, a future president likely will. Obama’s Clean Power Plan was also an easy lift for some, and many states are already close to meeting their goals. But globally, the Paris climate deal is not nearly enough. The U. S.  —   like other countries  —   would have to do much more to keep carbon emissions below the point where scientists say they will have disastrous consequences. So far, there’s nothing to suggest the Trump administration plans to make that extra push. David Sommerstein is a reporter for North Country Public Radio. Amy Sisk reports for Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focused on America’s energy issues."
587,"California Gov. Jerry Brown is vowing to lead the nation on climate change, as the Trump administration pulls back. But the Trump administration could get in California’s way. In his annual State of the State speech, California Gov. Jerry Brown had one key message about climate change: perseverance. ”We cannot fall back and give in to the climate deniers,” Brown said. ”The science is clear. The danger is real.” And just as President Trump took the oath of office on Friday, California acted, releasing its latest plan for tackling climate change. This includes renewable energy and putting millions of electric cars on the road. It’s a challenge Brown first made in December, when climate scientists from around the world met up in San Francisco. The mood at the conference had been dismal. Scientists were worried about losing federal funding for research and even the NASA satellites that collect basic climate data. Brown declared that should Trump turn off the satellites, California would launch its own. And that wasn’t the only warning Brown had for the Trump administration. Brown has spearheaded his own international climate agreement with more than 160 cities and states. California, he said, is the 6th largest economy in the world. ”We got the scientists,” he said. ”We got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight. We’re ready to defend.” And playing defense may well be in California’s future. The state has rules limiting carbon pollution from cars, but it can’t have those rules without permission from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. That came up at the nomination hearing last week for Scott Pruitt, who could run the EPA. California Sen. Kamala Harris asked Pruitt if he could uphold the state’s special permission  —   its waiver  —   for tougher car rules. ”Senator as you know, administrators in the past have not granted the waiver and in fact have granted the waiver,” Pruitt said. ”That’s a review process . ..” He said he would not know his intention without going through the process. This is not a new fight for California. In 2007, the Bush administration denied the state’s request to have tougher pollution rules for cars, saying it would create a patchwork of regulations. California took the federal government to court, but before the case was decided, Obama was elected. California got its waiver. Michael Wara, a professor at Stanford Law School, said this isn’t just about California. ”The first legal disputes are going to be about cars,” he said. ”And I’d be surprised actually if we didn’t see those disputes.” Thirteen other states have adopted the same clean car standards. But the bigger question, Wara said, is a political one. ”How a Pruitt EPA responds to some of these issues with California is really going to test Scott Pruitt’s and the administration’s commitment to conservative values,” he said. Pruitt sued the EPA as the attorney general of Oklahoma. He argued his state had the right to set its own environmental rules. ”So that logic would seem to imply that California should have the right to set its own agenda,” Wara said. ”But we’ll see how that trades off against the desire to roll back regulations related to greenhouse gases.” This is something California will be watching closely, with lawyers at the ready."
588,"If you want to move into 2017’s second month with some fun, Chicago   Nnamdi Ogbonnaya offers a good place to start. ”dOn’t turn me Off,” the latest single from his upcoming record DROOL, drips with positivity. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to gather all your best friends and take on the world, and it might just be the soundtrack to your 2017 breakout moment. Ogbonnaya’s aesthetic is quirky and eclectic. A wobbly,   sound winds through the track, lending the production extraterrestrial vibes. But an irresistible groove, combined with Mal Devisa’s singular voice on the hook, brings the listener down to earth and injects the song with its central testimony: Confidence is key. ”I’m ready to glow . .. I’m ready to grow,” Mal Devisa sings. Throughout the song, Ogbonnaya doubles up his voice in octaves it’s as if he’s giving each verse its own cheering squad. This choice feels fitting, given what he tells NPR about the track: ”The song is about surrounding yourself with positive people and becoming confident in yourself,” he says. JD AKA ThrashKitten rounds out Ogbonnaya’s team  —   he joins the track for a verse that overflows with   in lines like ”Even unplugged, I still got the power.” The song is about having fun and feeling yourself  —   but it also delivers a warning about the importance of art and the artist’s indomitability: ”Bringing the Holy of Holies down to the darkest   That’s just the job of an artist,” Ogbonnaya sings. ”Don’t even get me started.” DROOL comes out March 3 via   and Sooper."
589,"The U. S. men’s national soccer team is back in action with a game against Serbia on Sunday. It’s a   friendly, meaning it’s not part of any official competition. But it will provide a first look at the team under its new head coach or, more precisely, its new old head coach. Bruce Arena coached the team from 1998 to 2006. He has won more games with the U. S. men’s national team than any other coach, and is the only person to lead the U. S. at two World Cups, including a quarterfinals appearance in 2002. His long and successful career includes multiple NCAA championships at the University of Virginia and several titles in Major League Soccer, the U. S. men’s professional league. Now he’s back, on a rescue mission of sorts. Last November, the U. S. lost its first two matches in the final round of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup. After the defeats, head coach Jurgen Klinsmann was fired. Arena was hired with a specific mandate: get the team to Russia for next year’s tournament. Failure to do so would mean a big step backwards for a men’s team that’s played in every World Cup since 1990. Coalescing at January Camp, The first step was bringing together 32 players for what’s known as January camp in Carson, Calif. All the players were from the MLS. Top U. S. players playing overseas weren’t able to attend because their seasons are underway. The second week of camp opened on one of those southern California days in January that laughs at the calendar. The sky was blue and cloudless. The morning temperature crept toward 70 degrees. And on a lush, green soccer field at Carson’s StubHub Center, the U. S. national team scrimmage was all chatter and speed and energy. After the two qualifying losses in November  —     to Mexico and a   embarrassment to Costa Rica  —   the Americans dropped to the bottom of the region’s hexagonal. That’s the   World Cup qualifying group. The U. S. men’s team is not among the world’s best. Still, the results were dispiriting: The team didn’t play like a team. Two months later, on that beautiful winter day in Carson, the ailing patient looked better. ”I wouldn’t say it’s that bad,” Arena said. ”You know, we’re not in triage right now. We’re in, maybe, primary care. Obviously it’s not an easy situation being down at the bottom in the hex right now, but our aim is to make up for lost ground  —   real quick.” A new set of priorities, The next qualifying matches, against Honduras and Panama, are two months away. Until then, Arena has a couple of priorities. ”We want to get our defending right,” Arena said. The team’s defense looked weak against Mexico and Costa Rica, so he’s putting some emphasis on that during the camp. Building a team probably is Arena’s main priority. This has been one of his strengths during a long coaching career. ”Bruce has an aura,” U. S. veteran midfielder Michael Bradley said. ”When he walks into a team, he has a way about him and a way of working that I think engages everybody and motivates every guy to play for him and to really go after things.” Midfielder Graham Zusi talked about Arena’s ability to communicate with his players. ”Every day he lets us know what the mission is for training,” Zusi said. ”Every now and then we’ll have a quick meeting after lunch, as well, just to kind of recap.” Asked whether those communication skills were missing with Arena’s predecessor, Klinsmann, Zusi laughed. ”I thought we weren’t talking comparisons here,” he said. Tapping domestic vs. international players, In fact, players were advised before camp opened not to publicly compare Arena to Klinsmann. But comparisons were inevitable. Klinsmann’s firing in November followed several years of criticism: about his game tactics, about his preference for choosing national team players with international experience over players with experience in MLS. It’s understandable  —   Klinsmann played and coached in his native Germany and he experienced what any soccer fan knows: the best of the sport is overseas. Arena coached MLS teams for a number of years, most recently the L. A. Galaxy from 2008 to 2016. He’s been more open to having MLS players on the national team. In fact he brought to camp some MLS players who were overlooked by Klinsmann. According to a U. S. team official, Klinsmann also liked to make players uncomfortable. When they competed for roster spots, he didn’t want them feeling like anything was guaranteed. Arena, on the other hand, talks about relating to his players  —   although he’s hardly an ”      ” kind of coach. At practice, he lets players know in no uncertain terms when things aren’t working. ”Too sloppy there guys,” he yelled during one drill. ”Keep the ball on the ground!” And while the practice was high speed, physical and keenly competitive, there was a lighter feel as well. A U. S. soccer official watching from the sidelines noted the players ”didn’t look nervous.” As they scrimmaged, Arena yelled ”if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. But make an aggressive mistake.” Destination: Russia, 2018, In 2002, Bruce Arena led the U. S. men to the World Cup quarterfinals. It was the team’s second best finish in history  —   and the its best finish since the very first World Cup in 1930. Now, 15 years later, his initial goal, at least, is much more prosaic: just to make it to the tournament next year. There are eight matches left in the final round of qualifying. Though it’s not time to panic yet, there is an urgency to the upcoming qualifiers. The games against Honduras on March 24 and Panama four days later aren’t  . But Arena says the U. S. needs to at least get four points. That means a win, which is worth three points, and a draw, worth one point. Any more losses, and it might just be time to panic."
590,"Widespread fears about the future  —   including concerns about politics, the economy, the environment and   nuclear war  —   have led some people to prepare for ways to defend themselves. The ”survivalists” include some Silicon Valley executives, who worry about the tech future they have helped to create. Journalist Evan Osnos, who recently wrote about doomsday prep for the super rich for The New Yorker, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that tech survivalists are stockpiling weapons and food, and, in some cases, preparing luxury underground bunkers. ”They feel a sense of fragility in our politics,” Osnos says. ”Our politics have become disorderly . .. and [the tech survivalists] look at it and think, ’Well, we’re not entirely sure that our institutions are as sound as we’ve always assumed they are.’ ” While researching his article, Osnos spent the night in the Survival Condo Project, a   luxury underground apartment complex north of Wichita, Kan. The complex is designed to be   with hydroponic vegetables, its own fish farm and renewable energy sources. ”[The project] was developed by somebody named Larry Hall . .. and what he realized was that there was a certain kind of buyer out there . .. who would be willing to spend, in this case, about $3 million for an apartment underground, or $1. 5 million for half an apartment,” Osnos says. ”Larry Hall has sold every unit in it except one for himself.” On the kinds of scenarios the survivalists are worried about, Some of the things that they talk about are the kind of stuff of ordinary disaster movies, but there is some real element to it. The idea that there could be a pandemic, if the Ebola virus, for instance, had affected a much larger part of the population, or an earthquake on the San Andreas in San Francisco, that’s not a completely unreasonable fear. Or the possibility of some sort of civil unrest. They take what they’ve seen in some American cities and extrapolate onto a larger scale and they said, ”Well, what would happen?” . .. And then there’s another piece of it, which is specific to technology, and that is a fairly prevalent fear in this community, which is that the growth and the development of artificial intelligence, which has become such a big subject of discussion, the idea that you will soon have a car that has no driver, that this kind fundamental change in the American labor force will continue to produce tensions particularly between people who are losing their jobs and people who are responsible for the technology that is bringing about that change. . .. Max Levchin who was a   of PayPal, is the CEO of Affirm, a lending startup, who is opposed actually to this trend of survivalist thinking but is surrounded by it. He said what people worry about is, to use Max’s word, ”the pitchforks,” and by that he means the idea that the sort of tension that we saw with the Occupy movement a few years ago would take on a wider, more virulent form. On the fragility of our digital systems, including GPS, If you’re somebody who works in technology then you got into that business in part because you tend to think about how systems fit together. As one CEO of a    technology company put it to me, ”The truth is, is that our lives today are dependent on systems that are integrated, interdependent in ways that they simply weren’t even 20 or 30 years ago.” To give you an example, he said, ”The food that’s on the shelves in our grocery stories depends on a supply chain that depends on GPS and GPS, the Global Positioning System, depends to some degree on the Internet, and the Internet depends to some degree on another system known as DNS, and each one of those is vulnerable in its own way. ”... He’s a highly rational person. . .. He said, ”Look, I’m not rushing out and declaring that the end of the world is near, but what I am saying is that it is,” in his view, ”logically rational to talk about the fragility of these digital and electrical systems, which are really second nature and largely unexamined as we go about our daily lives.” On how the survivalists come from both sides of the political spectrum, One of the surprises to me was that this was not something that was occupying one political wing or another, it seems to actually draw from both sides. Traditionally most survivalists would describe themselves as libertarians somewhere out typically on the conservative end of the spectrum  —   they put a high premium on   on distance from government. But there is a new element here, which is partly reflected in the success and the candidacy of Donald Trump, and that’s the idea that . .. in the case of Donald Trump, somebody who defies all of the conventional expectations and descriptions of politics, the sorts of experience required, the kind of standard to which he would be held for accuracy in what he says  —   all of the things that we used to assume would be absolutely fundamental about politics, those no longer obtain at the moment. On the election and the ”creeping disrespect” for American institutions, Antonio García Martínez, who worked at Facebook, later was an adviser to Twitter, in the midst of the presidential campaign when it was getting really toxic between supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, he decided to buy five acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and he brought in generators and solar panels and as he put it, ”thousands of rounds of ammunition,” because as he says, ”When a society loses its founding myth, the thing that holds it together, well then it can descend into chaos.” . .. What he was referring to was something you hear across these conversations and that’s the idea that we are ultimately held together by a kind of commitment to the United States as a functioning entity. It’s a sort of consensus, a belief that our politics are possible, that it’s worth participating, that our institutions are sound, that the president, for instance, will abide by the Constitution, that the courts will have the say over the things which the constitution allows them to govern, so what they feel, the survivalists in Silicon Valley and in finance circles in New York who are expressing this view, is that they are worried that there’s been this creeping disrespect for fairly basic institutions in American life, the things that people used to believe were sources of authority."
591,"President Trump has said he won’t do any new foreign deals while in the White House, but that won’t stop new Trump hotels from springing up across the United States. Bloomberg News reports that Trump Hotels CEO, Eric Danziger, has revealed the company is planning a major expansion of its luxury properties, as well as some of its new   Scion hotels. Danziger, speaking after a panel discussion Tuesday at the America Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles, said Trump Hotels will be looking to triple its luxury properties in this country. ”There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U. S. and we’re in five,” Danziger is quoted as saying. ”I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger told the panel that cities up for consideration include Dallas, Seattle, Denver and San Francisco. He said only the luxury Trump hotels will be in the major metropolitan areas, while the Scion properties will be in secondary and tertiary cities. The first of the   hotels is due to open later this year. ”Both brands and any others we create will have a domestic emphasis for the next four or eight years,” Danziger told the audience. A spokesperson for Trump Hotels, who did not want to be identified, would not say how long these expansion plans have been in place, but added that business opportunities look positive. ”We see significant growth opportunity in the United States for both our hotel brands, ” the spokesperson said. On Jan. 11, Trump announced that while he would maintain ownership of his business empire, he’d address ethical concerns by turning over    operations to his two adult sons. That plan fails to end concerns that Trump could profit from his presidency, according to law professor Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis. Even when his sons manage the operations, the wealth stays in the Trump family, she notes. ”This demonstrates how inadequate and frankly laughable Trump’s plan for conflicts of interest is so far,” she said. ”Trump plans to exploit the power and prestige of the presidency for his own financial benefit,” she added. And Trump critics can point to another example of how the presidency is enriching the Trump Organization:    Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla. this month doubled the cost of membership. Bernd Lembcke,   ’s managing director, told the New York Times, there’s been ”a sudden surge in requests” for membership applications. The initiation fee to join the club, which was $100, 000, is now $200, 000. Lembcke, who could not be reached for comment, told the Times that the fee had been $200, 000 before 2010, when it was cut in half in response to the recession. In separate news, Politico reported Wednesday that an electrical contractor  —   AES Electrical, based in Laurel, Md.  —   has filed a lawsuit against Trump’s Washington hotel for $2 million. The contractor says Trump has not paid bills for ”nonstop” work done to open the luxury hotel inside the federal Old Post Office Building last year. The suit, filed in D. C. Superior Court, says the company was told to rush work on electrical and fire alarm systems ahead of a visit by   Trump in September."
592,"”I understand things visually, by finding them in paint. I don’t know if my dyslexia causes me to be this way, but I have a feeling it does.”  —   Rachel Deane, painter. We know lots of facts about dyslexia: It’s the most common reading disorder. It changes the way millions of people read and process information. But we know much less about how it feels to people who have it. How it shapes your   your confidence and how people see and react to you. And so I reached out to some really creative people  —   artists who have dyslexia  —   to talk about this. One of the most fascinating things I heard is that dyslexia plays a big role in their creative process. Some said their struggle with written words informs their art, and that the struggle to express ideas they can’t in writing makes their art unique. I asked six of these artists to show me through their work what dyslexia is like. Here’s what they came up with.  Gudrun Hasle, fine artist, Copenhagen, Denmark, School was a daily nightmare. Teachers thought I was lazy rather than dyslexic, and at that time if you were dyslexic you were considered plain stupid. I was given books for    when I was  . Finally, I sort of just gave up on the whole thing and began to injure myself by cutting into my skin. I never graduated school, which is very unusual in Denmark. I use my dyslexia in everything I do. It’s my technique. It began as an accident. When I started to attend the Art Academy in Denmark, I painted a painting and added some texts. I had no time to correct the spelling, so the next day all the other students and professors were trying to read their way through my uncorrected text, and suddenly they were dyslexic. They were having a hard time reading my words. I thought to myself, hmm, this is a very interesting and effective tool. I turned the whole thing around. But it was a giant leap for me to make this change. Since then, I never correct anything. And sometimes the wording is correct  —   by accident. Website   Instagram, Ash Casper, designer and illustrator, New York, My struggle with dyslexia doesn’t define me, and I have never felt defined by it. It was just something that I dealt with and overcame to get where I am today. Art was the answer for me. Many people deal with dyslexia on a daily basis, but they don’t let it define them. Dyslexia isn’t some disability that makes you a struggling student for the rest of your life, it is simply a hurdle that some people must jump in order to succeed. Website   Instagram, Rachel Deane, painter, Providence, R. I. I think that my relationship to my dyslexia manifests itself indirectly in my work. My paintings represent the way I see and process the world, the way I learn information. I learn visually and through narratives rather than by memorization or other standard education practices. I saw a large retrospective exhibition of (the artist Pierre) Bonnard at the Musée d’Orsay a couple of years ago and was blown away by his use of color and texture. I could not walk away from the exhibition without purchasing the large, heavy catalog. My Bonnard book protects me visually and emotionally. I think this example shows the way I think, the way I process. I understand things visually, by finding them in paint. I don’t know if my dyslexia causes me to be this way, but I have a feeling it does. Website   Instagram, Nick Fagan, fine artist, Columbus, Ohio, COME COME represents an attempt to find the area where communication breaks down into something more abstract. For me, language has always been somewhat of a struggle. The inability and difficulty to express myself through writing has been a particular struggle. In my work, I try to see these flaws as a new way of showing language by breaking it down into the physical lines to demonstrate how words are actually made. I collapse letters and words together and break them apart into a new way of expression. Website   Instagram, Leslie Chavez, photographer, Austin, Texas, This piece represents my emotions toward my dyslexia. Every day I am stressed, dispirited and fed up because I never feel satisfied with my work  —   whether it’s academic, my campus jobs or an artistic project. In the back of my mind, I have a voice telling me, ”You’re not enough, you can’t fit in with the others.” That’s when those emotions rise up and overwhelm me. I work twice as hard as other students to understand what they were able to pick up quickly. Thankfully, my professors are flexible with my learning disability, but once I’m done with school, I won’t have that help. I have to blend in with everyone else and pretend my learning disability won’t affect my job. Those feelings will always be there with me, by my side. Website   Instagram, Mel Jarvis, illustrator, Detroit, This little piggy didn’t need to read the book to know how to outwit the Big Bad Wolf! I wish people didn’t think dyslexia was only about mixing up letters. There are other frustrating effects, like memorizing verbal tasks, difficulty learning though written text, even the emotional frustration that comes with the whole package (just to name a few). I feel dyslexic creatives aren’t much different than other creative people, but all dyslexic people are very creative. Website   Instagram, "
593,"On Tuesday night, President Trump threatened to intervene in Chicago’s law enforcement, citing the number of shootings and murders there in 2016 and 2017. It wasn’t clear what type of intervention the president was referring to in a tweet he sent out Tuesday evening saying he ”will send in the Feds!” if Chicago ”doesn’t fix the horrible ’carnage’ going on.” As in many major American cities, the federal government is already deeply involved in Chicago’s approach to fighting violent crime. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has, among other units, a   homicide squad, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives investigates ”violent offenders, career criminals, gun traffickers and gangs” in the city. The Department of Justice announced earlier this month that it had found a pattern of abuse within the Chicago Police Department, and is working with the city government to reach an agreement in which the federal department will oversee the city’s police. Speaking on WTTW, Chicago’s local PBS station, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Tuesday that ”there’s a lot the federal government can do” to combat violent crime in the city. He cited the need for federal gun control legislation and asked for federal funding for additional police officers. Emanuel also said the federal government should be ”investing in neighborhoods that are   by poverty” and become ”a breeding ground for violence” by putting federal funds toward   and summer jobs programs. Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson also issued a statement, saying, ”The Chicago Police Department is more than willing to work with the federal government to build on our partnerships with D. O. J. F. B. I. D. E. A. and A. T. F. and boost federal prosecution rates for gun crimes in Chicago.” This is the second time this month the president has tweeted about violent crime in Chicago, and the White House’s website, updated by the new administration, specifically mentions the issue. In each reference, the president and his administration have included specific numbers to illustrate Chicago’s problem with violent crime. On Tuesday, the president quoted numbers originally reported Monday by The Chicago Tribune. ”As of early Monday, at least 228 people had been shot in Chicago so far this year, a 5. 5 percent increase from the 216 shot in the same period time last year. There have been at least 42 homicides, up 23. 5 percent from the 34 homicides from the same period in 2016,” the newspaper reported. The newspaper tracks homicides in the city, and noted that its numbers were higher than those reported by the Chicago Police Department because they include ”shootings on area expressways,   shootings, homicides in which a person was killed in   or pending death investigations.” But while Chicago led the nation in the absolute number of murders last year, the raw number tells only part of the story. Chicago’s   per capita murder rate, which is better at capturing human risk because it takes into account the total population, is well below that of other cities, including St. Louis and Baltimore, a review of the FBI’s most recent crime data reveals. ”Chicago’s homicide rate is not among the nation’s highest  —   but the number of deaths last year, 762, was the worst the city had seen in years and far exceeded those of New York and Los Angeles,” reported NPR’s Cheryl Corley. Although the FBI’s data is the most comprehensive national source of information, the Pew Research Center has noted: ”Fair warning: The FBI stats are compiled from reports by local police agencies that serve populations of at least 100, 000, and for various reasons  —   including the fact that not all agencies reported data every year  —   can be difficult to compare meaningfully across cities or time periods.” Member station WBEZ in Chicago has been revisiting families affected by homicides in 1998, the last time the city had more than 700 murders. See more of their work here."
594,"It’s a shocking statistic that caught the world’s attention last week: Just eight men own the same wealth as 3. 6 billion people living in poverty  —   that’s half the population of the planet. It comes from a new report by Oxfam, using 2016 data from Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Databook and the Forbes billionaires list. While the stat dramatically shows the ”sheer magnitude of the gaps between the rich and poor,” says economist Francisco Ferreira of the World Bank, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t, for example, ”tell us whether inequality has changed over time,” he says. Or ”include other dimensions of  ” like health or education, says Diana Alarcon, chief of the development and policy unit of the U. N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. There are other ways to examine global inequality, they say. Here are three sets of data from Ferreira and Alarcon that put Oxfam’s figure into context. Income inequality has declined over the past 25 years  Oxfam’s stat shows what people own, not what they earn, says Ferreira. If you look at the income levels around the world, you’ll find that inequality in global incomes has steadily declined over the past 25 years. To measure income inequality in a population, the World Bank uses something called the ”Gini index” (named after Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who developed the formula). A Gini score of zero in a country or region means that everyone has the same income  —   for example, workers in a utopian commune. A score of 100 means all the income in let’s say, a kingdom, is earned by a single person, like the king. The Gini index for most countries hovers around 30 to 50. The most unequal countries in term of income distribution, according to the Bank, have Ginis above 60. (Note: In the chart, the figures are expressed in decimals). The Bank’s global Gini index reveals a downward trend when it comes to income inequality. In 1988, the Gini index worldwide was 70. In 2013, that number was 62. 5. Researchers credit the overall decline to a few things. Globalization has helped create new jobs and boost income for people in many parts of the world. Government investments in basic services like health care, education and pensions, as in the case of Brazil, have improved people’s chances of success in life. And progressive tax programs on corporations and the wealthy have narrowed the gap between the rich and poor in countries like Chile and Mexico. Still, economists aren’t totally optimistic. ”It’s clear that the levels of inequality are deeply disturbing,” says Ferreira. ”But recent progress shows that it’s possible for countries to reduce inequality if they choose to.” Asia has benefited the most  While globalization and other factors have helped reduce income inequality over the past couple of decades, it’s only ”created a lot of wealth and richness and income” in a few parts of the world  —   namely, Asia, says Alarcon. Rapid economic growth in China and India have helped boost incomes in the region. According to a 2015 report on inequality by UNDESA, a person living in Asia could only expect to earn 14 percent of the average citizen’s income in a developed country. In 2014, that number nearly doubled to 25 percent (although that’s still just a quarter of the average income in a developed country). If you remove Asia from the equation, you’ll see a very different story in the rest of the developing world. You’ll find that ”for the average Joe, they haven’t seen much improvement to their standard of living,” says Alarcon. Wealth alone doesn’t determine quality of life  How much a person earns or owns is not the only indicator of   says Alarcon. You also have to look at access to education, proper housing, health care and decent jobs. ”In those dimensions of development, progress has been made,” she says. ”Although large inequalities remain.” For example, more children around the world are in school than a generation ago. According to the U. N.’s Report on the World Social Situation 2016, the ratio of children enrolled in primary school was 93 percent in 2015, up from 84 percent in 1999. Advances in health care have helped increase chances for child survival and improved life expectancy around the world. Between 1990 and 2015, the yearly number of deaths in children under five declined from 12. 7 million to 6 million. And people are living longer. In 1990, the average life expectancy was 65 years. In 2015, it bumped up to 70. Money may not be the only thing that matters, but it sure helps. ”If wealth and income distribution improved, achievement on quality of life would improve faster for a larger group of people,” says Alarcon."
595,"Geneviève Castrée died in July. She made deeply searching music as Ô Paon and Woelv, and illustrated comic books with the same emotional intensity. She was also the wife of Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and the mother of their child. A Crow Looked At Me, written and recorded last fall, is an   response to Elverum’s past year, and today brings its first song, ”Real Death.” Since July, I’ve kept coming back to a longer essay I’ve been writing about Castrée, Elverum and death, and now there’s a blunt piece to add  —   one I thought would come and wasn’t sure how to handle. I’m still writing that essay, but for now, here’s a note from Phil Elverum himself about A Crow Looked At Me: Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our   imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) In May 2015, they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. ”What matters now?” we thought. Then on July 9, 2016, she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea left over from a more   time before I was a   a caregiver, a   a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known. DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why. A Crow Looked At Me comes out March 24 on P. W. Elverum  Sun."
596,"On Wednesday morning, activists from Greenpeace unfurled a massive yellow and orange banner with the word ”Resist” on a tall crane behind the White House. ”We climbed up the crane this morning, and occupied it and locked and chained ourselves in,” the environmental group’s board chairman Karen Topakian, 62, told The  . We reached her as she was chained and locked high up on the construction crane with six other activists. ”I have a long, long history of fear of heights,” she said. ”As much as I have a fear of heights, I decided that I would do this because the risks are so great and so tremendous at this point with this administration.” Topakian, who lives in San Francisco, said the environmental group’s protest aimed to send a message against Trump’s plans and actions that he has already carried out. His positions on climate change, immigration and religious minorities motivated this protest, she said, among many other issues. She is lesbian and said she was also concerned about LGBT rights under the Trump administration. Images of the Greenpeace protest were widely shared on social media. Topakian and the other activists had been up on the crane for at least nine hours, about three blocks from the White House. A group of police were waiting below, she said, and the activists had agreed to ”come down ourselves.” The D. C. Metropolitan Police department said they blocked several streets this morning because of the incident. ”While we respect everyone’s right to protest, today’s actions are extremely dangerous and unlawful,” it said in a statement. A carpenter at the site, John Evans, said that the activists ”must have arrived before workers showed up at 5 a. m,” according to The Associated Press. Evans told the wire service that the activists suspended high above appeared experienced: ”Look how organized they are. They have the same equipment that I use every day . ..They’re professionals. Amateurs couldn’t stay up there that long.”"
597,"Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who want to publish or present their scientific findings likely will need to have their work reviewed on a ”case by case basis” before it can be disseminated, according to a spokesman for the agency’s transition team. In an interview Tuesday evening with NPR, Doug Ericksen, the head of communications for the Trump administration’s EPA transition team, said that during the transition period, he expects scientists will undergo an unspecified internal vetting process before sharing their work outside the agency. ”We’ll take a look at what’s happening so that the voice coming from the EPA is one that’s going to reflect the new administration,” Ericksen told NPR. Ericksen did not say whether such a review process would become a permanent feature of Trump’s EPA. ”We’re on Day 2 here. . .. You’ve got to give us a few days to get our feet underneath us.” Any review would directly contradict the agency’s current scientific integrity policy, which was published in 2012. It prohibits ”all EPA employees, including scientists, managers and other Agency leadership from suppressing, altering, or otherwise impeding the timely release of scientific findings or conclusions.” It also would likely have a chilling effect on the agency’s ability to conduct research on the environmental issues it is charged with regulating. Ericksen’s comments come just days after Trump’s team ordered agencies to limit their external communications to the public. Employees at the EPA, the Department of Agriculture and the Interior Department, among others, have been instructed not to post on social media accounts. At the EPA, the staff was told not to speak to the news media. Ericksen said it’s not abnormal for administrations to limit outward communication during their transition while they work toward getting different branches on point. Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is still awaiting confirmation. It’s also not abnormal for administrations to restrict access to government scientists. In 2013, a statement by the Society of Environmental Journalists called the EPA under   Obama ”one of the most closed, opaque agencies to the press.” ”It’s certainly the case that every administration tries to control information, but I think that what we’re seeing here is much more sweeping than has ever been done before,” said Andrew Light, the distinguished senior fellow in the Global Climate Program at the nonpartisan World Resources Institute. ”And in particular, it’s noteworthy that it seems to be aimed at a cluster of   agencies that primarily work on the environment and climate change.” While previous administrations have restricted government scientists’ communications to the public, controlling their scientific conclusions is far more rare. Perhaps the most notable case came in 2003, when the administration of President George W. Bush tried to alter the climate change section of a major EPA report on the environment. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which tracks such issues, changes included the deletion of a 1, 000 year temperature record and insertion of a study funded by the American Petroleum Institute. Many federal agencies employ scientists to help conduct research. Those findings are crucial in ensuring that regulations and government policy are based on the best information available. Data collected by federal scientists is also used by state and local governments as well as private industry. The EPA’s policy, like those of other technical agencies within the government, is designed to encourage its scientists to participate in the scientific process. To that end, the agency’s official policy is to ”encourage publication and presentation of research findings in   professional, or scholarly journals and at professional meetings.” There’s a growing concern in the scientific community and among environmental organizations that the new administration might take aim at climate change research in particular. Trump has previously called climate change a hoax created by China to hurt the U. S. economy, though he later said he had an ”open mind” on the issue. In the weeks before his inauguration, groups of scientists rushed to copy and preserve federal public climate data out of fear that it would be purged. Ericksen said that under Trump, the EPA will focus on its ”core mission, which is to protect the environment and protect human health.” When asked if climate change fit into that, he repeated that they’ll focus on the core mission. Pressed further about whether specific research on issues such as climate change could be withheld, Ericksen told NPR that ”it’s premature to comment on a hypothetical before we’ve even had the time to look at what’s currently happening in the [agency].”"
598,"Tom Coleman is busy pruning branches off pistachio trees that aren’t budding at an orchard just north of Fresno, Calif. He farms and manages more than 8, 000 acres of pistachios across the state. ”Here’s an example of some hanging down nuts from last year that just wouldn’t come off because of the position on the tree, so we want to remove that,” says Coleman. Coleman worries these trees won’t get enough sleep this winter. Crops like pistachios, peaches and almonds need a certain amount of cold weather every year. This is what the agricultural industry refers to as chill hours. Frigid temperatures between 32 and 45 degrees help set buds that will turn into flowers in spring, then into fruits and nuts in summer. The problem is that there is a decrease in the amount of hours needed for tree crops to reach these temperatures. Coleman’s trees need more than 700 hours of sleep every winter, but for the past four years, many have slept less than 500 hours. ”And as result of that, they do not bloom uniformly. When they don’t have uniform bloom, it can dramatically reduce the yield,” says Coleman. This is a problem that farmers are facing across California, and if it continues, the prices for these products could go up. Multiple University of California studies predict that within 30 to 50 years it may be too warm to grow many tree crops where they now flourish. Agricultural scientist Eike Leudeling found that climate conditions in California by ”the middle to the end of the 21st century will no longer support some of the main tree crops currently grown.” He says farmers will either need to find alternative crops or establish ways to mitigate warming temperatures. UC Davis researcher Hyunok Lee, whose study was published in the journal California Agriculture, found that winter temperatures are increasing more than at any other time of year. Her model looks at the year 2050 in Yolo County. ”Our agriculture will continue,” Lee says. ”But if you look at . . . 20 years or 30 years, the pattern may change a little bit, crops may move a little bit north.” She says tree crops like walnuts would be harmed the most, but annual crops like tomatoes could benefit from rising temperatures. For growers with huge investments in trees that have life cycles of 25 years or more, this is a big deal. Farm adviser David Doll, of the University of California’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, is trying different things to get the trees more sleep. He has experimented with overhead sprinklers and even painting the trees white with liquid clay to reflect sunlight. ”This is something that could impact a lot of farmers over the next 10 to 40 years,” Doll says. ”It’s already impacting farmers on random given years across the state.” This problem is so prevalent that   deniers really can’t get away from it. Crops have failed because of warming temperatures. (Doll explains more about chill hours here.) In 2015, California’s pistachio industry was hit hard by a lack of chill hours. As a result, the crop was nearly split in half. The UC system and the pistachio industry have invested about a million dollars to figure out how to cope with warming temperatures. UCANR farm adviser Craig Kallsen is trying to breed a pistachio tree that needs less sleep. ”We’re trying to use the other species of pistachios to see if we can come up with something that has a   requirement. It’s pretty hypothetical at this stage,” Kallsen says. ”We made quite a few crosses this spring and we actually hope to put a trial in a   area.” It’s not just pistachio trees that aren’t getting enough shuteye. Kern County farmer Steve Murray says his cherries may suffer this year because of a warmer winter. ”Initially it was looking like 2017 was going to be a disastrous year, because not only were the trees not getting chilling, they were actually heating up,” Murray says. ”When the sun hits the wood, the temperature of the wood can be 20 and even 30 degrees warmer.” Murray says the only real solution is for the temperature to drop. And to complicate the matter, many researchers and farmers say there isn’t enough understanding about why the trees need sleep. Plus, a decrease in the amount fog in the region also keeps trees from staying cool. That has to do with rain. Back on Coleman’s 160 acres of pistachios, it has rained so much that a large creek has formed in the middle of his property. He’s hoping the ground is saturated enough for fog to form this winter, which would lower the temperature around his trees. ”The fog is a good thing because it keeps a uniform cooler temperature on the ground, but we just haven’t seen that over that last several years  ” even with the rain,” says Coleman. For Coleman the facts are evident: The climate is warming and he has to adapt his practices. ”I know that there are people that think that global warming is not man made, but regardless we have to deal with it. I think that making plans around it is necessary,” says Coleman. These trees that he’s prided himself on since the ’70s could live well beyond him and his children. He’s taking warming temperatures seriously, because what happens with the climate today could mean severe cuts or total crop loss in the coming decades. The story comes to us from KVPR, an NPR member station in Central California."
599,"No, it’s not a cover of ”Danger Zone” or ”What A Fool Believes,” but, yes, the Kenny Loggins and the Michael McDonald guest on the first single from Thundercat’s newly announced Drunk. ”Show You The Way” is a smooth piece of funk balladry that is at once ridiculous and sincere, announcing each singer before his verse  —   It’s ya boy, Thundercat Tell ’em how you feel, Kenny Ladies and gentlemen, Michael McDonald. And you know what? All three of them sound great and sound great together: different and generational hues of tender soul cascading across Thundercat’s crystalline production. ”These are guys that I’ve listened to and where I felt that I’ve learned that honesty in the music,” Thundercat tells Red Bull Music Academy. ”Kenny Loggins is one of my favorite songwriters.” McDonald joined the song at Loggins’ suggestion. Thundercat continues, ”I think one of the most beautiful moments of it was realizing how amazing Michael McDonald was. He would go through so many ideas and have so much to offer.” Drunk comes out Feb. 24 on Brainfeeder. Thundercat starts a U. S. tour on Feb. 12. "
600,"”Missed it by that much”  —   that could have been the simple explanation after American skier Robby Kelley lost control just before the finish line in a slalom race in the Alps in Austria on Tuesday night. But after Kelley crashed, thousands of people cheered him on as he hiked back up the hill to finish his run. ”I just want to cross the finish line every time I go,” Kelley said after the race, in comments relayed by the U. S. Ski Team. ”I basically always hike. It’s something I’ve always done. My parents told me to never give up, so I wanted to cross that finish line.” Kelley had the finish line in sight on his second run at the Schladming Night Race, but when his skis went sideways after a tight turn, the rest of him followed, sending him airborne before crashing down the mountain. But Kelley, who has skied as part of   Redneck Racing and is known for his unique approach to skiing, wasn’t done. After his momentum carried Kelley next to the finishing gate, he picked himself up and began sidestepping back up the mountain. And with that, the crowd that had been largely silent upon seeing him crash began cheering for Kelley to reach the gate that he’d missed. ”I’m tired  —   very tired  —   but it was worth it!” Kelley said afterward. ”It was a great feeling to cross the finish line here. This is the best race of the year. I would have liked to be 48 seconds faster than I was, so I’m a little disappointed.” Kelley, 26, was the top American finisher in the Alpine Skiing World Cup slalom event, with other U. S. skiers either not finishing or failing to reach the race’s second run. Today, the Vermont skier’s refusal to quit is winning fans far beyond the Alps, after he posted a video of the unusual finish on his Facebook page. ”I am a high school ski coach and I preach to my kids that you NEVER quit,” one fan wrote. ”Thank you so much for showing such a great example at the highest level! !!! You ROCK. ..and I hope you crush the rest of the season!” This isn’t the first time Kelley has drawn attention for his unusual style in 2014, he published a video of himself tackling a local run in Vermont  —   but in the summer, schussing over grass and ferns, in his ski suit."
601,"In a monastery tucked away in a quiet back lane of Bangalore, India, Benedictine monks of the Vallombrosian Order are using their European connections to meet rising demand for fresh,   cheese in this South Asian country. As Western lifestyle and cuisine gain popularity in India, there is a growing legion of cheese lovers. Most cheese, however, is imported and expensive, as well as adding to the cost of international cuisine at local restaurants. For more than a decade now, the Vallombrosians, who originated in Vallombrosa, a picturesque small Italian town not far from Florence, have been meeting this demand by producing a small but steady supply of Italian cheese. ”We have to spend time in contemplation, but we also have to work to sustain our activities and community living. Ora et Labora [pray and work] as per Saint Benedict’s rule,” explains Father Michael, who, at 15, was among the first Indians to join the order in 1988. As an early Vallombrosian monk in India, it fell upon Father Michael to find viable,   work options. ”Back in Vallombrosa, the priests make table wines and herbal liqueurs, but we felt it wasn’t appropriate for India,” says the monk, referring to the country’s conservative attitude towards alcohol  —   particularly when mixed with religion. Monasteries in Europe have been making their own cheese for centuries, and many regional specialties like Roquefort, Muenster and tête de moine (Monk’s Head) are traditionally monastic cheeses. And yet, it did not occur to Father Michael to take up   because cheese is not part of the mainstream Indian diet. But indigenous cheese variants do exist, particularly in the Himalayan region, where communities produce small varieties of both soft and hard cheeses with the milk and buttermilk of sheep, yak, cow and dzomo (the hybrid of cow and yak). The monks in Bangalore only realized the potential for   as a business when an Italian businessman with ties in India  —   the monks refer to him as a friend of the monastery  —   complained to them that it was impossible to find good mozzarella in India, while pizza and pasta joints were aplenty in the big cities. Father Michael, who spent several years in Italy as a liturgical scholar, speaks fluent Italian. He tapped into his connections to import used machinery from Italy and traveled there to learn more about the art. After the monastery started producing cheese, he began to make cold calls to local restaurants, offering to send them samples, which included a small range of Italian cheeses like mozzarella, bocconcini, ricotta, burrata and mascarpone. That was 13 years ago. Today, Father Michael has a steady bank of upscale restaurants and luxury hotels as clients  —   not just in Bangalore, but also in Mumbai and Delhi. Presently, the monastery produces about 220 pounds of cheese per day. The cheese is also sold in select outlets in Bangalore, but as Francesca Cossa Valentini, an Italian expat who has lived in the city for several years, says, ”It is not easy to find Vallombrosa cheese, but it’s pretty good.” Valentini laments the lack of variety in some   retail packs: ”Italian cheese is not just mozzarella and ricotta.” The monks have been   their sales and distribution strategy over the years, and they prefer to sell to restaurants, because most Indians who do eat Western cuisine do so at restaurants. Only a small number experiment with cooking international dishes at home.   Ema Trinidad is an expat based in Bangalore. Originally from the Philippines, Trinidad has lived and traveled to several countries, including the United States. ”I love cheese and I really missed it after moving to India about 10 years ago,” she says. ”Good cheese was really expensive.” Trinidad says she discovered Vallombrosa cheese while dining at one of the restaurants at JW Marriott  —   which in India is a luxury brand  —   in Bangalore. ”The cheese was so fresh and tasty. I remember specifically asking the chef where I could find such good Italian cheese in India,” recounts Trinidad. Making fresh cheese in India that tastes authentic is not easy, and Father Michael has had his fair share of hurdles. Initially, the Benedictine tried to make cheese in his hometown of Kottayam, a city in a neighboring state in southern India which remains hot and humid through the year. ”It was a complete failure,” says the priest who then moved to Bangalore, which has a more moderate, cooler climate. The monks also discovered that milk, the key ingredient for   continues to be among the most adulterated food products in India. After trying several suppliers, who delivered milk of varying quality, the monastery bought a herd of buffaloes. But they found that managing them was quite a hassle.   ”We pay much more than the market price to ensure that our milk is free of adulterants. Even then, there have been times when the cheese simply does not set and we have to discard the product,” says Father Michael. Vallombrosa cheese may be the answer to the prayers of many   Indians, expats and chefs seeking fresh, local products, but not everyone’s a fan. ”It was very hard to find good cheese when I started out, and to be honest, even now it is not easy. Hard and   cheeses are still being imported, but good quality fresh cheese is still a nightmare,” says Ritu Dalmia, a celebrity Indian chef who is famous for making Italian food more accessible to Indians through her restaurants, books and cooking shows. ”I have only tried Father Michael’s burrata. Maybe it had traveled some distance, so unfortunately it was not very good,” says Dalmia, who is based in Delhi, some 1, 300 miles away from Bangalore. And do the monks themselves ever get to enjoy the cheese they make? Occasionally, when there is some left, the novices are served   cheese with chapathi or Indian flat bread for breakfast, says Father Michael. Like everything else about this   order in India, the answer reflects a confluence of two distinct cultures."
602,"David Betras realized Hillary Clinton’s odds of winning the presidency were in peril  —   back in March of last year. Betras, the chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party, lives in an area of Ohio that traditionally votes for Democrats. But during the Ohio primary, Betras saw 18 people on his own precinct committee defect and cross party lines to vote Republican. ”Why did they vote for Donald Trump?” Betras asked rhetorically, and in the next breath answered his own question, ”’cause Donald Trump  —   I don’t get it, but, amazingly, a man that s**** in   toilets  —   was talking more to working people than the party’s  .” Quick fact check: While some apartments in Trump Tower do have   bathroom fixtures, there’s no evidence of a gold toilet. But you get the point: Betras was frustrated with his own party, that it could not appeal to   voters while running against a New York billionaire. ”We were stressing the wrong messages. ’Stronger Together’  —   that’s real nice,” Betras said, referring to Clinton’s campaign slogan. ”Let’s sit around and sing, ’Kumbaya,’ but that really doesn’t get anyone a job, does it?” The future for Democrats is fuzzy. Following President Obama, the first black president, the party is having something of an identity crisis. Clinton lost, in part, because she wasn’t able to appeal to white,   voters, who were a crucial pillar of the party for decades. But minority activists warn that people of color have been a growing key to Democratic success for years  —   yet still don’t have the influence they feel they deserve. While many in the party were encouraged by the massive turnout for the Women’s March Saturday, which was bigger than the crowd that showed up for Trump’s inauguration the day before, Democrats have no clear leader and no unified policy direction. Democrats suffered a stunning defeat in November, capping off a disastrous string of defeats during the Obama years. Democrats have lost more than 1, 000 state legislative seats in that time, dozens of congressional and governors seats  —   and are at the lowest point of their power than at any time in the last century. In this   moment, Democrats can’t even agree on why the party lost. Some, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s chief rival for the nomination, say Democrats focused too much on identity politics and need to return to their economic roots. Others point out that identity politics is a necessary part of the game. They argue that Trump was playing to his own base of white identity politics and that black voters, for example, were among the most loyal Clinton supporters, so the party should not abandon them and cater to whites. And yet others insist that economics and race are not mutually exclusive choices, that it is possible to focus on both simultaneously. Figuring out that balance is going to be central to the party’s survival, as it currently wanders in the political wilderness. ”Off message”: Concerns over economy, white,   ignored, Betras, the county chairman, was so deeply frustrated by what he was seeing, he typed up a memo and sent it to the Clinton campaign in Brooklyn. ”I told the campaign they were in trouble with   workers,” he said with urgency. He tried to warn the campaign that if it ”didn’t retool [its] message,” it would lose not only Ohio, but also other states with influential white,   voting blocs, like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Betras said no one ever responded to his memo. And Clinton went on to lose exactly as he had predicted. It was the first time a Democrat had lost Ohio and Pennsylvania since 1988 and the first time a Democrat had lost Wisconsin since 1984. A big reason for that was the bleed with   voters in the Mahoning Valley. Three counties make up the valley  —   Mahoning and Trumbull in Ohio and Mercer in Pennsylvania. Clinton suffered     swings in each county from Obama’s performance in 2012. ”We could have saved those states, had they taken my damn memo [and] at least tried to do what I suggested for them to do . .. start talking to these people about their jobs,” Betras said. Clinton’s loss shocked many Democrats across the country, but it didn’t surprise everyone in Ohio, a traditional battleground state where Clinton suffered one of her largest defeats. She lost by more than 8 percentage points, the worst loss for a Democrat there since Michael Dukakis lost it by 11 in 1988. ”I’m not shocked that Hillary Clinton lost,” said Precious Samuel, 29, a labor organizer in Cleveland. ”I saw the loss a mile away.” In Northeast Ohio, Democrats said they saw the warning signs. And, so now, as Democrats look to rebuild, they also see lessons the national party can learn from Ohio. ”Here’s the irony of it  —   all our local Democrats crushed the Republicans,” Betras said, ” ’cause we’re talking to those voters, we know how to talk to them.” He, like other Ohio voters, pointed to the popularity of Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan (who tried unsuccessfully to challenge Nancy Pelosi, who won yet another term as the Democratic House leader). But Betras said the familiarity and trust many voters felt for local Democrats didn’t translate to Clinton on the national level. ”The people here thought  —   wrongly  —   the national Democratic Party cared more about where someone went to the bathroom than whether or not these people had a job,” Betras said. ”And so, we’re  .” Betras insists for most voters, the economy is the primary concern. And he is worried the Democratic National Committee doesn’t understand that  —   that it has become too coastal, too elite and too disconnected from middle America. His prime example of the elitism he sees in his own party is the criticism he heard from some Democrats when Trump misrepresented the number of jobs in the Carrier deal. ”I don’t care if it was a bad deal,” Betras argued, ”he was fighting for someone’s job. That’s what we used to do, right?” Betras said the pushback seemed horribly out of touch with   voters. And the Mahoning Valley is home to thousands of   folks, many of them white people who voted for Trump in November. ”Those are our voters,” Betras said. ”Those are the people’s issues we should be fighting for.” ”Time for progressives to reclaim the party” Leo Jennings III, a    Democratic consultant and former union organizer, grew up in the shadow of the Ohio steel mills. But those days are long gone, he said, in between bites of country toast and bacon at the Golden Dawn restaurant in Youngstown. ”There’s no one around this area who believes for two seconds that the steel mills are coming back, because we all watched them flatten. . .. They’re gone,” he said. ”But what they see is the rich getting richer and no opportunity for them to go to work.” Jennings, a Sanders supporter during the primaries, said the only way his party can start winning again is by adopting a more progressive economic agenda. ”I think we’ve left a lot of people behind by this belief in trade,” Jennings said. ”I think it’s time for the progressives to reclaim the party.” He added that in a year when people wanted to shake up the system, Clinton was the poster child for the status quo. Plus, he added, she didn’t have credibility among many voters on issues like income inequality and wage stagnation, because of her   on the   Partnership. Jennings, like Sanders, thinks the party needs to focus on   issues above all else. ”If we don’t start talking about the things that we can do to make it better for all   voters, we’re bankrupt as a party,” Jennings argued. Jennings added that   whites and blacks are affected by the same financial woes and that the Democratic Party needs to start talking about the economy in a way that rises above race. ”I mean, I don’t think you have to abandon identity politics,” Jennings said, ”but, at the same token, you have to talk to the issues that motivate the traditional Democratic base, because it’s been decades where they feel as if they’ve been ignored.” Both Jennings and Betras fundamentally believe race and class are not mutually exclusive  —   they say the dichotomy between identity politics and the economy is a false choice. ”I hate the [phrase] ’white, working class,’ ” Betras said, ”and I reject that notion that somehow the white,   needs are different from the   needs.” For both men, it’s a matter of prioritizing the discussion. They see a focus on the economy as a way to ensure the party remains a ”big tent.” A warning not to ”go and pander back to white Americans” About an hour and a half west of the Mahoning Valley, in Cleveland, Chinemerem Onyeukwu, 23, part of a group called Ohio Young Black Democrats, echoed that message. He, too, wants a more progressive party. ”If the Democratic Party wants to be around in the future, they need to go left,” said Onyeukwu, an organizer for the state’s coordinated campaign that worked to elect Clinton. Onyeukwu, like the Democrats in the Mahoning Valley, also thinks the party needs to focus more on the economy. He points out that’s how a man named Barack Hussein Obama won Ohio  —   twice. But ”progressive” politics for Onyeukwu is more than just the economy. He wants a party that is progressive socially  —   and culturally. He thinks the party could start winning again by investing more in young voters. ”The Democratic Party has not done a good job in developing the next generation of policymakers, of advocates, and activists, and politicians,” Onyeukwu said. He feels that Republicans have made more of concerted effort than Democrats to develop a bench. He is worried that Democrats are going to keep running what he called ’  campaigns despite Clinton’s loss. ”The people that they’re talking about running in 2020  —   they need to be in a retirement home, just old heads,” he said, quickly adding, ”And, I don’t say that to like be ageist . .. [but] these people have sat at the top for so long, they don’t even know what’s going on in the rest of America.” A few other members of the Ohio Young Black Democrats nodded in agreement. ”Hillary’s not the problem,” said Samuel, the labor organizer. ”The democratic process is the problem. And, making sure people feel included.” Samuel said the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to understand its audience. And for Onyeukwu, that audience includes many people of color. So he wants a party that also continues to push for more progressive policies on race. ”I want to guard against the Democratic Party, because they feel that they lost because white men and white women did not vote for Democrats,” Onyeukwu said. ”I want to make sure that we do not abandon minority demographics to go and pander back to white Americans.” Onyeukwu is concerned that identity politics has become increasingly taboo in some Democratic circles. ”As a party,” he said, ”you should be robust enough to have multiple conversations with multiple groups of people at the same time.” ”People of color are the base of the Democratic Party” This debate over identity politics gets people like Jessica Byrd frustrated. She is an Ohio native who now leads a group called Democracy in Color, which calls for Democrats to invest more in minorities. ”We’re talking about identity politics as if the only people who have an identity are people of color when we know that white men . .. that’s an identity too,” she said. ”That’s who came out and voted for Donald Trump.” Byrd believes Democrats need to figure out how to create the most inclusive party possible. And, for her, that means not just expanding the tent, but also looking inside the tent. She noted that people of color have been key for Democrats to win elections for years  —   and yet, she believes they have not been given an influential enough voice in the party. She said without doing so inevitably hurts enthusiasm and   activism. ”The lack of diversity in the Democratic Party,” she said, ”means that we aren’t meaningfully able to engage in the conversations on the ground that actually get people to care about voting.” She added, ”People of color are the base of the Democratic Party it is our home. The difference, though, is  —   we’re not allowed to make any decisions there.” She argued that power dynamic needs to change, especially at a moment when the party is rebuilding. ”In a time where we are rebuilding our home, and we’re like deciding what’s going to go on the walls and what kind of couch we’re gonna sit on,” she said, ”we want everybody to come to our housewarming, [but] we also want to make some decisions about what that vibe is like.” Byrd said the party doesn’t need a huge overhaul  —   it just needs to do a better job connecting with the people already in the Democratic Party, particularly minorities, to make sure they show up on Election Day. Byrd argued part of what’s getting lost in this moment of Democratic introspection is the technical failures of the Clinton ground game. Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by fewer than 78, 000 votes combined. Winning all three of those states would have put Clinton over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Clinton didn’t make a single campaign stop in Wisconsin and did not pour in the kind of resources necessary to win Michigan. In each of those states, Clinton underperformed President Obama with young voters. Byrd, who worked on the Obama campaign in Ohio, said it takes extensive organizing and    conversations for Democrats to engage their base voters. ”We have to get back to believing that those resources being spent on human beings,” she said, ”having conversations with other human beings, is meaningful.”"
603,"As promised, President Trump has moved to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. It’s a concern for those who might be left without health insurance  —   and especially for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which may have to pick up some of the slack. Carrie Farmer, a health policy researcher at the Rand Corp. says 3 million vets who are enrolled in the VA usually get their health care elsewhere  —   from their employer, or maybe from Obamacare exchanges. If those options go away, she has no idea just how many of those 3 million veterans will move over to the VA. ”I would expect that the number of veterans using VA health care will increase, which will only provide a further challenge for VA to provide timely and accessible care,” Farmer says. The VA has already seen a surge in usage in the past year, straining what has long been an overtaxed system. That could get worse if the agency can’t fill vacancies. Trump signed a federal hiring freeze this week, and while national security is supposed to be exempt, the VA is not. White House spokesman Sean Spicer called it a ”broken” system. ”The VA in particular, if you look at the problems that have plagued people, hiring more people isn’t the answer. It’s hiring the right people,” Spicer told reporters on Tuesday. Just hours after the White House emphasized that there would be no exemption for the VA from the hiring freeze, the acting secretary of the agency, Robert Snyder, seemed to issue a contradiction. ”The Department of Veterans Affairs intends to exempt anyone it deems necessary for public safety, including   caregivers,” he said in a statement. David Shulkin, Trump’s nominee to lead the VA, in the past has stressed an urgent need to hire more caregivers. Shulkin has run the VA’s health administration for the past two years, and he told NPR this past fall that negative attention to VA caused a 78 percent drop in applications there. ”We have 45, 000 job openings. That’s too many,” Shulkin said. ”I need to fill every one of those openings in order to make sure that we’re doing the very best for our veterans.” Shulkin said the VA performs as well or better than private health care systems, but he said that long before he was asked to join the Trump administration."
604,"President Trump met with executives of the Big Three U. S. automakers, the latest in a parade of business leaders to visit the White House in the first few of days of the Trump administration. The president told the executives of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler on Tuesday that he was going to make it easier for them to invest in the country. ”We’re bringing manufacturing back to the United States, big league,” Trump said. ”We’re reducing taxes very substantially and we’re reducing unnecessary regulations.” The president assured the executives that his administration will be among the most   in the world. But Trump also has been threatening companies that move U. S. jobs and factories to other countries. During the transition,   Trump began singling out companies  —   including Carrier, Ford and GM  —   that were planning investments in Mexico that involved moving American jobs. In a tweet about GM, Trump promised a big border tax on Chevy Cruzes shipped from Mexico into the United States. He repeated that threat to corporate leaders Monday. ”A company that wants to fire all of its people in the United States, and build some factory someplace else, and then thinks that that product is going to just flow across the border into the United States  —   that’s not going to happen,” Trump said. ”They’re going to have a tax to pay, a border tax, substantial border tax.” Trump has suggested the tax could be 35 percent to 45 percent of the value of the product. Exactly what form the tax would take is unclear. House Republicans have their own idea: They’ve talked about a steep   tax on all goods coming into the country, as part of their plan to overhaul the tax code. But both Trump and his nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have said that’s not what they’re contemplating. During his confirmation hearing Thursday, Mnuchin said that what Trump has suggested is that, for certain companies that move jobs out of the U. S. ”there may be repercussions,” including ”taxing” products they try to move back into the United States. But Trump doesn’t have the authority to do that, says Steve Charnovitz, an international trade specialist at George Washington University Law School. Charnovitz says it would be illegal for Trump ”to impose a tax or a tariff on a company merely because it moves its production outside the United States” and seeks to import goods into the U. S. from Mexico. Charnovitz says presidents do have authority to levy tariffs on individual nations and products, but not on individual companies. Trump might try to target a specific company without naming it by defining the product in detail, for instance, a       car, but Charnovitz says that tactic would likely get struck down by federal courts. The bigger issue, says Charnovitz, is that ”it’s a crazy idea.” Charnovitz says Trump campaigned on making American great again, but ”he’s offering these counterproductive trade policies that can only make it worse for the U. S. economy and for American workers.” That’s because his policies will likely lead to less trade, and most economists believe trade boosts growth and benefits consumers and most workers. That said, Charnovitz acknowledges that he can understand why workers who lost their jobs to trade voted for Trump. ”The Obama administration did a terrible job in trying to explain the benefits of trade,” he says. And, Charnovitz says, for decades the federal programs that were supposed to help workers and communities hurt by trade have not done a good job."
605,"Updated at 6:45 p. m. ET, The Trump administration is considering alternative ways to pay for the border wall, backtracking on the president’s   promise that Mexico would foot the bill. A White House spokesman said one idea taking shape is to apply a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico, as well as other countries with which the U. S. has a trade deficit. That would effectively saddle U. S. consumers with a significant portion of the wall’s cost, estimated at $15 billion or more. Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer did not offer details about how the import tax would work, but he said it could be adopted as part of comprehensive tax reform. After the idea sparked controversy, Spicer later walked back the idea, saying that ”it could be a multitude of things.” The tax could be 20 percent or 18 or 5, he said, adding that he wasn’t trying to be ”prescriptive.” Trump discussed the plan during a meeting in Philadelphia with congressional Republicans. Even floating this idea amounts to a remarkable capitulation by the new president, who was insisting as late as Wednesday that Mexico would bear the cost of the border barrier. Mexico’s refusal has already created friction between the countries. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Trump next week, a decision that the U. S. president tried to explain as mutual. Mexico is one of America’s top trading partners, with more than $500 billion worth of goods flowing across the Southern border each year. Spicer argued that adding a 20 percent surcharge to imports from Mexico would quickly cover the cost of the wall. ”This is the beginning of this plan to make sure it’s done right,” Spicer told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One. ”It clearly provides the funding and it does so in a way that ensures that the American taxpayer is wholly respected.” The suggestion drew a swift rebuke from at least one Republican senator, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who said it would be a bad idea to do anything that raises the price of Corona, tequila or margaritas. (Graham’s family used to own a bar.) House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office contended the White House and Congress were on the ”same page.” ”We have been and continue to be on the same page about tax reform that supports American jobs and American goods,” Ryan aide AshLee Strong told NPR’s Susan Davis. That’s because Ryan has proposed a ”border adjustment” tax that would affect the ”corporate tax rates applied to goods and services consumed in the U. S. but not applied to goods and services exported,” a Republican Capitol Hill source added. The plan would allow corporations to subtract export sales when calculating their tax bill, but companies would not be allowed to deduct the cost of imports. Under the current tax code, export sales are taxed, and import costs are deductible. If Trump is embracing Ryan’s plan, it would be a reversal. Just 10 days ago, he told the Wall Street Journal that a ”border adjustment tax” was ”too complicated.” ”Anytime I hear border adjustment, I don’t love it,” Trump said. ”Because usually it means we’re going to get adjusted into a bad deal. That’s what happens.” Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said the plan raises questions. Spicer brushed aside suggestions that much of the cost would be passed on to American consumers who purchase   goods. He argued that cost would be outweighed by the reduction in illicit border crossings. ”What it’s going to do is lift up the wages of American workers,” Spicer said. ”Right now we’ve got an influx of cheap labor. It’s going to put the American consumer back,   to make sure that American workers get lifted up as well.” Back in Washington, after the original comments, Spicer said, ”I don’t think our job right now is to roll something out   be prescriptive it’s to show that there are ways the wall can be paid for. Full stop.” He added that he was trying to address ”questions about how the president could pay for the wall.” He said, ”The idea is to show that generating revenue for the wall is not as difficult as some might have suggested.” But ”there’s nothing to roll out, so the idea of asking for details on something, we’re not there yet.” Spicer also suggested that building the border wall would produce savings elsewhere in the federal budget. ”I think we’re going to save additional money that we would have had to spend on tracking down illegal immigrants and on immigration,” Spicer said. ”So it’s actually a huge win for the American taxpayer and for American security when you look at the kind of plan that’s coming to fruition right now.” Trump actually wants to increase spending on immigration enforcement. In addition to the wall, he has ordered the hiring of 15, 000 new Border Patrol and immigration officers and the construction of new detention facilities."
606,"President Trump said if Mexico won’t pay for the wall, Mexico’s president shouldn’t bother coming to Washington, D. C. next week. So Mexico’s president cancelled his trip. Mexicans are outraged by Trump and support their president’s decision."
607,"”Buckle up. We’re ready to go to work,” Vice President Pence told Republican lawmakers at their annual retreat in Philadelphia on Thursday. With a GOP administration in place for the first time in eight years, congressional leaders have mapped out an ambitious legislative agenda, with goals to have bills to repeal and replace Obamacare, overhaul the tax code and build a wall on the U. S.  border, all before lawmakers break for the annual August recess. ”We’ve been working with the administration on a daily basis to map out and plan a very bold and aggressive agenda to make good on our campaign promises and to fix these problems,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters gathered here for the party’s annual   GOP policy retreat. Pence and President Trump joined the lawmakers here on Thursday. The agenda will test the party’s commitment to small government and a fiscal conservatism that in recent years has rejected any new spending without corresponding cuts in the federal budget. Trump’s promises to expand health care coverage and spend more on the nation’s ailing infrastructure systems  —   while cutting taxes for businesses and individuals  —   will be hard to reconcile with competing GOP commitments to balance the budget and reduce the nation’s debt burden. Nearly all congressional Republicans are   fiscal conservatives. But Trump has shown support for vast new federal spending  —   like that $1 trillion infrastructure proposal  —   and an indifference to deficit spending if it can spur U. S. economic growth. For instance, Republicans largely agree that tax cuts do not need to be paid for and consider them economic stimulus. Ryan would not say Republican policies won’t increase the deficit in the short term, but he reiterated a   commitment to paying for new spending. ”We are fiscal conservatives. If we’re going to be spending on things like say, infrastructure, we’re going to find the fiscal space to pay for that in our spring budget,” he said, referring to the annual budget resolution. Republicans are already working to provide Trump with $12 billion to $15 billion in new spending to fund his call to finish a border wall with Mexico. Congress is expected to use an upcoming defense supplemental spending bill to include new border funds. The supplemental spending bill is considered ”emergency” spending and does not require spending offsets. Ryan and McConnell declined to answer repeated questions about whether the wall would be offset in the federal budget. Trump has insisted Mexico will reimburse the U. S. for the costs, through undetermined new measures affecting trade and tax policy with Mexico. Leaders say they are on the ”same page” as the Trump administration on an agenda that has expanded to the first 200 days in part to accommodate extra scheduling burdens in the Senate related to the confirmation process for Trump’s Cabinet and an upcoming Supreme Court nominee. Ryan and McConnell struck a more cautious tone to reporters on their timeline for moving legislation. ”We don’t want to set arbitrary deadlines on things. We want to get things right,” Ryan said. ”The speaker understands the challenges of getting things through the Senate,” McConnell added. ”That’s been true for 240 years. But we’re aware of those challenges and we think we can move forward.” However, in a presentation to lawmakers on Wednesday leaders outlined a 2017 program that included a specific timeline, including: Congress also wants to pass laws affecting federal flood insurance, veterans health care and financial regulations by the end of the year. Lawmakers are also anticipating further executive actions from the Trump administration on immigration and health care. The ambitious agenda is being pushed by Trump, who has told lawmakers he wants quick action on his priorities. ”President Trump comes from a different world,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,  . told reporters. ”Out in the business community, he likes things done fast, and he’s going to continue to push them.” On Thursday, the president did. ”We have to deliver,” he told lawmakers. ”This is our chance to make major and lasting change.”"
608,"This week, President Trump’s transition team put new restrictions on government scientists’ freedom to communicate. The restrictions are being characterized as temporary, and some have already been lifted. But climate scientists, in particular, are on edge because the federal government generates a huge amount of data on climate. That information is used in everything from farming to weather forecasting and insurance. Take the example of a single agency: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA operates 17 environmental satellites, along with myriad instruments that collect data on land and in the oceans. When you add NASA’s satellites and instruments and scientists, as well as those at other agencies, you get the country’s biggest source of climate data  —   by far. Those data are the main way we know what’s going on with the climate, says Greg Asner, who studies forests at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution for Science. ”Nobody has databases like NOAA nobody has instrumentation networks like NASA,” Asner says. ”Without it, we will go blind. It’s like turning off the lights  —   we’re not going to know what’s happening at the Earth scale.” The government’s role doesn’t stop with just collecting data. Federal scientists analyze the information and eventually release it to the public in reports such as the National Climate Assessment. There have been three so far, and a fourth is due out next year. The assessments are required by law. Scientists from several federal agencies, including NOAA, write them. Ocean scientist William Sweet at NOAA is currently working on the section about sea level rise. ”Sea level rise is already happening and the impacts can be felt,” Sweet says. But those impacts, he notes, are not the same everywhere. ”The ocean is not a bathtub. It may rise in one place it may drop in the other,” he says. Ocean currents and wind patterns distribute ocean water unevenly. And coastlines actually move up and down  —   sometimes it’s a   response to the retreat of glaciers during the latest ice age, and sometimes it’s from people draining groundwater. That ”vertical land movement” influences how far inland water will encroach. Sweet says research prepared for the new assessment shows that the East Coast and parts of the Gulf Coast, for example, will experience even higher sea levels than the world average. And that world average? It could be 8 feet higher than it is now by the end of the century  —   about a foot and a half higher than predicted in the latest assessment, in 2014. That’s the   scenario. Sweet says it probably will be less  —   a lot depends on how much more carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere and how much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melts. In the short term, he says, the assessment will provide news you can use. For example, there’s been an uptick in abnormally high tides  —   these cause ”sunny day” flooding that occurs even when there’s no storm. ”At what point do these damaging, disruptive tidal flood events become the new norm?” Sweet says. He adds that the latest climate assessment will help answer that question by pinpointing where and how often these   tides will hit. Local municipalities can use this information to prepare by deploying pumps,   streets or even building sea walls. That’s just a small part of what’s in the assessments. They also cover everything from drought to extreme rain and snowfall. So what happens if the Trump administration tries to censor this huge scientific enterprise? Peter de Menocal, the dean of science at Columbia University, says there just isn’t any substitute for what federal climate scientists produce. ”The United States, I think, has the   and some of the top talent in climate science and engineering in the world,” he says. ”The concern is that that brain trust, that amazing compendium of knowledge is going to disappear.”"
609,"If Twitter accounts fall silent in the woods, can they still make a sound? Turns out, yes  —   lots. Tuesday afternoon, a new Twitter account called ”AltUSNatParkService” appeared and began tweeting out facts about climate change, support for the National Parks and comments in opposition of President Trump, who has called climate change a hoax created by China. All this came in response to the news of new orders to limit outward contact with the public, including bans on social media postings, at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service. The EPA was ordered to enact a temporary media blackout as the Trump administration transitions its team into the agency roles. The rogue tweeting started at the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, as the park’s verified Twitter account tweeted in defiance with facts about climate change, such as: ”Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650, 000 years. #climate.” The messages took Twitter by storm, but were later removed. This led to a public outcry over what many took to suggest was censorship of the accounts. The National Park Service responded with a statement that blamed ”a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account”: ”The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized their account had been compromised. At this time, National Park Service social media managers are encouraged to continue the use of Twitter to post information relating to public safety and park information, with the exception of content related to national policy issues.” In true Twitter fashion, the removal of climate change tweets from the official account gave rise to a wave of rogue accounts, including ”BadlandsNPSFans” and ”BadHombreLands NPS”  —   the latter referring to Trump’s ”bad hombres” comment during a presidential debate. Both accounts post about science and climate change, as well as in opposition of Trump’s policy proposals, with BadlandsNPSFans directly skewering Trump and his team. In both cases, it is unclear who is running these accounts. The AltUSNatParkService account, for its part, grabbed the spotlight on Wednesday, racking up some 600, 000 followers in the span of 24 hours. The account claims to be run by current park rangers, which NPR could not confirm. The location of this group is also unclear as they made references to Mount Rainier in Washington as well as the local Washington, D. C. time. NPR reached out to the   ”unofficial resistance team” for a comment, but did not hear back. The official National Park Service communications office also did not respond to requests for further comment. The official NPS Twitter account found itself in hot water last week, too, when it was asked to stop tweeting after sharing images comparing the crowd size of Trump’s inauguration to that of former President Barack Obama in 2009."
610,"Heavy precipitation is erasing years of extremely dry conditions in parts of California, with the latest federal report showing that just over 51 percent of the state remains in drought  —   and no areas have the worst rating, ”exceptional drought.” It’s the first time since January of 2014 that no part of California was in the exceptional drought category, according to the U. S. Drought Monitor report from weather and agriculture experts. In January of 2016, more than 40 percent of the state had that unwelcome distinction. Currently, nearly 39 percent of California is also free of the more benign ”abnormally dry” status  —   which, one year ago, covered the entire state. The change wrought by heavy rains is striking, as seen in a series of    photos of key reservoirs complied by member station KQED. Drought conditions persist mainly in the south, affecting nearly 25 million people, according to the drought monitor. And Dan Cayan, a climate researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, tells KQED that while some areas have already received a winter’s worth of water, the risk of drought shouldn’t be discounted. ”I’m a little reluctant to say the drought’s over, even though conditions have markedly improved,” says Cayan, citing the need to replenish groundwater aquifers. Relief from the drought has come at a cost, as powerful and drenching storms also brought flooding, mudslides and damage  —   including to the iconic ”Pioneer Cabin Tree,” the sequoia that was carved into a tunnel in Calaveras Big Trees State Park. Since Oct. 1, precipitation is running well above normal levels across the state, according to the National Weather Service. The agency’s office in Sacramento adds that wet conditions are likely to return next week."
611,"  has a message for the Trump administration: There is no such thing as an ”alternative fact.” There are facts, and then there are falsehoods. That memo was at least implied this week when the dictionary publisher tweeted the definition of a fact just hours after Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet The Press and referred to statements by White House press secretary Sean Spicer about the inaugural crowd size as ”alternative facts.” Later,   threw another dig at Conway by tweeting an alternative definition of the word ”fact.” The idea for those tweets came from the dictionary’s Trend Watch feature, Lauren Naturale, social media manager at   told Vox. com. When people are looking up a word at a higher rate than usual as related to an event,   shares that trend and adds context on the word’s meaning and how it was used. ”Four people were involved in writing and editing the ’fact’ article, and none of us felt like we shouldn’t report the story  —   choosing not to report that trend would have been much more political than continuing as we always have,” Naturale told Vox. ”If you don’t believe that words matter, why are you consulting a dictionary?” On Monday,   subtly scolded the Trump team again, this time in response to a spike in searches for the word ”claque.” The searches were likely in response to reports that the people who cheered Trump during his visit to CIA headquarters were not actually agency staffers but Trump supporters invited for the occasion. These types of tweets are nothing new for  . Throughout the presidential campaign,   developed its funny style of delicately trolling Trump on social media. When Trump accused China of stealing a U. S. drone back in December, calling the act ”unpresidented,”  ’s Twitter account mocked the   for misspelling ”unprecedented” and making up a new term. Trump corrected himself and deleted the tweet, but by then   had already tweeted ”Huh” as its word of the day. During the presidential debates,   also threw some shade at Trump’s unique rhetoric. After Trump’s comments referring to ”bad hombres,” the dictionary’s site saw a surge in searches for the word ”ombré” but was quick to point out the difference between the two words. ”Hombre” is the Spanish word for ”man,” while ”ombré” refers to ”having shades or colors that fade into each other.” And the dictionary publisher attempted to set the record straight on a major perplexing question of the campaign: Did Trump say ”bigly” or ”big league”?   highlighted that ”bigly” is in fact a real word, but concluded that Trump was using ”big league” as an adverb, which is uncommon. Despite all of this mocking, Naturale clarifies that  ’s social media strategy goes beyond that. She says it reflects  ’s quirky identity while furthering its goal of sharing knowledge as experts on language. On Sunday  —   one day after the Women’s March drew millions of people worldwide  —     tweeted the definition of ”vanguard” with a GIF of Sylvia Rivera, a transgender activist. ”Smart people are curious about the world, and smart people are curious about the other people who live in that world,” Naturale told Vox. ”Our Twitter reflects that attitude.”"
612,"It’s no secret that NPR has a soft spot for haiku. Springtime, social media, the Super Bowl, even, um, grindcore? If it’s a story worth covering, it’s entirely possible we’ve squeezed it into 17 syllables. It turns out we’re not the only ones who are sweet on the ol’   . The   a weekly newspaper based in Indianola, Miss. has been turning some of its police reports into haiku. And this week, the paper started publishing the curious little jewels on Twitter. ”In an effort to reach the new era of     millennials, we have begun publishing a ’Crime Haiku of the Week,’ ” the newspaper tweeted Wednesday. And so began the stream of   tweets. Charlie Smith, the    publisher and editor of The   tells NPR he started the haiku last month, as a way to liven up the newspaper’s most popular section. ”Cops and Robbers,” a   summary of crime reports in the area, is often the part of the paper readers flip to first  —   but it usually ends up being just a big gray block of text. Smith figured a haiku would be an amusing way to break it up. So every Wednesday, on deadline, Smith decided to take one of those reports and sum it up in haiku. Then . .. silence. Smith says he received no feedback from the paper’s readers at first. He was thinking about giving it up, but he got support from one important fan. ”My mom told me she loved it,” Smith says. ”I couldn’t let her down.” He says it was only when he put the haiku on Twitter this week, rounding up all the poems he’s written so far, that the audience at large took notice. Some faithful readers have even submitted haiku of their own. ”I think it’s finally found the right medium,” he says."
613,"An underground pipeline that runs through multiple Midwestern states has leaked an estimated 138, 000 gallons of diesel fuel, according to the company that owns it, Magellan Midstream Partners. Clay Masters of Iowa Public Radio reported diesel leaking from a   underground pipe was initially spotted in a farm field in   Worth County, Iowa, on Wednesday morning. Officials from the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency and Iowa Department of Natural Resources joined representatives of Magellan and other local officials at the site, Masters reported. ”It’s a big one  —   it’s significant,” Jeff Vansteenburg of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources told the Des Moines Register. ”The product is under pressure, so as soon as a leak develops, it starts coming out pretty fast,” Vansteenburg said at a Wednesday evening news conference. ”Vacuum trucks are sucking up as much liquid as they can and taking that down to Magellan’s terminal. . .. Once they’ve recovered all the free product that they can then they will go in and remove contaminated soil.” Vansteenburg said the diesel had not reached nearby Willow Creek or a wildlife protection area. A safety plan submitted by the company to the U. S. Department of Transportation in 2014 lists the pipeline, which runs through Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, as a transport route for multiple refined oil products, ”including Diesel, Gasoline, Jet fuel, Natural gasoline, Naptha, Propane, Natural Gas, Butane.” Maps of the pipeline were redacted from the public version of the report. The leak occurred when the pipeline ruptured and diesel sprayed out, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources told the Register. More than a foot of snow has fallen since Monday in some parts of   Iowa. As of Wednesday afternoon, cleanup crews had sucked up ”about 25, 000 gallons of diesel and a   mixture,” reported the Globe Gazette newspaper in Mason City, Iowa. Another pipeline operated by Magellan leaked near Decatur, Neb. last October, according to the Omaha   which reported that a ruptured pipe carrying anhydrous ammonia killed one person and led to the evacuation of 23 households. In 2010, the company agreed to pay a $46, 200 penalty for violating the Clean Water Act, after an estimated 5, 000 gallons of diesel spilled into a creek near Milford, Iowa. That year, Magellan was also fined $418, 000 for a   gasoline spill in Oklahoma. In November, the company temporarily shut down its pipelines in order to inspect them after an earthquake in Cushing, Okla. damaged several buildings, as we reported. As the public media project Inside Energy has reported, ”According to data from federal regulators, there is actually a low probability of a pipeline accident. But when there is an accident, the impact can be huge.” The project also created a map of all the pipeline spills reported since 2010. Inside Energy also reported last year on what it called the ”chronically underfunded and understaffed regulatory agency,” the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, that oversees pipelines in the U. S.: ”According to PHMSA, the agency has 533 inspectors on its payroll. That works out to around one inspector for every 5, 000 miles of pipe. A government audit in October [2016] found that that PHMSA is behind on implementing new rules. It has 41 mandates and recommendations related to pipeline safety that await rulemaking.” The PHMSA makes searchable information about where pipelines are in the U. S. broken down by county, available at its website."
614,"There they were, Greenpeace activists hanging from cranes in the sky. The banner, reading ”RESIST,” unfurled within sight of the White House after President Trump froze EPA grants and ordered the environmental agency to remove   research from its website. It was a potent image Wednesday, perhaps setting a tone for years to come. Working under the Saltland moniker, Rebecca Foon calls her second solo album, A Common Truth, a meditation on climate change. The Montreal cellist and composer works in climate justice and has been a member of Esmerine, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Orchestra and Set Fire To Flames, and has recently toured with Colin Stetson’s Sorrow orchestra performing Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony. Here, Foon places her focus on the acoustic and processed sounds of her cello to represent a natural world in flux. ”I Only Wish This For You” layers somber cello loops with equal parts elegance and anger, swooping one moment and crashing the next. With a voice equally suited to opening petals and opening wounds, Foon sings to the earth like a mother to a newborn, beaming with hope while gripped with fear. But she also offers an alternate form of resistance: transformation. Oh, to what end, How to break, This vicious cycle of greed, A fight, Transformation, I only, Wish this for you, A Common Truth comes out March 31 on Constellation."
615,"Donald Trump took aim at Chelsea Manning in an early morning tweet on Thursday. The tweet appears to refer to an   published in The Guardian on Thursday morning, in which former Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning criticizes former President Obama as having been too willing to attempt compromise with his political opponents and being insufficiently progressive. She did not, however, call Obama a ”weak leader” in so many words, as Trump’s tweet might suggest. Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks in 2010 and was subsequently sentenced to a   prison term. After seven years in prison for Manning, President Obama commuted that sentence last week, just before leaving office. Manning acknowledged that Obama’s opponents were unusually obstinate, writing that the former president ”faced unparalleled resistance from his opponents, many of whom wanted him to fail.” However, Manning excoriated Obama for, in her eyes, compromising too much on health care and foreign policy, and she called for ”a strong and unapologetic progressive” to lead the United States. It wasn’t clear whether Trump’s tweet was intended to come to Obama’s defense  —   Trump, after all, has slammed the former president on many occasions. Rather, it may have been an opportunity to both criticize Manning and draw attention to criticism of Obama  —   criticism coming from someone whom Obama recently prevented from serving around 28 more years in prison, no less. Likewise, it’s not clear whether Trump’s tweets were inspired directly by the Guardian column. The tweets came minutes after a Fox News report that could easily have prompted them, as CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted. Reporting on the column, Fox and Friends First’s Abby Huntsman said that ”the disgraced former Army private is slamming President Obama as a weak leader with few permanent accomplishments,” while the words ”ungrateful traitor” appeared at the bottom of the screen, as Mediaite pointed out. This wouldn’t be the first time that Trump’s tweets correlate with Fox News segments. As BuzzFeed’s Brandon Wall pointed out earlier this week, a recent tweet about violence in Chicago may also have been inspired by a segment on the O’Reilly Factor."
616,"What makes North Korea feel so oppressive? If you ask its   defector in decades, the answer is censorship. Thae Yong Ho, who was until last summer a Pyongyang envoy in London, argues that increasing the flow of information into the North is what can sow the seeds of popular discord to bring down the Kim Jong Un regime. Thae had served in London for 10 years, and previously in Denmark, before he defected to South Korea last summer with his wife and two sons. He spent several months being questioned and debriefed by South Korean intelligence before settling into his new life in Seoul, where bodyguards accompany him most hours of the day. ”When we got out of the embassy, I told [my sons] that now I’m going to cut the chain of slavery and you are a free man,” Thae said at a Wednesday news conference in Seoul. His   and    sons’ first concern was whether they could freely browse the Internet. ”You can go to the Internet, you can do Internet games whenever you like, you can read any books, watch any films,” Thae said he told them. That’s not the way of life in North Korea, where fewer than 1 percent of the population has Internet access. Foreign books, films and information are banned  —   and TV only broadcasts propaganda. Breaking down the censorship and surveillance state from within, Thae believes, is the only way to bring down North Korea’s nuclear   leader. With information comes education, Thae says  —   and that can lead to a popular uprising. ”Once they are educated to that level, I am sure they will stand up,” Thae told reporters. A shortwave radio station called Free North Korea Radio has been delivering information from outside the country since 2005, broadcasting from the second floor of a multipurpose building just outside Seoul. ”The power of radio has been huge in advancing the cause of freedom and human rights,” says Suzanne Scholte, head of the American group that partners with the station. Free North Korea Radio puts out at least an hour a day of programming, produced by North Korean defectors for their fellow North Koreans to hear. ”This is a critical way for them to understand that the North Korean defectors living in South Korea are working for freedom and rights, providing them with information but helping them to understand that the source of their misery is Kim Jong Un. And their true ally is the people of South Korea and the people of America,” Scholte says. This kind of tactic is far more effective than any military action, Thae, the defector, said. Any surgical or preemptive strike on the North in an attempt to eliminate its nuclear facilities would only turn South Korea  —   a longtime U. S. ally where 28, 000 American troops are based  —   ”into ashes,” he told reporters. And the power of information explains why the Pyongyang regime is so resistant to moves like propaganda loudspeakers on the border, he said. ”[The] Kim Jong Un regime is trying to prevent and is trying every possibility to stop the influx of outside information,” Thae said. Information flows into the former Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc, he said, were key to crippling those systems more than two decades ago. And the many tactics to spread information into the North are working, he said. ”The leaflets, USBs with films [stored on them] can be introduced to North Korea. So the ways of educating North Korean people for people’s uprising is also evolving,” Thae said. Despite the total surveillance state in   North Korea, he said, those with the means simply pay off the officers who catch them watching or listening to outside information. ”So even this surveillance system is getting more and more corrupted,” Thae said. But that’s also giving information an opening to get into a notoriously closed country. Haeryun Kang contributed to this story."
617,"As the Trump administration is expected to overhaul America’s immigration system, some policymakers suggest looking north to Canada. That’s because Canadians see immigration as critical to their economic success. The nation has invited in so many immigrants that today,   of the population is  . Yet Canadians don’t seem to wrestle with   nativism that has erupted in the U. S. and Europe. In Toronto, scanning a business directory shows how multicultural the city is: the Association of Bulgarian Engineers, the Canadian Network of Iranian Architects, the Association of Filipino Canadian Accountants. Half the population was born under another flag. ”If you ask me where I’m from, I say I’m from Canada. And if you ask me what’s my nationality, I say Jamaica,” says Michael Thomas. He’s a      of the Caribbean Corner, a warm,   grocery in the frigid precincts of downtown Toronto. He arrived in Canada 30 years ago. For him, Toronto’s astonishing multicultural character is a global village. ”I love it,” Thomas says in his island lilt. ”I see the world in one place.” Canada knows what it wants:   workers and business entrepreneurs like Thomas. As such, Canada assigns points to prospective newcomers for job skills, education and language proficiency. They don’t even call them immigrants. ”In Canada, we do refer to immigrants as ’new Canadians,’ ” says Margaret Eaton, executive director of the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council. ”Because there is that expectation that they will come here and that they will stay. And our country, unlike others, actually provides a path to citizenship.” The night Donald Trump won the election, the Canadian immigration website crashed from the crush of panicky U. S. residents and citizens considering relocation. The next day, Rene Berrospi, a   immigration lawyer in Toronto, started getting calls, emails and Facebook messages from immigrants living in the U. S. ”I have a person who contacted me, her husband is black and also Muslim and they want to immigrate here because they see that Canada is more welcoming,” Berrospi says. ”I know there is the American dream, but people are now thinking in the Canadian dream.” ’Our identity has never been stronger’ Yet Canadian immigration is not based purely on   hospitality. This northern colossus  —   the second largest country on the globe  —   has only 36 million people. Eaton says a low national birthrate creates Canada’s immigration imperative. ”We are not replacing ourselves. So we are always relying upon bringing new immigrants into the country, but it even has more urgency now,” Eaton says. ”If we want to maintain our standard of living, we are going to have to be bringing even larger numbers of immigrants.” The United States, which admits more legal immigrants than any other country, has a different approach. Here, it’s all about family reunification: bringing in spouses, parents, children and siblings who live abroad. But consecutive Congresses have failed to update the immigration program for 27 years. Foreign nationals can wait more than a decade for a green card. The lottery system for worker visas is overburdened. And 11 million unauthorized immigrants live in the shadows. ”The biggest contrast between the U. S. and Canada,” says Chris Alexander, Canadian minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship from 2013 to 2015, ”is that we have reformed our immigration system continuously, intensively, for a decade at a time when the U. S. has been facing gridlock.” Alexander is currently running to lead the Conservative Party. He says Parliament continually tweaks the immigration system because it’s a national priority. ”The consensus in Canada that immigration is part of our economic future and that part of our identity has never been stronger,” he says. About 300, 000 permanent immigrants come into Canada every year. That’s equivalent to about one percent of its population, one of the highest ratios in the world. Ashot Verdanyan and his wife, Lora Yekhstyan, are the kinds of immigrants Canada prizes. They live in a cozy apartment in a heavily multicultural Toronto suburb. They came over from Armenia as part of the skilled worker program. He teaches English she’s an industrial engineer. ”We find that the American immigration system hasn’t been flexible,” Ashot says. Before migrating to Canada, they both lived in Iowa for nine years getting advanced degrees. ”The Canadian system is much more flexible in terms of immigration. Canada’s system is very organized. We wanted to stay in the United States, but even given our credentials, we were unable to do that, because we were restricted.” When they arrived in Canada six years ago, Yekhstyan says the government had programs in place to help them transition. ”You don’t have any family, you don’t have any friends, you don’t have anything here in Canada,” she says ”You can go straight to the newcomer centers, and they will give you support.” This is not to say every immigrant has a job waiting for them. It’s common to find doctors and engineers driving taxis in Canada. Eaton of the Immigrant Employment Council says she hears complaints about employers turning down immigrant job applicants because they lack ”Canadian experience.” ”And that can become a bit of a code word for ’I didn’t like your accent. We didn’t think you would fit in,’ ” she says. An E pluribus unum shifting north? Some parts of Canada are more welcoming to newcomers than others. ”I don’t care what people look like. I don’t care if they’re black, brown or yellow. It doesn’t matter. But don’t try to change our culture,” says John Duggan, an oilfield truck driver who lives in St. Catharines, a town near Niagara Falls. He’s digging into an omelet at Angel’s Café. Though Duggan himself was brought to Canada as a child from Ireland, he is critical of the   policies of the liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. ”I have no problem with people wanting to come here, but . .. charity begins at home. I watched Mr. Trudeau giving brand new jackets to [immigrants] coming over,” he says. ”I have no problem with that. But we have people here freezing and they need the same stuff but they have a hard time getting it.” One reason there’s not more social tension over immigrants is because Canada doesn’t struggle with illegal immigration. This nation has fewer than 150, 000 unauthorized immigrants. The United States  —   with its illegal border crossers and visa over stayers  —   has millions. It’s partly an accident of geography. ”We are lucky to have the United States. And we have only one land border,” Alexander says. ”We have Russia to the north of us. We have Danes [and] they’re not people swimming in from Greenland.” These days, Canadians are taken aback when they look south. They see the climate of fear and anger that has broken out in America toward   and Muslim immigrants. ”Canada has looked at the United States in many ways as an example of a welcoming society,” says Laura Dawson, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D. C. ”And it’s disheartening for many Canadians to see the United States be so fearful, to be so xenophobic and not to be more welcoming to other folks in the world.” Some Canadians wonder if that most American motto  —   E pluribus unum  —   out of many, one  —   has moved north."
618,"Last week, the first two of an expected 25 Syrian refugee families arrived in Rutland, Vt. a scenic,   town of 16, 000 people. Now that President Trump is expected to call for a temporary ban on Syrian refugees entering the U. S. these families may never be joined by the 23 others. For some in Rutland, that’s welcome news. But others say this rural community desperately needs the youth and diversity refugees would bring. The two Syrian families  —   four adults and five children  —   arrived without fanfare, at night. They were exhausted after two days of travel from Turkey. Rutland Mayor Christopher Louras, a champion of refugee resettlement, helped both families move in with host families. The newcomers hope to have their own apartments soon.  ”As our new neighbors were fleeing for their lives, coming to a new home a half a world away to rebuild those lives, they needed to understand that they were welcome,” he said. Speaking through an interpreter this week, members of one family said they felt relieved to be in Vermont. ”At first, we came here, and we were surprised by the very, very, warm welcome by the people of Rutland,” one Syrian said. ”The mayor, our caseworker, our host family, all came and welcomed us, and since then, it never stopped, and people have just welcomed us and helped us in every way.” Last year, Louras applied on behalf of Rutland to receive the Syrian refugees, beating out several other Vermont towns to do so. Since then, volunteers in town have been active for months, gathering donations and furniture for the new families, taking free Arabic classes and attending seminars on Middle Eastern history and Syrian culture. The local high school is planning a Syrian dinner to help introduce the refugee families to their new community. Despite all the excitement and goodwill, there remains an uncomfortable divide over bringing Syrians to town. You get a sense of it at the local farmers market, where vendors sell everything from kombucha and winter vegetables to steaming cups of mulled cider. Some in the crowd worry about the vetting process for refugees  —   is it strong enough? Others are more concerned about the cost of refugee resettlement and how it will affect city and school budgets. Local school officials and the mayor have assured residents that the newcomers won’t be a burden or cost local taxpayers more, but many are still not convinced. Michael Spafford, 51, took a break from selling fudge to admit he’s torn by the issue. ”I know the mayor and I know his family,” says Spafford. ”I know they were from Greece. And my family was from Italy. I get that America is   to all the people from different countries and that we’re a melting pot. But what I’m concerned about is, I know people who are living in the woods because they’re poor and homeless, and I know veterans who aren’t getting proper care.” Spafford says he can’t forget something President Trump said recently, ”that America is giving money out to so many other countries and so many areas. I can’t help but think we should be taking care of our own first.” Spafford pauses. ”I know that comes across as selfish,” he says, ”and my heart aches for the refugees. But my heart also aches for the locals, our own, first.” Refugee proponents  —   and there are many in Rutland  —   counter it’s not an   dilemma. But it’s a debate that’s been raging for months. Back in April, when Louras announced plans to bring in the refugee families, many were surprised. Rutland has never taken in refugees before. The mayor emphasized that helping Syrians was the right thing to do. But he also believes refugees can help solve a problem: Rutland’s shrinking population. Lyle Jepson, executive director of the Rutland Economic Development Corp. says the city’s population is expected to decline by 10 percent to 16 percent by 2030. Most of that drop will be among those younger than 50. ”What that means is we’re entering a crisis period,” says Jepson. ”We are retiring, we are living much longer and there are fewer people coming in to replace us.” Vermont’s median age, 42, is the   in the country. Only Maine skews older. A report by the Vermont Chamber Foundation projects that the entire state will need nearly 11, 000 new employees every year until 2040 to replace retirees and fill new jobs. ”We hear people say our children are leaving because there are no jobs here,” Jepson says. ”But we need to change that narrative  —   because there are jobs here.” He says young, motivated refugees would be a welcome part of the talent pool in Rutland. The newcomers from Syria include people who are multilingual. One of the refugees holds a degree in French literature. Depending on their skills, Jepson says they might find work with local hotels, nursing homes, the nearby Killington ski resort, the regional hospital or local GE plant. Back at the farmers market, Josh Squire wraps up a sale at his vegetable stand. The    farmer moved to Rutland from Delaware, which he describes as much more culturally diverse. Rutland, he says, would benefit from more diversity.  ”Different ideas can spur a new business, and that new business brings in money for the economy. Those people who are working in that new business can now come to my business and, like, it’ll spread. So having even a couple hundred more people in our little town, it’s going to make a big difference for us,” he says, smiling. But his shoulders sag as he admits that he worries if the U. S. scales back its refugee programs, Rutland’s first two Syrian families could be the last."
619,"A federal judge in Ohio has rejected the state’s   lethal injection protocol on the grounds that one of the drugs, the sedative midazolam, is not sufficiently humane in its effects. The drug has been used during multiple botched executions in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Alabama, as The   has reported. After five days of hearings, U. S. District Court Magistrate Judge Michael Merz blocked three upcoming executions in a decision issued Thursday morning, writing that the ”use of midazolam as the first drug in Ohio’s present   protocol will create a ’substantial risk of serious harm’ or an ’objectively intolerable risk of harm.’ ” In December, Arizona announced it would no longer use the drug in executions, member station KJZZ reported. Ohio was the first state to use midazolam as an execution drug. Ohio first used it to kill Dennis McGuire on Jan. 16, 2014, in an execution that took 24 minutes and during which ”McGuire started struggling and gasping loudly for air, making snorting and choking sounds which lasted for at least 10 minutes,” according to a witness. The plaintiffs in the Ohio case are the next three people scheduled to be executed in Ohio in the first part of this year. Ronald Phillips was scheduled for execution on Feb. 15, Gary Otte on March 15 and Raymond Tibbetts on April 12 according to the Ohio Department of Corrections. Their executions have been put on hold as a result of Thursday’s decision. In court filings, the prisoners argued that the use of midazolam violated the Eighth Amendment and amounted to a reversion to a ”more primitive, less humane execution method,” citing past executions involving the drug in which prisoners appeared to struggle, regain consciousness, writhe and die slowly over the course of minutes or even hours. Ohio’s lethal injection statute requires ”a lethal injection of a drug or combination of drugs of sufficient dosage to quickly and painlessly cause death.” The U. S. Supreme Court ruled   in 2015 that using midazolam for executions did not violate the Constitution. However, as Judge Merz noted in his decision, the high court did not ”logically imply that it can never be proven that midazolam presents an objectively intolerable risk of harm.” As a result, Merz felt his court was free to evaluate the potential harmfulness of midazolam, despite the higher court’s previous ruling. As we reported, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion that ”the prisoners failed to identify a known and available alternative method of execution that entails a lesser risk of pain, a requirement of all Eighth Amendment   execution claims.” Merz wrote that such a method exists in the form of barbiturates, which were the lethal injection drugs of choice until pharmaceutical companies began blocking their sale for executions, as The   also has reported. Merz wrote in Thursday’s decision: ”All the parties and witnesses in this case agree that use of a barbiturate, either as the first drug in a   protocol or as the sole drug, would be preferable to the current Ohio protocol in that it would eliminate the side effects observed in   executions identified in the lay testimony and would also eliminate (or at least reduce to a constitutionally acceptable level) the risk of subjecting the inmate to severe pain.” ”The question, then, is the availability of barbiturates,” he continued, explaining that there is no legal requirement that barbiturates be available in order to qualify as an alternative execution method. The state will decide whether to appeal the decision. There are currently 140 people on death row in Ohio."
620,"Esteban Santiago Ruiz, the    man arrested shortly after the shooting at Fort   International Airport on Jan. 6, has been indicted on 22 counts by a federal grand jury. Santiago allegedly killed five people in the baggage claim area of Terminal 2 after retrieving a weapon from a checked bag and loading it in the bathroom. Mary Louise Amzibel, Michael John Oehme, Olga M . Woltering, Shirley Wells Timmons and Terry Michael Andres all died, according to the indictment. The indictment includes five counts of ”violence at an international airport resulting in death,” as well as numerous weapons charges for allegedly firing a Walther   pistol. U. S. law specifically prohibits, and specifies federal jurisdiction over, the unauthorized use of weapons inside an international civilian airport. The provision was part of the massive Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. As NPR’s Colin Dwyer reported, Santiago served as a combat engineer in the National Guard in Puerto Rico and Alaska, and was discharged from service last year for unsatisfactory performance. Colin also reported: ”During Santiago’s time with the Puerto Rico National Guard, he was deployed to Iraq from April 2010 to February 2011. The U. S. pulled troops from the country at the end of that year. ”His aunt, Maria Ruiz Rivera, tells The Record of New Jersey that after he returned, she noticed changes in his mental health. ” ’He lost his mind,’ Ruiz Rivera told the newspaper in Spanish. ’He said he saw things.’ ”Over the course of 2016, Santiago was repeatedly reported to Anchorage police for physical disturbances, according to the city’s police chief, Christopher Tolley  —   including two separate reports of domestic violence and strangulation in October last year. ”The next month, Santiago walked into an FBI office in Anchorage ’to report that his mind was being controlled by a U. S. intelligence agency,’ said FBI special agent Marlin Ritzman, at a Saturday press conference. Tolley described them as ’terroristic thoughts,’ in which ’he believed he was being influenced by ISIS.’ ” Addressing Santiago’s mental state briefly, the indictment alleges the crime was committed ”after substantial planning and premeditation,” and accuses him of ”intentionally” killing five people and that his actions ”constituted a reckless disregard for human life.” Santiago is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges on Jan. 30, according to a press release by the Department of Justice."
621,"President Trump says he wants a swift and complete victory over the Islamic State, and he inherits the battle at a moment when the extremist group is losing ground in Iraq and Syria. The group’s   caliphate is looking increasingly fragile. Could 2017 be the year the U. S. and its allies break the back of ISIS? Progress is being made in the war against the Islamic State, according to analysts. But they caution that the U. S. is likely to face a recurring challenge in the Middle East: how to turn battlefield gains into a comprehensive political solution. ”The quickest way to lose against ISIS would be declaring victory too soon,” says Jessica Lewis McFate of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D. C. ”ISIS is fighting a multigenerational war, and we need to think that way as well.” Trump heads to the Pentagon on Friday for his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the war with ISIS is expected to be at or near the top of the agenda. Here are several key questions to watch this year: 1. Will Trump take a radically different approach than Barack Obama? Their rhetoric is diametrically opposed, but it’s not clear how that will translate into policy. Obama’s watchwords were patience, restraint and a limited American role. He took a lot of heat from Republicans who said he didn’t do enough to roll back ISIS. Yet since he ordered the U. S. air campaign in the summer of 2014, ISIS has lost most of its territory in Iraq, and chunks in Syria as well. Trump’s inaugural address didn’t mention ISIS by name, though he said his administration would ”unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.” Trump hasn’t laid out details, such as whether he wants to add to the roughly 6, 000 American military personnel in Iraq and Syria, where they are training, advising and carrying out the air campaign. They’re often close to the front lines or soaring above them, but they’re not supposed to be in ground combat. Escalating the air campaign is an option, with caveats. After some 17, 000 U. S. airstrikes over the past couple of years, ISIS targets are increasingly hard to find, and ISIS members often seek shelter by clustering in civilian areas. ”There are not a whole series of targets we have simply not hit. That’s not the case,” Deborah James, who just stepped down as Air Force secretary, told U. S. News and World Report. ”What we have been very careful about is making sure we know what we’re hitting, and taking care to hit what we intend to hit.” 2. Should Iraq and Syria be viewed as two separate wars? The U. S. focus is on ISIS in both countries, but the wars are at different stages right now. ISIS has been greatly weakened in Iraq. The northern city of Mosul is its last stronghold, and after four months of fighting, ISIS has been driven out of the eastern half of the city on the eastern bank of the Tigris River. A major battle is looming in the densely packed western part of the city, which could also involve months of fighting. If ISIS is driven out of Mosul, it would be a diminished threat, though it could still press on with its campaign of car bombs that target Baghdad and several other key cities. In Syria, ISIS has lost ground but still controls large parts of eastern Syria, including Raqqa, its de facto capital in the desert. The U. S. is working with Arab and Kurdish fighters, and they have come as close as 17 miles from Raqqa. But all forecasts point to a long, hard slog to uproot ISIS. And ISIS is just one faction in the hugely complicated Syrian war. ”ISIS is still in a very good position in Syria because everyone else is in a bad position,” said Lewis McFate. ”Right now, it’s hard to see a good political future for any of the actors.” 3. How is ISIS responding in its weakened state? The Islamic State is ambitious and unpredictable. Its ambition was on display during its rapid expansion in 2014, as it gained men, money and territory, seemingly by the day. All these resources have been shrinking for the past year or more. ISIS has more trouble attracting new recruits, partly because Turkey has tightened its border with Syria, the main gateway for foreign fighters. When ISIS was surging, it paid regular salaries to its fighters. The group looted Iraqi banks and sold oil from Syrian wells it captured. Those sources are drying up after sustained attacks. ”We are destroying [ISIS’] economic base,” Brett McGurk, Obama’s point man on the group, said last month. ”Their fighters are not getting paid, and we have multiple indications of that,” added McGurk, who has remained in his post during the early days of the Trump administration. However, the group has been full of surprises and that’s why it’s expected to remain dangerous. Major terror attacks in Turkey and Europe have demonstrated the group’s reach, and as it loses ground at its core in the Middle East, lashing out abroad is a way to show it’s still relevant. Counterterrorism officials warn that fighters in Syria and Iraq could flee from the collapsing former Islamic State and continue to pose a terror threat in the West. ISIS also has a habit of returning to places where it was dislodged. ISIS recaptured the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra last month, several months after it had been driven out. For good measure, it recently destroyed part of Palmyra’s most famous Roman ruins. 4. What about ”the day after?” What’s the plan if ISIS is defeated? In Iraq, the path ahead is relatively clear. Not easy, but clear. Obama’s approach envisioned an Iraqi government and military that would own the fight against ISIS. Iraqis will play the lead role and that will give them the strength and credibility to take control after the fighting. The Iraqi government will have to rebuild cities, unify the country and guard against a return to sectarian feuds. Previous governments failed miserably, and this one might, too, but at least there’s broad agreement on the aim. In Syria, the puzzle has many more pieces, and it’s not clear if any of them fit together. If the U. S. and its allies dislodge ISIS, some party would still need to take political control in eastern Syria. If the U. S. doesn’t want to occupy the region  —   and there’s no sign it does  —   the Trump administration would have to find someone who could hold it. The limited options would include the hodgepodge of local factions that are at odds with President Bashar Assad’s government, which might have its own designs on the region. And relative calm in eastern Syria doesn’t mean peace will break out in the more heavily populated western part of the country. That’s where the Syrian government, with its Russian and Iranian allies, is still at war with multiple rebel groups. Greg Myre is a national security correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @gregmyre1."
622,"The minute hand on the Doomsday Clock ticked closer to midnight Thursday, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said it’s seeing an increase in dangers to humanity, from climate change to nuclear warfare. The group took the ”unprecedented” step of moving the clock 30 seconds closer to midnight, to leave it at 2   minutes away. The setting is the closest the symbolic clock has come to midnight since 1953, when scientists moved it to two minutes from midnight after seeing both the U. S. and the Soviet Union test hydrogen bombs. It remained at that mark until 1960. ”Make no mistake, this has been a difficult year,” Rachel Bronson, executive director and publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said as the new setting was announced Thursday. Explaining its move, the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board said: ”Over the course of 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change . .. This   world situation was the backdrop for a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a U. S. presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.” The board criticized President Trump further, saying that ”even though he has just now taken office, the president’s intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice, and questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international security situation worse.” Last year, the Doomsday Clock’s setting didn’t change from 2015, when it jumped two notches to three minutes before midnight  —   the closest it had been to midnight since the early era of   hydrogen bomb testing. Created in 1947, the Doomsday Clock was conceived by scientists who had participated in the Manhattan Project. Initially seen as an indicator of the likelihood of disastrous nuclear conflict, it now also includes other threats, such as climate change, biological weapons and cyberthreats. It’s the first time in the Doomsday Clock’s   history that the advisory board has adjusted the clock by 30 seconds. The decision to advance the clock was announced at the National Press Club, where speakers included board members former U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering and physicist Lawrence Krauss. A simultaneous event was held at Stanford University that featured California Gov. Jerry Brown, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former Defense Secretary William Perry. ”Facts are stubborn things,” Krauss said, ”and they must be taken into account if the future of humanity is to be preserved.” The Doomsday Clock, physicist Lawrence Krauss said at Thursday’s event, offers ”a rare opportunity to reach the global public directly.” Urging members of the public to speak to their political leaders, he added that important decisions about humanity’s future shouldn’t be left to a few men. ”President Trump and President Putin, who claim great respect for each other, can choose to act together as statesmen, or act as petulant children, risking our future,” Krauss said. His direct comments sparked the first question after board members had made their initial statements, as Tracy Wilkinson of The Los Angeles Times asked Krauss, ”You said this shouldn’t be left in the hands of one or two leaders making crazy statements. I know you mean Trump, but is the second person Putin?” As Krauss answered yes, another panel member, Thomas Pickering, added, ”Good guess.”"
623,"It seems readily apparent that the writer of a book titled Bad Feminist would register significant disagreement  —   to put it politely  —   with a writer who has called feminism ”bowel cancer.” But when Roxane Gay realized she was to be published on the imprint of the same publisher that recently signed Milo Yiannopoulos to a   book deal, she made that disapproval quite clear. ”I can’t in good conscience let them publish it while they also publish Milo,” Gay told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday. ”So I told my agent over the weekend to pull the project.” That project, currently titled How to Be Heard, had been set to publish through TED Books, a Simon  Schuster imprint. Yiannopoulos, a tech editor at Breitbart News, has drawn significant backlash for consistently provocative statements on the conservative website  —   and for getting banned from Twitter last year. That ban followed his prominent role in the gamergate controversy and a campaign of racist and abusive messages directed at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. Yiannopoulos, for his part, has dismissed the criticism as politically motivated and as an attempt to silence dissenting opinions. Late last year, another Simon  Schuster imprint  —   Threshold Editions, which is geared toward conservative readers  —   agreed to a book deal with Yiannopoulos worth $250, 000, according to multiple media reports. That news didn’t sit well with a lot of Simon  Schuster authors. So much so, in fact, that the publisher’s president and CEO sent a letter reassuring them that ”we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech.” Others in the publishing industry also voiced their distaste with the deal. Dennis Johnson, head of the independent publisher Melville House, explained his reasoning to NPR’s Lynn Neary: ”Nobody in the protest is saying, ’You have no right to be published. You have no right, Simon  Schuster, to publish this guy, and this guy, you have no right to be published’  —   nobody’s saying that. ”What they’re saying is, ’We’re shocked and we’re outraged that you would stoop so low to make a buck as to publish this purveyor of vile hate speech.’ ” It didn’t sit well with Gay either, she said in her statement, but at first she thought she didn’t have anything to do with it  —   until she remembered TED Books’ association with the publisher. ”I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation,” Gay said. ”I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in.” Though she acknowledged that TED Books and Threshold are different imprints, with different staffs and intended audiences, Gay said the link between them through Simon  Schuster was still too much for her. She found herself ”fortunate enough to be in a position to make this decision”  —   so, she said, ”I’m putting my money where my mouth is.” Gay said she has not yet found a new publisher for her project."
624,"Girls in the first few years of elementary school are less likely than boys to say that their own gender is ”really, really smart,” and less likely to opt into a game described as being for   kids, research finds. The study, which appears Thursday in Science, comes amid a push to figure out why women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, fields. One line of research involves stereotypes, and how they might influence academic and career choices. Andrei Cimpian, a professor of psychology at New York University and an author of the study, says his lab’s previous work showed that women were particularly underrepresented in both STEM and humanities fields whose members thought you needed to be brilliant  —   that is, to have innate talent  —   to succeed. ”You might think these stereotypes start in college, but we know from a lot of developmental work that children are incredibly attuned to social signals,” Cimpian says. So they decided to look at kids from ages 5 to 7, the period during which stereotypes seem to start to take hold. The researchers conducted a series of experiments that included 400 children. In one, they took 96 kids and asked them a series of questions about brilliance and gender. For example, they were told a brief story about a person who was ”really, really smart” and then asked to pick the protagonist from four photos, two of men and two of women. Across the various questions,    boys said their own gender was smart 71 percent of the time, compared to 69 percent of the time for girls. Among    the numbers were 65 percent for boys and 48 percent for girls. And among    it was 68 percent for boys and 54 percent for girls. ”The surprising thing is that already, by age 6, girls and boys are saying different things,” says Sapna Cheryan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington who wasn’t involved with the research. ”Before they’ve heard of physics or computer science they are getting these messages.” Another experiment showed that even as older girls were less likely to associate their own gender with brilliance, they (correctly) assessed that at their age, girls were more likely to get good grades in school. And another experiment asked   and    about the appeal of two similar imaginary games, one intended for ”children who are really, really smart,” and one for ”children who try really, really hard.” Girls were less interested than boys in the game aimed at smart kids but interest was similar in the game for hard workers. The research can’t explain how these messages are getting to kids or how they could be changed, says Cimpian. He is planning a   study of young children that would measure environmental factors, including media exposure and parental beliefs. That would give a better idea of what factors predict the emergence of stereotypes, and what levers are available to change attitudes. Research does suggest that role models might ”inoculate” women and members of other underrepresented groups. So the movie Hidden Figures, about female   mathematicians at NASA during the late 1950s and early 1960s, could inspire girls and teens of color to pursue STEM fields. But it’s also important to step back and ask what the goal of any intervention should be, says Cheryan. Girls, after all, were split about evenly in associating brilliance with their gender, she notes. The boys were more likely to make the association with their own gender. So do girls need help in thinking more like the boys, or vice versa? Cimpian says it’s important not to fall into the trap of always assuming it’s the girls who need to change. But he says that girls at this age are usually overwhelmingly positive about their own gender, so any deviation from that baseline may suggest the beginning of negative attitudes. Another approach is to change the characterization of the academic fields themselves, namely that certain areas require inborn brilliance rather than hard work. ”Stereotypes are all about who has an innate ability,” says Cimpian. If kids were instead exposed to the idea that success comes not because of fixed ability, but because of hard work over time (a   ”growth mindset,” the idea developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck,) maybe those stereotypes would lose their punch. Kids might also benefit from being exposed early on to fields like engineering, which aren’t typically studied in high school, to demystify them, says Cheryan. Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer based in Brooklyn, N. Y. She’s on Twitter: @katherinehobson."
625,"It’s been 14 years since the Williams sisters last played for the Australian Open title  —   but they’ll do it again on Saturday, in a final that showcases two of the most successful careers in tennis. At 36, Venus Williams is the oldest Grand Slam finalist since Martina Navratilova’s run to the Wimbledon final in 1994. For now at least, the Australian Open’s final bracket is strictly for the   club. On the men’s side, Roger Federer reached Sunday’s final with a   victory over Stan Wawrinka. At age 35, he’ll face either Rafael Nadal or Grigor Dimitrov, who play on Friday. The women’s final ”won’t be an easy match. I know that it won’t be easy,” Venus said after earning her spot. ”You have to control yourself, then you also have to hopefully put your opponent in a box. This opponent is your sister, and she’s super awesome.” Her sister Serena is indeed super awesome. At age 35, she’s the   player in the world and will play in her eighth Australian Open final after beating Mirjana   in just 50 minutes. World No. 1 Angelique Kerber didn’t reach the semifinals after losing to American CoCo Vandeweghe  —   who fell to Venus Williams in three sets Thursday. With a combined age of 71 and the experience of decades of elite tennis, both of the Williams sisters are motivated to win this final. Their only other meeting for the Australian Open title came back in 2003, when Serena won. For Venus, the match is her first Grand Slam singles final since Wimbledon in 2009. And while she has seven Grand Slam singles titles in her career, she’s never won the Australian Open. For Serena, the final brings a chance to break the tie for most Grand Slam titles  —   22  —   that she currently shares with Steffi Graf. The mark is a record in the Open era."
626,"When I was 9 years old, suddenly finding out I would have to inject myself with insulin and watch what I ate every day was quite a heavy load. But Mary Tyler Moore gave me hope that I was gonna make it after all. Back then, in 1973, she was the only famous person I knew with Type 1 diabetes. She never looked depressed or unhappy  “ quite the opposite. Daily shots couldn’t be that bad, I reasoned, if Mary can do it and still turn the world on with her smile. Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 33, just as The Mary Tyler Moore Show was getting off the ground. She would become a double hero for me, as much for the strong single   character she portrayed on the show as for her real life, lived so fully with Type 1 diabetes. Moore spent decades advocating for diabetes research and for people with diabetes, including testifying in front of Congress and public service campaigns for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, now known as JDRF. (The organization has set up a website for people to post tributes to Moore.) Soon after my diagnosis, I wrote her a letter telling her how much she had helped me accept my diabetes. Weeks later, I received a beautiful autographed photo of her. The autograph was preprinted, but still . .. Maybe she’d actually read my letter! In August 1997, I had the chance to meet her when she spoke during a ceremony held at Georgetown University in Washington, D. C. to announce three   projects related to diabetes, including one specifically for Type 1.   Bill Clinton thanked Moore for her ”long, tireless and selfless efforts” and was whisked off at the end of the event. But she stayed, chatting with attendees. I shyly approached her and introduced myself as a medical journalist living with diabetes and writing about it for doctors. She shook my hand warmly. When I told her that I’d written to her as a child, she touched my arm and anxiously asked, ”Did I reply?” When I told her that indeed she’d sent me a photo, she exclaimed, ”Oh, thank goodness!” Moore was a pioneer in not only going public with her diabetes, but taking it on as a cause, says Desmond Schatz, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Florida. ”She used her position, one of tremendous respect in the world, to raise awareness about Type 1 diabetes,” he says. ”She has inspired and encouraged so many.” She also served as a stoic model of acceptance of the disease, which which in her case meant taking four insulin injections a day and constant monitoring in an effort to keep her blood sugar in check, all while keeping up with the demands of a showbiz life. Later, as she developed complications from the condition, she spoke candidly about that as well. Schatz, who is immediate past   of the American Diabetes Association, for which Moore also advocated, says: ”Some people deny it. She was never in denial. For her it was ’I have it, and I have to deal with it.’ She dealt with it.” Many celebrities with diabetes have followed Moore’s advocacy lead, including Nick Jonas, Bret Michaels, Patti LaBelle and Tom Hanks. Other prominent advocates include Olympic gold medalist swimmer Gary Hall, Jr. Miss America 1999 Nicole Johnson, and Miss Idaho 2014 Sierra Sandison, who famously wore her insulin pump on her bikini for the state pageant and won. But Mary Tyler Moore was out there first, and always with a smile. Miriam E. Tucker is a freelance journalist specializing in medicine and health. You can follow her on Twitter @MiriamETucker."
627,"Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday, wasn’t just beloved. She was the kind of beloved where they build you a statue. Moore’s statue is in Minneapolis, where her   character, Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, worked for the fictional television station WJM. She’d already won two Emmys playing Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but Moore cemented her icon status when Mary Richards walked into that job interview. Even if she got off to a rough start with Lou Grant, her    boss, who kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk. He wanted her to join him for a drink. She asked for a Brandy Alexander. He didn’t mean a Brandy Alexander. Mary Richards was not TV’s first working woman, or its first woman on her own. But before Mary, if you saw a woman without a partner at the center of a TV comedy, she was probably a widow, like Diahann Carroll’s single mom on Julia or Lucille Ball on the show she did after I Love Lucy, which was, perhaps unsurprisingly, called The Lucy Show. Mary didn’t have a living husband, a dead husband, an   or even a permanent boyfriend like Marlo Thomas did on That Girl. It wasn’t that she didn’t want one. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong wrote Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, a history of the show. And in 2013, she told NPR how Mary stayed single for so long: The show tried out some possible boyfriends, but ”no one was good enough for her.” Mary may not have found that exactly right guy, but she did have an apartment, a job, friends and a sex life. In fact, she was on birth control, as the audience learned in November 1972, when Mary’s parents were visiting. Her mother cheerfully called out, ”Don’t forget to take your pill.” Mary and her father both answered, ”I won’t.” Comedies about single women with all kinds of lives would become staples of both broadcast and cable: Laverne  Shirley, Murphy Brown, Living Single, Sex And The City, and now Girls and Insecure  —   but Mary and her best friend Rhoda were there first. Mary had bad dates before Rachel and Monica on Friends did, Mary had to get the show on the air before Liz Lemon on 30 Rock did, and Mary struggled with a gruff but loving boss before Leslie Knope on Parks  Recreation did. I talked to Rachel Bloom, the star and   of the CW’s Crazy  . She told me one of the things she most appreciated was that Moore was funny on her own. She responded to ”the idea of someone being a funny ingenue,” she says, ”in that she was funny as well as the people around her. And that it was a woman cracking jokes, not just, like, the woman being the straight man for dudes cracking jokes.” Women mattered behind the scenes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, too. They had roles as writers and directors. And Moore and her   Grant Tinker set up MTM Enterprises to produce the show  —   you might remember the logo with a mewing cat where the MGM lion would have been. That company produced not just The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda and Lou Grant, but The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Minneapolis’ Mary Tyler Moore statue was moved indoors in 2015, away from its home on the outdoor Nicollet Mall, to make way for construction. But later this year, it’s scheduled to return. And once again, tourists will copy Mary Tyler Moore’s pose, and they will throw their hats in the air."
628,"1. Don’t. 2. No Seriously, Netflix: Do Not. This is a thing for which no one  —   no one  —   was clamoring. There’s still time to turn back! I’m the creepy guy at the beginning of the horror movie, imploring you not to enter the abandoned   from the     for a swim, at night, alone. You don’t have to do this. Save yourselves! . .. Ok. Ok, you’re not gonna let this go? You’re really going to revive Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which ran on Bravo from 2003 to 2007, on which five gay men  —   the waggish Carson, the raffish Thom, the nerdy Ted, the sexy Kyan, and also Jai was there  —   made over hapless straight men in five key areas, respectively: Fashion, Design, Cuisine, Grooming and . .. Other? Fine. It’s both wildly unnecessary, and, according to my calculations (detailed for your    betterment of the whole damn world at the bottom of this post, under ”Notes on Reboots and Probability”) premature. But fine. Go nuts. Here’s my third piece of advice, then. 3. Find New Hosts.  Looks like you’re already on this. You’ve announced that the original Fab Five may make return appearances in some form, but you’ll be looking for fresh blood to make quips. And drink. And come up with their own weird ways to say ”push up your sleeves.” And teach straight guys how and why to abjure overhead lighting, and how to make a simple pasta dish, and shave with the grain, and [note to self: come back later and insert whatever the hell Jai did, here]. In a very real sense, Queer Eye offered a crisp slap in the complacent,   face of the   archetype, which (not coincidentally) the wider culture of the  ’00s was then eagerly embracing. Like so many makeover shows, QEftSG said, simply: ”Look, just try.” The key difference, of course, was to whom that advice was directed for once, it wasn’t women being lectured about the sundry patriarchal standards they were expected to uphold, it was . .. the patriarchy itself. ”Look, you lazy, schlubby,   lout,” it said. ”You must make an effort. For your girlfriend, for yourself: Try harder than sweatpants.” That was the gig, and original Fab Five acquitted themselves admirably. But the world’s changed. 4. You Know What, Let’s Revisit That Whole ”Don’t” Idea. There was always something reductive and retrograde about the premise, admit it. The notion that there’s only one ”Queer Eye”  —   one kind of gay man, in this case, who can dependably be expected to wax fabulous about food and furniture and fashion and haircare and [wait, was it getting tickets to shows? I think Jai was about getting tickets to shows] is flatly wrong. I say this as a gay man who subsists on turkey breast sandwiches and lives to avoid shopping. Our numbers are legion. (Quick, true story: back when Queer Eye premiered, my     and I used to watch it every week with friends. We had drinks, we laughed, we   over the obtuseness of the     . We knew it trafficked in stereotypes  —   gleefully so  —   but because the show clearly did so intentionally, it seemed harmless. Very early in the show’s run my partner and I found ourselves at a party at which a gay couple we’d never met absolutely lit into the show even used the  . ”Gay minstrelry,” one of them sniffed we winced. He followed that up with another unfortunate, reductive  : ”Middle America sees that show and thinks we’re not real people, we’re just mincing stereotypes, we’re all the same. It makes them think that every gay man just thinks and talks about gay this and gay that.” I attempted to steer the conversation to other matters by asking what he and his boyfriend did for a living. Which is how I learned they were professional figure skating judges.) 5. Put The Queer In Queer Eye, Already. Pursuant to item 4, above: Maybe listen to queer   Adam Goldman, who yesterday tweeted, in reaction to the Queer Eye announcement: ”How about queer eye for the queer guy? There are some basic gay                         out here.” Amen. Also: I volunteer as tribute. Lord knows I could always stand with a good lecture about, like, beard conditioning or whatnot. The culture, as seen on TV, has changed since 2003. There are still a lot of straight   taking up space at its center, of course, but there are more queer people, more people of color, more women jostling for space as well. The QE reboot, if you insist on it happening, has to reflect that. Yes, the show was silly, and frothy, and fun. But it also never truly lived up to its title. It claimed to hold a queer eye up to (hapless, indolent, doesn’        ) nature  —   but in fact the eye in question was always, invariably, that of very specific, loftily urbane and comfortably urban gay male experience. Queer means a lot more than that. So could the show. 6. Bring It. The original Queer Eye premiered on Bravo just a few months after the U. S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and it ended amid the 2007 troop surge. As such, it served a demonstrable purpose, over and above teaching a bunch of mooks in hockey jerseys how to follow a basic moisturizing regimen. It was a release valve for a kind of collective national anxiety. Ten years later, we’re living through another anxious time. This one lacks the clear focus of a specific military action it’s all around us, in the air we breathe. So if you’re going to do this, Netflix, do it big. 7. Or, Maybe, Don’t. I’m just saying: You haven’t started casting yet. There is still time to turn back from this path and keep the original show preserved in amber  —   tasteful, bespoke,     amber, with its sleeves forever, freshly zhuzhed. The graph reproduced below is the product of my advanced,   calculations in re: the percent probability that a given property (often, but not exclusively, a TV show) will get rebooted in 2017. The algorithm in question, which I fed into vast banks of computers using a series of punch cards, describes a graceful bell curve which is real, and all like, scientific, and was in no way just scribbled on the back of a dry cleaning receipt. So we’re clear on that. Here’s the gist: The probability that a given property will be rebooted depends upon the year it first premiered. As we go back in time from 2017, this probability increases steeply to reach a peak in 1995, and then falls off more gradually. Because science is why. Thus, the section of the curve wherein this probability exceeds 50% (the dotted horizontal line) extends between 1986 and 2001. Clip and save for your records. You will find it useful. This means that the probability that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, premiering as it did in 2003, would get rebooted this year stood at 40%. Which is to say: it wasn’t likely, but the possibility was real, considerable. Weirder things have happened, with an even smaller probability."
629,"Editor’s Note: On Jan. 31, Philip Glass turns 80. We’re marking the event by asking a few of his collaborators and colleagues to write about him and his music. Paul Simon contributed lyrics to a song from Glass’ 1986 album Songs from Liquid Days. Look for essays this week from Errol Morris, Nico Muhly, David Lang and Laurie Anderson. It’s difficult to choose one Philip Glass piece and call it a favorite. My mind immediately goes to the first time I saw Einstein on the Beach at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Satyagraha at the Metropolitan Opera  —   the beauty of the productions and the live orchestra had a unique power that left an indelible memory. But then, the films Koyaanisqatsi and Kundun allowed the music to prevail in a manner equally as powerful in a cinematic context. Of Glass’s recordings, the 2006 live performance of Music in 12 Parts is exceptional and inspiring for its accuracy, and the sheer stamina required of the ensemble to do justice to this monumental   long piece. As a musician, I am fascinated by Glass’s use of repetition and symmetry. The way he subtly breaks patterns by changing time signatures, or playing different time signatures (a three against two) to interrupt the repetition before it numbs the mind. It allows the listeners to swim in an almost   state until a new musical motif is introduced. As an orchestrator, Glass has an ear for unique combinations of sounds, like in his piece Voices written for organ and didgeridoo. His symphonic works, too, combine or contrast instruments and voices in a distinctive way: Strings and woodwinds merge with synthesizers played at a level of intensity usually associated with rock music. His use of what he calls an ”end piece”  —   a short coda which does not recapitulate the melodic lines of the larger preceding piece  —   is an idea that he used beautifully to conclude my song ”The Late Great Johnny Ace.” That end piece concept has found its way into my arrangements for live shows, as the band plays a related but original addition to a song, allowing me to shape endings to sequences of songs, or to set the environment for the next tune. Philip Glass’s thinking has been pervasive in several other music genres beyond his classical home, rightfully earning him credit as the most influential of modern classical composers."
630,"When   Coates’ new Black Panther comics hit shelves last year, they proved to be more of a challenge than a treat. That’s no wonder, actually: If you ask a writer who specializes in picking apart the knotty mesh of   experience (Coates won the National Book Award for 2015’s Between the World and Me) to pen your comic book, you have to expect the result to be somewhat daunting. The new Black Panther incarnation certainly is that. This second volume of Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet  —   which takes its title from a Pulitzer   book about   political history  —   is just as dense with crisscrossed narratives, tangled motivations and previously established plotlines as the first volume was. Which is appropriate, considering the Panther’s place in the history of comics: Created in 1966, he was mainstream comics’ first black superhero, an avatar of racial progress. And racial progress has never been simple. (It can be bestselling, though, as Coates demonstrated when Vol. 1 became one of 2016’s top comics.) Coates, who won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 2015, clearly sees his project here as similar to  —   and overlapping with  —   his work writing about race in America. ”I understand the need, particularly among black fans, to see T’Challa . .. restored to a certain place,” he told io9’s Evan Narcisse last year. ”This is like in my bones. I feel a deep responsibility to history.” The inescapability of history is just one of Coates’   themes in this book. He’s also got a hearty distaste for the rule of one over many  —   even when the One is the Black Panther, a. k. a. T’Challa, rightful king of the mythical African nation of Wakanda. This volume finds the mysterious prophet Zenzi and the warrior Tetu  —   leaders of the insurgent group known tellingly as ”The People”  —   still at odds with T’Challa. He’s still a slippery, morally ambiguous protagonist, using force to thwart democratic rebellion and seeking advice from a devils’ council of counterterrorism experts, even as he frets,   about his destiny. One of the strongmen sums T’Challa up with surprising acumen: ”Your problem is schizophrenia,” he says. ”You lack the will to follow your own mores. Return to your true nature, and your country will be as peaceful as any of ours.” What is that nature? The strongman and his fellows believe it’s essentially imperial, but T’Challa’s true heart actually seems to be both greater and less than that of a monarch. As Zenzi puts it, T’Challa ”does not want to be a king. He wants to be a hero.” (No wonder he’s spent so much time, as one character says, ”gallivanting with Avengers” over the years.) This volume sees the addition of some  —   but only some  —     levity along with equally galvanizing   buttkicking. But the problems that marred episodes   are still in evidence. Coates, a philosopher at the core, too often allows his characters to get lost in their thoughts, and the action on the page sometimes takes a backseat to their   rumination  —   which is a shame, considering the quality of Black Panther’s artists. Chris Sprouse, Karl Story and Laura Martin beautifully conjure the Wakandan world. The textures are satiny, the action scenes inventive and the characters richly delineated. While T’Challa pursues his labyrinthine quest, his sister Shuri is   on a plane of Wakandan collective memory. Here she encounters the myths of   Wakanda, and here Coates’ storytelling is particularly satisfying: He tells of Ife, enslaved and deprived of her power of flight Oronde, the boy who raced a cheetah and Sologon, the queen who led warriors and told her son, ”Spirit of iron makes skin of stone.” Coates has a knack for aphorisms. Another one that resonates is the sage Changamire’s accusation to the rebels: ”You kill what you cannot control, break what you cannot bend.” Wise words like these suggest the rebels and T’Challa may eventually find some path to reconciliation. It’s hard to see a way, but presumably the author of Between the World and Me can envision one. However violent and conflicted Wakanda’s current story, Coates still says ”there is no fist wide enough to hide the sky.” Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and Salon. com. She tweets at @EtelkaL."
631,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Mauro Remiddi is broadening his horizons. Four years ago, the   New   musician released his critically acclaimed debut   Strange Weekend, which was assembled in a basement in Brooklyn. Two albums later, he’s issued Microclimate, and the backdrop is much vaster. Prior to recording it, Remiddi traveled to locales as   as Barbados, Bali and Big Sur, among others, soaking up perspectives and environments in an attempt to infuse his new album with a different sort of depth. His prior work has never skimped on emotional richness, but on Microclimate, he’s setting that introspective impressionism within a context as large as nature itself. ”Like a tiny whisper   Like a distant shore,” Remiddi sings in a wispy, elfin voice at the start of ”The Earth Before Us,” the opening song on Microclimate. It’s a brief song full of acoustic guitars and gentle pulses of beauty, and it sets the tone for the excursions, both internal and external, to come. From there, the record wanders far and wide. As their titles imply, ”Big Sur” and ”Kookaburra” draw from the artist’s specific experiences in faraway places, but rather than functioning as musical travelogues, they capture sketchy portraits filtered through a lens of longing and wonder. Ethereal   guitar coalesces into an aquatic lull in ”Big Sir,” while Remiddi sings, ”Burned leaves beneath the trees   It’s getting dark, my body spins.” Meanwhile, ”Kookaburra” evokes that bird’s Oceania home, complete with a subtropical sway and a heady dose of magic realism: ”Mechanical birds flying by, flying by   A second moon in the sky   Cities hanging     Oh, if you could see them now.” That’s exactly what Remiddi does: He makes you see the places he’s encoded in song. Splitting the difference between ambient electronic music and the musings of a traditional   he infuses ”The Greatest View” and ”Bring Me To The River” with soaring, atmospheric imagism. Finely crafted and achingly tuneful, ”Accelerating Curve” plays with trippy stereo tricks and traffics in screeching, psychedelic dynamics, adding a   dose of muscularity and heft to his otherwise delicate compositions. This isn’t an   album as soft and breezy as it can get, Remiddi keeps a careful eye on incorporating both tension and release, both apprehension and bliss. The album’s final two songs, ”The Poets Were Right” and ”Zero Frame Per Second,” sum up Remiddi’s captivating marriage of verse and visuals. Amid plaintive piano and minimalist blips, he uses his featherweight voice as a vehicle, singing of islands and illusions, beginnings and inevitable extinctions. Many journeys and attempts to commune with nature delivered Mauro Remiddi to Microclimate. If the album’s hushed, lush grandeur is any indication, that connection was a profound one."
632,"Testosterone Rex is extinct. That’s the central conclusion of a fascinating new book by University of Melbourne psychologist Cordelia Fine. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society hit the bookstores Tuesday. ”Testosterone Rex” is a nickname for the view that women and men are essentially different, owing very largely to biology. The hormone testosterone is, in this view, a biological agent that makes men more liable to seek a variety of sexual partners, more prone to   and so on. Pretty much everyone agrees these days that nature and nurture both play a role in how humans develop. Nonetheless, Fine writes, Testosterone Rex is still a powerful perspective that gives much greater weight to nature when it comes to gender. She describes it like this: ”Of course there is variability  —   not all men are identical, nor are all women. But amid all the ’noise’ of individual differences, a male or female ’essence’ can be extracted: characteristics of maleness and femaleness that are natural, immutable, discrete, historically and   invariant, and grounded in   biological factors.” I’ve frequently taken up against this overly simple view, here at 13. 7, for example with regard to anthropologist Melvin Konner’s claim that women are biologically superior to men. It’s way too simple to think there’s any straightforward   binary in the first place. So Fine’s bold writing  —   ”Testosterone Rex misrepresents our past, present, and future it misdirects scientific research and it reinforces an unequal status quo”  —   naturally appeals to me. Fine has written a book that’s not only   and convincing but also, at times, delightfully humorous. Where else, after all, would we find the startling phrase ”cichlid testes are a social construction”? Cichlids are fish. According to Fine, only some male cichlids manage to set up a territory to which they may lure females for breeding. Unlike others who lack such a territory, these successful males ”sport bold splashes of red and orange, and intimidating black eye stripes.” They also have significantly larger testes (the site where testosterone is produced) and more circulating testosterone than the   males. Here’s the relevant news though: Put a territorial male in a tank with a larger territorial male, and within days his bold colors vanish and his testes shrink. When a   male is put into a tank with only females and smaller males, his testes enlarge. It’s the social circumstances that the fish find themselves in that sculpt their anatomies and their behaviors. Or, to put it Fine’s way, cichlid testes are a social construction! More than cichlids, humans interest Fine. As she did in her prior book Delusions of Gender, Fine crams Testosterone Rex full of scientific studies about human gendered behavior and interprets them skillfully. Readers familiar with the history of science will appreciate Fine’s takedown right at the outset of the supposedly universal principle (stemming from British biologist Angus Bateson’s famous fruit fly experiments) that males across numerous species are evolutionary selected to be philanderers and females to be coy. We now know that in many species, males can be choosy and females quite capable of sexual activity way in excess of what’s required for reproduction. When it comes to humans, yes, Fine says, on average men report a greater interest in casual sex than do women. But according to a   British study of more than 12, 000 people ages   the most common number of sexual partners for both men and women was . .. one. That answer held whether the respondents were asked to report for the previous three months, the previous year, or the previous five years. Both men (80 percent) and women (89 percent) also said they preferred to be in a sexually exclusive relationship. What about the   studies done on college campuses that show men are far more likely than women to accept the request of an   unfamiliar peer (actually a research confederate) to come over to their apartment or even to go to bed together? Here Fine is at her best, registering this objection (among others): ”What this study is actually primarily showing is women’s lack of interest in being murdered, raped, robbed, or inflaming the interests of a potential stalker. ... Social realities mean that women and men in these studies are simply not participating in the same experiment.” Over and over, Fine takes us through studies to show how gendered behavior is immensely influenced by our social circumstances.   is often presented as an inherently male trait, to take another example. Yet it’s much more complicated than that. In one study, more than 1, 500 U. S. households were surveyed, with the finding that women, on average, perceived higher risks in society across the board. When the researchers looked beyond gender to ethnicity, however, they discovered that one group saw society as safer than any other: white males. ”What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference,” Fine writes, ”was actually a difference between white males and everyone else.” One of Fine’s most striking overall conclusions is worded this way: ”Every newborn human inherits gender constructions as an obligatory part of their developmental system.” I asked Fine via email to elaborate on this point. She said: ”Animals don’t just inherit genes, but an entire ’developmental system’: depending on the species, this might include a particular habitat, a mother, playmates and, in the case of humans, a rich cultural legacy. Developmental biologists have recognized for a long time that the   developmental system can provide reliable, stable and critical inputs for the development of adaptive traits  —   meaning that ’adaptive’ doesn’t necessarily imply genetically determined.” This breaking of the link between what is adaptive and what is genetically determined  —   realizing that a whole development system is inherited by humans as well as by other animals  —   is highly significant for our understanding of human gender behavior. Why is this more nuanced picture comparatively slow to catch on? Fine said: ”In psychology we still tend to focus on statistical significance rather than functional difference: what does this result mean in practice, in real life, or for our theory? Meanwhile, sex differences research usually (as the term suggests) focuses on difference rather than similarity, size, or shape, and this influences the kinds of explanations that come to mind. For example, when we make a generic statement like ’men are more financially   than women,’ then men’s greater average testosterone exposure seems like an obvious explanation. But when we, more accurately, say, ’On some financial tasks, but not others, some men, from some cultures, in some contexts, with some   are more financially   than some women,’ we no longer think, ’It must be the testosterone!’ Reading Testosterone Rex, it becomes disturbingly clear the degree to which gender researchers do their work via a bedrock assumption that everyone is either male or female, and heterosexual. Fine mentions intersex individuals and gay individuals  —   and briefly asks us to think twice about the ”  male versus female binary.” But, still, I thought she might have pushed harder on this point. Doesn’t such a limited view as taken up by gender researchers make for poor gender science? To this point, Fine emailed me: ”I agree that it’s critical that scientific models of sexual differentiation take account of the true array of developmental outcomes, and gender scholarship has and should play a vital role in this.” Meanwhile, Fine says that we need to push back against simplistic Testosterone Rex thinking about gender because it too often translates into sexism that holds women back from being seen as   people with all sorts of desires and aptitudes and skills. This intertwining of good science and gender activism makes Testosterone Rex a timely book. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape"
633,"Once more, the National Mall has swelled with demonstrators. Just a week after President Trump’s inauguration at the Capitol and six days after the Women’s March on Washington,   opponents were raising their voices in the nation’s capital. The annual rally they call the March for Life attracted demonstrators from across the country Friday. The demonstration, which has been held each year since the nationwide legalization of abortion in 1973, is celebrating a seminal moment in its   run: a speech from a sitting vice president. ”Life is winning in America!” Mike Pence told the audience. It was a phrase he repeated often during his brief speech, emphasizing the electoral victories of   candidates. That includes President Trump, in particular, who asked his vice president to attend the rally, according to Pence. Americans now have ”a president who I proudly say stands for the right to life,” Pence told the crowd. And Pence wasn’t the only representative from the White House on the rally’s schedule. Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway also addressed the demonstrators. ”It is no coincidence that the first right cited in the Declaration of Independence is the right to life,” she said. ”It is a right it is not a privilege it is not a choice. It is  .” Though he was not there himself, Trump tweeted a message for protesters earlier in the day: ”To all of you marching  —   you have my full support!” The demonstration had explicitly religious overtones. It opened with a Christian rock concert and featured a prayer led by Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. Amid the crowd, which began gathering hours early for the rally, NPR’s Sarah McCammon noted that many of the protesters’ signs quote biblical verses  —   among a spate of other signs calling for defunding Planned Parenthood. ”We demand the immediate eradication of abortion,” the musical group Transform DJs told the crowd as they opened the day’s program. ”As we follow Jesus, this atrocity will stop with us.” At a rally rippled with chants of ”We are the   generation,” Sarah noted there seemed to be a wide range of ages among the demonstrators in attendance. As Sarah has reported, the brief interlude between this rally and the march that flooded the same spaces last Saturday makes for an abrupt juxtaposition. Among the many pillars of the platform published by organizers of the Women’s March on Washington, ”open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people” was central. And while some groups are participating in both demonstrations, the overlap in people attending both isn’t expected to be large. ”I think we’re a pretty different march  —   we’re a   march,” March for Life President Jeanne Mancini told Sarah. The day’s schedule opened with an hourlong rally and segued into a march toward the Supreme Court and Capitol buildings, where demonstrators were asked to visit their congressperson to advocate for their cause. It kicks off a weekend of associated marches planned in several other U. S. cities, including Salt Lake City, Denver and Austin, Texas."
634,"Marchers  —   many of them women  —   are descending on Washington, D. C. to send a message about abortion to the Trump administration and the   Congress. If that sounds like déjà vu, it’s not: What the organizers call the March for Life is a protest against legalized abortion, unlike the Women’s March last week, which included support for abortion rights in its platform. A different kind of march, ”I think we’re a pretty different march  —   we’re a   march,” said March for Life President Jeanne Mancini. The March for Life is also an annual event, held each year since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion nationwide. This year’s march and rally come less than a week after the Women’s March, which was organized on social media largely as a protest against President Trump’s campaign rhetoric. While the marches in Washington and around the world focused on an array of issues including LGBT rights and the environment, reproductive rights were a major focus. Vice President Pence and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway are scheduled to speak at the Friday rally. A statement from the March for Life pointed out that Pence will be the first vice president in history to speak at the march.  Can feminists be ” ”? That juxtaposition has opened up a larger debate about how women who consider themselves ” ” fit into the feminist movement. The issue became a point of tension surrounding the Women’s March after a handful of   activists said they were planning to attend. In a statement, organizers apologized for initially including the   group as a partner, stating that the march’s ”platform is   and that has been our stance from day one.” The group New Wave Feminists, a   ”  feminist” organization, was initially granted partnership status in the Women’s March, only to have that status rescinded when it became clear that the group opposed abortion rights. Destiny   La Rosa of New Wave Feminists said she was ”certainly disappointed” but had ”no hard feelings” about that decision. ”The march on Saturday was AMAZING,”   La Rosa wrote afterward in an email to NPR. ”I honestly can’t begin to describe how wonderful it was. It was so positive, no negativity, so much support.”   La Rosa said she is also attending the March for Life in Washington. Another   group, Students for Life of America, also wanted to have a presence at both marches, said President Kristan Hawkins. She said they walked with the crowds of women in pink hats carrying banners that read, ”Abortion Betrays Women” and ”We Don’t Need Planned Parenthood.” Hawkins said some of the marchers tried to block their banners at one point, but overall, ”We had some really good interactions.” Among marchers, a search for some common ground, For some   supporters, there is room for disagreement on the issue among those who identify as feminists. Kristie Hewitt, 49, came to the Women’s March from Lansing, Mich. She said she is worried about the potential for cuts to federal funding for women’s health services at Planned Parenthood under the Trump administration. ”I really believe in women’s reproductive rights. I cannot quietly go back to the 1950s,” she said. But Hewitt said she was OK with marching alongside women who disagree. ”I think anybody has a place in this movement we’re all here for the same reason  —   women’s rights  —   and I think there’s a place for everybody,” Hewitt said. ”And we all need to sit down at the table and talk, and have a conversation as to what’s the best for everybody.” Battles over contraception, abortion  But in terms of policy, the disagreements are stark. Already, abortion opponents are seeing some of the actions they want from Trump and the Congress, including a presidential memorandum banning federal funding for groups overseas that provide or ”promote” abortion. Other goals, said Hawkins of Students for Life, include cutting federal funding for reproductive health services at Planned Parenthood, which Hawkins said is ”in the fight of their lives.” ”So it’s even more important that   are there, they show up, and they show this administration in Washington that we’re paying attention,” Hawkins said. March for Life organizers are expecting ”tens of thousands” of marchers in Washington, Mancini said, along with dozens of smaller, local marches being held around the country in the early months of 2017. The goal, she said, is to mobilize   activists around the country to put pressure on elected leaders to carry forward their agenda. Mancini’s top priorities include making permanent the federal ban on public funding for abortions and a ban on late abortions. State laws banning abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation have been found unconstitutional in federal court. That’s why a major concern for   groups is to see Trump follow through on his pledge to social conservatives to appoint judges who align with their views. Trump has promised to announce his nomination to replace late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia next Thursday, a move activists on both sides of the abortion debate will be watching closely."
635,"British Prime Minister Theresa May, the first foreign leader that President Trump has hosted at the White House, joined Trump in a joint press conference at the White House on Friday. In addition to discussing NATO and trade, Trump was asked about his relationship with Mexico and his views on the use of torture. NPR reporters have annotated the remarks."
636,"President Trump spoke by phone to President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico for an hour on Friday, according to statements by both leaders. Peña Nieto was scheduled to visit the White House on Jan. 31. But on Wednesday Trump signed an order to move forward with a wall along the Mexican border and insisted that Mexico would eventually pay the bill. On Thursday, Peña Nieto canceled his planned visit to the U. S. without giving a reason. According to a statement released by Peña Nieto’s office after Friday’s call, the two leaders did discuss security along the border between their two countries. ”With regard to the payment of the border wall, both Presidents acknowledged their clear and very public differences in position on this sensitive issue and agreed to resolve these differences as part of a comprehensive discussion of all aspects of the bilateral relationship,” an unofficial translation of the statement read. ”The Presidents also agreed at this point not to speak publicly about this controversial issue.” The White House released a statement saying, ”With respect to payment for the border wall, both presidents recognize their clear and very public differences of positions on this issue but have agreed to work these differences out.” Asked about the call at a news conference on Friday, Trump said the call had been ”very good” and that ”we are going to renegotiate our trade deals and we are going to renegotiate other aspects of our relationship with Mexico and in the end I think it will be good for both countries.” Trump also noted the trade deficit with Mexico, saying: ”I have great respect for Mexico. I love the Mexican people. I work with the Mexican people all the time, great relationships. But as you know Mexico with the United States has outnegotiated us and beat us to a pulp through our past leaders. That made us look foolish.” On Thursday, a White House spokesman said one potential way to pay for the wall could be to apply a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico, as well as other countries with which the U. S. has a trade deficit. ”That would effectively saddle U. S. consumers with a significant portion of the wall’s cost, estimated at $15 billion or more,” NPR’s Scott Horsley reported."
637,"Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will congratulate President Trump on his election, in what the Kremlin says is the first phone call between the two since Trump was inaugurated last weekend. The call is slated for Saturday evening Moscow time  —   which is eight hours ahead of U. S. Eastern. In other phone calls on Saturday, Trump will speak with France’s President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer says. As for the call with Russia, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says it’s too early to say what the two leaders will discuss. But possible topics include the U. S. sanctions that were levied over accusations that the Kremlin backed hackers seeking to tamper with the recent presidential election. And with both Trump and Putin having spoken of a closer U. S.  relationship, a plan for a personal meeting might also be discussed. ”This is the first telephone contact after President Trump took office, so one can hardly expect from such a telephone conversation any substantive contacts on all the issues on the agenda,” Peskov said, according to   Tass media. Peskov urged reporters to be patient. Senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway tells CBS that Trump and Putin will likely talk about common interests and fighting terrorism. News of the conversation between Trump and Putin comes as reports emerge from Russia that two senior officers of the cyber intelligence unit of the Federal Security Service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB) have been arrested on treason charges, setting off speculation that the moves could be linked to hacking attacks in the U. S. as Radio Free Europe reports. Those arrests, and this weekend’s phone call, are playing out amid a backdrop that includes ”unverified claims that Russia may have compromising material” on Trump, as NPR’s Greg Myre reported earlier this month. Trump has denounced those claims."
638,"President Trump met with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday, his first    meeting with a foreign leader since he took office a week ago. With the United Kingdom preparing to leave the European Union, May is looking for a trade deal with the U. S. ”I am convinced a trade deal between U. S. and U. K. is in national interest of both countries,” the prime minister said at a White House news conference with Trump after their meeting. ”I think Brexit is going to be a wonderful thing for your country,” Trump said. ”I think when it irons out you’re going to have your own identity and you’re going to have the people that you want in your country, and you’re going to be able to make free trade deals without having somebody watching you and what you’re doing.” The two leaders also touched on the future of NATO, the   War II military alliance between the U. S. and Europe. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized NATO, calling the organization ”obsolete.” He also suggested that America might not defend fellow NATO countries that didn’t help reimburse the U. S. for the cost of its troops and bases in Europe, as NPR’s Frank Langfitt has reported. But during a speech Thursday to Republicans gathered in Philadelphia, May argued that U. S. support was crucial, saying, ”America’s leadership role in NATO  —   supported by Britain  —   must be the central element around which the alliance is built.” At the news conference, May said, ”On defense and security, we are united in our recognition of NATO as the bulwark of our collective defense,” adding as she turned to Trump, ”Mr. President, I think you confirmed that you’re 100 percent behind NATO.” Trump did not address NATO. Asked whether his seeming change in position should be seen as genuine, he said, ”I really don’t change my position very much.” Ahead of the meeting with Trump, May faced political pressure at home over their relationship. ”Critics in Parliament said she should be more skeptical before cozying up to the new American president,” Frank reported. One member of Parliament from Scotland, Pete Wishart, expressed particular concern about Trump’s stated support for torture. ”When a United States president backs torture as an instrument of policy, when particular religions are picked out for exclusion, when women’s rights are set back for decades, should this country not be just a little more cautious before accepting this Trumpian embrace?” Wishart said. Asked about the issue on Friday, May did not directly address the issue of torture, confirming that, ”there will be times we disagree,” and arguing that the ”special” relationship between the two countries, referred to at least a dozen times during the news conference, allowed for ”open frank discussion” on a range of topics. A 2005 law bans the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of military detainees. On Friday, Trump appeared to say he would defer to his defense secretary on the issue of torture: ”We have a great General who has just been appointed Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, and he has stated publicly that he does not necessarily believe in torture, or waterboarding, or however you want to define it  —   enhanced interrogation I guess is a word, a lot of words, a lot of people would like to use. I don’t necessarily agree, but I will tell you he would override because I’m giving him that power.” The president continued, ”I happen to feel it does work. I’ve been open about that for a long time. But I am going with our leaders and we’re going to win with or without, but I do disagree.”"
639,"Updated 5:30 p. m. ET, President Trump paid his first presidential visit to the top brass at the Pentagon on Friday afternoon and announced his intention to provide a wide range of new resources for the U. S. military. ”I’m signing an executive action to begin a great rebuilding of the armed services of the United States,” the president said in a brief ceremony that included the swearing in of the new defense secretary, James Mattis. ”We’re developing a plan for new planes, new ships, new resources, and new tools for our men and women in uniform,” Trump added, though he did not provide additional details. The president signed a separate order that freezes visas and immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries, a move that had already drawn heavy criticism as word began to leak out earlier this week. ”I’m establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” Trump said. Earlier Thursday, Trump said he still believes that torture works as a way to extract information from detainees, but that he would defer to Mattis, who opposes such measures. ”I don’t necessarily agree,” Trump said, following a meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May. But, he added, referring to Mattis, ”He will override, because I’m giving him that power.” During his Pentagon visit, Trump met with Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his first such gathering with senior military leaders at the Pentagon since he became commander in chief a week ago. By all appearances, Trump and Mattis have a good relationship and share a belief that the military could use more manpower. However, a number of their stated positions have been at odds. For example, Mattis is a strong believer in   U. S. alliances, including NATO, which Trump has called obsolete. The president also has sent contradictory messages with his own statements. While calling for a   military, which currently has an annual budget of some $600 billion, Trump has also pointed to expensive programs, such as the   Lightning II. The   fighter is the most expensive ever, with a price tag currently pegged at around $130 million per plane. Trump says the cost needs to come down. Trump has also called for a   military campaign against the Islamic State, though he did not mention the extremist group in his brief public remarks. During the election campaign, Trump boasted that he had a secret plan to crush the Islamic State. At times, he sharply criticized the generals he now commands, but he also said he would give them a month to come up with a new plan to fight ISIS. The president repeatedly dismissed   Obama’s military campaign against ISIS as insufficient. ”The last administration had a strategy that was more of an indirect approach, and it was certainly a   approach,” retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno told NPR’s Morning Edition. ”I think President Trump might be looking for something with some quicker results and that could put some new options on the table.” Obama ordered an air campaign against the extremist group in the summer of 2014 as ISIS was surging across Syria and Iraq. The U. S. military, working with local forces, has pushed the Islamic State out of all Iraqi cities except Mosul, where an offensive has been underway for the past four months. ISIS has also lost territory in Syria, though it still holds key cities and towns in the eastern part of the country. The U. S. currently has about 6, 000 military personnel in Iraq and Syria, including trainers, advisers and special operators. Under Obama, the U. S. focus was on the air campaign, and the U. S. forces are not supposed to be involved in combat. The U. S. forces have been guided by the mantra of working ”by, with and through” local forces in Iraq and Syria, rather than having a large U. S. force leading the way. Trump could ”certainly use more military force. He could elect to put American boots on the ground in larger numbers,” Barno said."
640,"The first week of the Trump administration has been marked by a flurry of executive actions  —   and lots of bombast and argument with the press. President Trump’s executive actions  —   in the form of orders and memorandums, which differ slightly  —   aim to show that President Trump will deliver on the promises made by Candidate Trump. And the actions hit on many of the most contentious issues in American politics: Trump moved to repeal the Affordable Care Act, remove roadblocks from the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, impose a hiring freeze on federal employees, withdraw the United States from the   Partnership, build a wall along the U. S.  border and withhold federal funds from   sanctuary cities. Along the way, Trump and his surrogates claimed to have drawn the   inauguration crowd (he didn’t) said that 3 million to 5 million votes were illegally cast (no evidence of that) softened his stance toward the CIA and said that he would announce his pick for the Supreme Court next week. The Senate approved four of his nominees for   positions, and 10 others have finished their confirmation hearings and await votes. And it comes as congressional Republicans huddle to figure out a legislative way forward with the new president. Here, we take a look at the biggest issues and where they stand, one week into the Trump presidency: Within hours of being inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to ”ease the burdens” of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. The order allows the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, or any other agency with authority under the law, to not enforce regulations that impose a financial burden on a state, company or individual. What are the consequences? It’s not totally clear yet. The order is so broad that it’s possible it could dismantle key parts of the ACA before a replacement plan is ready owing to a potential lack of enforcement of some of the tax provisions like the mandate, the requirement that if you don’t have health insurance, you have to buy it. That’s despite previous statements from Republican lawmakers that a replacement plan would immediately follow repeal. What happens next? The action adds a lot of confusion to an already complicated system. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, hasn’t yet had his confirmation hearing or vote. He will be responsible for administering the program and exchanges run by the federal government for states that opted not to create their own systems. Price is an opponent of the ACA, and congressional Republicans are vowing to repeal the law. But they haven’t yet settled on an alternative. Trump has also confused matters with a pledge to offer ”insurance for everybody,” though congressional Republicans say they assume he means ”access” for everyone. On Wednesday, Trump signed two executive orders related to immigration and border security, shortly after the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Marine Gen. John Kelly, was sworn in. ”Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders,” Trump said. What are the consequences? The move communicated that Trump planned to follow through with his    plan to build a border wall, estimated to cost $15 billion or more. The fallout was immediate: Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled a planned visit to Trump in Washington next week. What happens next? Trump and Congress need to figure out how to pay for it, for starters. Though Trump has repeatedly said he would make Mexico pay for the wall, on Wednesday he told ABC News that the U. S. will be ”reimbursed at a later date” by Mexico for the costs of building the wall. Congressional Republicans vowed to come up with the funding during a policy retreat Thursday in Philadelphia, though they did not specify how. On Thursday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that one way the administration is considering paying for the wall is via a 20 percent tax on imports from Mexico  —   a cost that would mean that U. S. consumers would, in fact, pay for the wall. Ironically, that was part of a congressional plan that Trump, less than two weeks ago, derided as ”too complicated.” Hours later, the White House walked it back, saying there are many funding options being considered. On Monday, Trump told congressional leaders in a bipartisan, bicameral meeting at the White House that that he would have won the popular vote, were it not for 3 million to 5 million votes cast against him by ”illegals.” When asked about it at the Tuesday press briefing, Spicer affirmed that ”the president does believe that.” It was revealed by the New York Times that Trump is partially basing his belief on a story he heard thirdhand from a professional golfer, born in Germany, who wasn’t allowed to vote in Florida and claimed there were people in line behind him who looked like they shouldn’t be allowed to vote. After NPR’s Mara Liasson pressed Spicer at a White House briefing on why the president wouldn’t call for an investigation into something that could be the biggest scandal in U. S. history, Trump tweeted, in fact, that he would. On Thursday, Spicer told reporters Trump will issue an executive action calling for a probe of voter fraud in the coming days. What are the consequences? Trump’s insistence that massive voter fraud occurred would seem to set up a showdown between the White House and. .. the evidence. So far, no evidence of significant voter fraud has come to light. What happens next? At this point, it’s unclear. The White House insists it will issue an executive action to launch an investigation, but it’s uncertain what form a probe would take. Would it be run by the White House? Would the Justice Department take it up (even though the Justice Department is supposed to operate independently of the White House)? The U. S. has already conducted a voter fraud investigation, by the way, during the Bush administration  —   and found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, turning up only 120 people charged and 86 convicted. On Tuesday, Trump signed five executive actions relating to the Keystone XL pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, using American materials when building pipelines, reducing regulations for domestic manufacturing, and ”expediting environmental reviews and approval for   infrastructure projects.” What are the consequences? The pipelines had been stopped during the Obama administration. Trump’s actions mean that the owner of the Keystone XL pipeline could apply again for a construction permit, and it did exactly that Thursday night. Trump also encouraged the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process for the section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that hasn’t been built. What happens next?  The Dakota Access issue will probably head back to federal court: The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said it will take legal action to fight Trump’s decision, saying the pipeline ”risks contaminating tribal and American water supplies while disregarding treaty rights.” Demonstrators remain camped near the site where the Dakota Access Pipeline is slated to cross under the Missouri River. On Monday, Trump signed a presidential memorandum imposing a hiring freeze on federal workers, with exceptions for military positions and national security. What are the consequences? The ramifications are immediate: The freeze is now in effect and is scheduled to last 90 days. It’s expected that by then, the Office of Management and Budget will have a   plan for shrinking the federal government. The impact, though, is  . The federal government employs some 2. 8 million people, more than 80 percent of whom live outside Washington, D. C. Maryland or Virginia. What happens next? The next steps are for the exceptions to be hammered out the memorandum states that ”the head of any executive department or agency may exempt from the hiring freeze any positions that it deems necessary to meet national security or public safety responsibilities.” That could give agency heads at least some flexibility to hire as needed. Other exceptions could also emerge. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, has 45, 000 job openings, and Trump’s nominee to lead the VA had said he needs to fill those openings  to serve veterans."
641,"I’ve heard the same story from both our previous Tiny Desk Contest winners: They weren’t going to enter the Contest until someone encouraged them to do it. Well, the entry period closes at 11:59 p. m. ET this Sunday, Jan. 29. So here I am telling you: Enter! Maybe you think your video will take too long to make  —   that you need professional camera work, a crew or special editing skills. You don’t. You can do this. Last year’s winner, Gaelynn Lea, shot her video on a smartphone. The year before, Fantastic Negrito shot his on an iPad. It doesn’t have to be a whole big production  —   that’s not what the Tiny Desk is about, anyway. This is about your song and your performance. So long as we can hear and see you (and there’s a desk!) then you’re doing all you need to do. That means you can pull out your phone right now and shoot a valid entry. It won’t take long! Your musical path may be wandering it may not take off in this one moment. But it could. And if it doesn’t, we hope that this community gives you the strength to keep going, to further refine what it is about your music that makes it your own. Take a chance."
642,"”Rogue” accounts that have the look of those by real federal agencies are spreading like wildfire on Twitter. The AltUSNatParkService Twitter account has gained more than 1 million followers and inspired the creation of many more ”unofficial resistance” accounts for specific national parks and other entities, including accounts like Rogue NASA and AltUSForestService. Some of these accounts  —   this list has compiled more than 80 of them  —   initially claimed to be run by members of these organizations, but many have since altered their descriptions, or in the case of the alternative National Park Service have said the account was handed off to environmentalists and activists. But that’s just it. These are all claims. None of the account owners have come forward and identified themselves. Instead, they are choosing to remain anonymous and continue tweeting out facts about climate change and directly opposing the Trump administration. While the accounts are making news with their defiant tweets and stances against President Trump, it should be noted that accounts of this type are not new. In fact, this has been happening for years as people have created accounts to mimic the language and tone of a North Korean News Service as well as more comedic accounts for fictional television characters like Tina from Bob’s Burgers. What’s different about the number of rogue accounts that have come about as a result of the Trump administration’s apparent gag orders on some federal agencies is that this form of expression could be a logical way to oppose a media blackout. There are several accounts related to the Environmental Protection Agency, which has reportedly been targeted by the Trump administration over its climate research. Accounts like @ungaggedEPA and Stuff EPA Would Say list similar missions: to ”flood the Web with real climate facts” and say things the EPA ”is unable to tell you.” So even if these accounts are just run by supporters and not actual members of the agencies, do they still serve a purpose? Probably. It’s true that most senators or congressional representatives probably don’t spend a ton of time looking for constituents on Twitter. So some of these accounts are encouraging their followers to take action by calling their congressional representatives and providing scripts for what to tell their lawmakers. Additionally, and much like last weekend’s Women’s March on Washington, these accounts have given rise to what is being called the Scientists’ March on Washington, an event that is still being organized but has already fostered communication between regional groups. Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist in Tucson, Ariz. writes about weather and climate. While he hasn’t been able to identify any of the rogue account owners, he has found people in his area he can meet up and collaborate with on ways to be active in their resistance. He says he sees the creation of these accounts and dissemination of the facts on climate change as being in the public interest. ”I think that it’s natural that scientists would want to retain their political power and say. ’This is not OK and we as scientists want to stand up for   policy and spreading the truth that human activity is changing the climate,’ ” Holthaus says. As for now, it seems like most of the accounts just want to continue to share facts and spread the information that’s available. A few of them include jokes, or snarky comments aimed at Trump, but all of the actual participation that they are advocating for is normal, and really just advocating for participatory democracy."
643,"Ben’s Chili Bowl, a D. C. restaurant famous for its   celebrity   and ties to the civil rights movement, is preparing for some redecorating. This week, the restaurant painted over the giant mural of Bill Cosby, Donnie Simpson, Chuck Brown and President Barack Obama that has lived on its outside walls since 2012. Kamal Ali, one of the restaurant’s owners, said his customers have been talking about that mural for a long time, arguing over who should or shouldn’t be featured. Now, he said, it’s time to let the public decide. ”We’d like people to tag the mural with positive sentiments of healing the country. And the world,” he said. ”We just had the inauguration, lots of protests, the Women’s March, which was huge, and then there’s the Black Lives Matter movement, with police brutality and those things going on. So it just seemed like an appropriate time.” The beloved restaurant is asking fans and customers to vote on who should be depicted on the new mural. The list of new possibilities includes 59 artists, celebrities, activists, athletes, politicians and chefs: everyone from Gandhi to Kevin Durant to Nikki Giovanni to Rachael Ray. There are some local D. C. heroes, too, like Charlene Drew Jarvis, a longtime public servant and former president of Southeastern University. There are international superstars, like Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey. Voters can also write in their own suggestions if they aren’t inspired by anyone on the list. Already, over 5, 000 people have voted in the online poll, which will stay open through the end of February. Fans have begun to weigh in on Twitter, with a strong contingent pushing to keep Obama on the wall. Some want women to finally be represented  —   a fact that Ali said is reflected in the poll, which includes 21 women. The owners of Ben’s Chili Bowl hope to have a decision made in March, and the new mural is slated to be up by April 1. But even after the public has spoken and the new mural goes up, Ali expects the discussions to continue. ”All over ” he said."
644,"With open enrollment season for buying health coverage under the Affordable Care Act ending Tuesday, it seemed like an apt time to talk with folks in charge of some of the state insurance marketplaces created by the federal health law. It’s the fifth year these marketplaces, also called exchanges, have been running. The marketplaces are the   option for people under 65 who don’t get health insurance through work or qualify for Medicaid. This time around, there’s a   wrinkle: The Trump administration has halted advertising and outreach for HealthCare. gov, the federally run exchange, in the last week of enrollment, when   typically surge. But the states that control their own exchanges also control their own promotion and, for now, their destiny. All told, 11 states and the District of Columbia run their own marketplaces. Under the ACA, the marketplaces were supposed to become   businesses within a few years, supported by fees insurers pay to offer plans on the sites. But the election of Donald Trump as president and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress mean that proposition, like the rest of the health law, is now in doubt. Here’s what five exchange chiefs are looking at now and for the future.  Peter Lee, executive director, Covered California  More than 5 million Californians  —   about a quarter of all Americans now covered under Obamacare  —   gained insurance either through Medicaid expansion or on the state’s exchange, called Covered California. With the Affordable Care Act now on the political chopping block, California has a lot to lose. But Covered California’s executive director, Peter Lee, says he is planning for a different scenario. He hopes to position California as a leader in a new model for health coverage nationwide. ”I do think that we have a number of the ingredients of what can make the individual market work,” Lee says. ”And we want to take those lessons to members of Congress and to policy leaders.” In particular, Lee believes California’s   approach is one that would be ”in sync, philosophically, with many of the things I hear from Republican and Democratic members of Congress and the Trump administration.” ”We have about 1. 4 million Californians shopping in our marketplace picking private plans with the leg up of federal tax credits that make health care affordable to 90 percent of them,” Lee says. California’s marketplace has had its share of problems. A reliance on inaccurate provider directories left some consumers exposed to    medical bills. Consumers also complained about narrow networks that left them unable to choose the doctors they wanted. But overall, the state is considered an ACA success story, thanks in part to innovative approaches, including state discretion to choose which insurers could operate in its market and then to negotiate premiums and benefits with those insurers. ”It’s a   market solution,” Lee says. ”Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat or independent, it’s a   solution that has a lesson for the country.” Still, Lee’s hopefulness is tempered by the knowledge that California faces a loss of $20 billion in federal funds if the promised Obamacare repeal happens without a replacement that preserves Medicaid expansion and premium subsidies. Under that scenario, Lee says, ”people would have their health insurance pulled out from under them in droves.” ”The whole issue of repeal without replace is cataclysmic not just for California or Californians but for any of the 20 million Americans that have coverage because of the Affordable Care Act,” he says. Even in the face of a ”very fuzzy” future, Lee says he is focusing on the present, which includes shepherding more than 300, 000 Californians newly enrolled in health care into 2017 coverage. He also wants to get the word out on parts of California’s plan that can be adopted elsewhere. ”There have been some things that have not worked great with the Affordable Care Act there are some things that have worked pretty darn well,” Lee says. ”Let’s make sure the laboratory of the states is a laboratory that’s sharing the lessons of success and failure with one another.” Stephanie O’Neill, freelance reporter based in Ojai, Calif. Donna Frescatore, executive director, NY State of Health, The New York state health exchange is fielding its busiest enrollment period yet, even with the uncertainty about the health law’s future. A repeal of the Affordable Care Act, without significant replacement, could cost 2. 7 million New Yorkers their health insurance and the state $3. 7 billion, according to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office. ”We believe that the stakes here in New York are dramatic  —   for consumers, for our health care delivery system and for our state budget as well,” says Donna Frescatore, executive director of NY State of Health, New York’s marketplace. Losing ”momentum” is one of Frescatore’s main concerns. Between 2013 and 2015, the uninsured rate in New York was cut in half, falling from 10 percent to 5 percent, according to the state’s health department. ”We talk to moms who are concerned because their children have   conditions and they’re afraid coverage might no longer be available. We talk to   New Yorkers who fear that the premiums could increase to the 2013 levels  —   over $1, 000 a month for an individual policy,” Frescatore says. Without financial support from the federal government, premiums may increase. Options may revert to health insurance plans as they were in New York before the ACA. ”New York had a number of very strong consumer protections in place before the Affordable Care Act, including guaranteed issue,” says Frescatore. ”People could get insurance regardless of whether or not they had a medical condition or illness, as well as other consumer protections. We’ll maintain those protections.” But without an individual mandate bringing enough people into the insurance pool and no financial assistance, she adds, the price of plans is ”just out of reach” financially for many consumers. For now, the New York exchange continues outreach to enroll consumers and reassure them that policies won’t be disrupted throughout 2017. ”At this point, without knowing more details about repeal or replacement, what we’re really focused on is getting people coverage that they deserve,” Frescatore says. Karen Shakerdge, WXXI and Side Effects Public Media, Jim Wadleigh, CEO, Access Health CT, Connecticut was an early adopter of the ACA. After the law was enacted, the state expanded Medicaid ahead of schedule to cover roughly 200, 000 more people a year. For this year, more than 100, 000 people enrolled in coverage they found on the   exchange, with nearly 80 percent getting subsidies. But while the exchange may have been attractive to many consumers, it was less appealing to insurers. Two of the four original insurance companies in the marketplace are no longer in it. Now, with an uncertain future ahead, Access Health CT CEO Jim Wadleigh says he has one hard goal in mind as he thinks beyond 2017: ”What can we do to help make the business environment that our carriers are in easier for them to be more successful?” Insurers have told Wadleigh that they lose money on customers who miss open enrollment periods and go through special enrollment  —   the process reserved for people with big life events or job changes that merit new insurance. ”What the carriers are telling us is, these customers are coming in . .. finding a reason that they have a life event because they’re sick, get services, and then drop out,” he says. That’s an expensive pattern. This week, Wadleigh is asking his board to approve a plan to ramp up enforcement. ”If we can do a better job enforcing the special enrollment, we think we can reduce the premiums by potentially 6 percent to 10 percent,” he says. Another way to reduce costs? Shrink provider networks. So, let’s say you live in Hartford. Do you really need to pay for a plan that covers a doctor’s visit in Danbury? ”Customers are telling us they would go with a network choice option, or a narrow network, if it was cheaper   had a lower deductible,” he says. That chance, he says, could save another few percentage points in premiums. Third, Wadleigh says he is considering changes that would push more of the cost of emergency room visits to consumers, hoping to deter frequent ER fliers. The question is whether all of this will work. Wadleigh says he thinks it will. He already has had discussions with existing carriers that are curious whether other insurers are looking to get into the marketplace. ”So what that is telling me is that the carriers think that we’re making changes in the positive direction,” he says. ”And we expect that other carriers would be interested in joining our exchange with that.” Whether they do  —   and whether the exchange will even be around for them to join  —   is still very much unclear. Jeff Cohen, WNPR, Louis Gutierrez, executive director, Massachusetts Health Connector, A near record number of Massachusetts residents are signing up for coverage through the state’s online insurance market, the Health Connector. Enrollment is running 32 percent ahead of last year as the Jan. 31 deadline approaches. Around 47, 000 people who didn’t have insurance through the exchange last year have purchased insurance for 2017. So many members, physicians and others in the health care world were stunned when Louis Gutierrez, who runs the exchange, said he couldn’t guarantee coverage through the end of 2017 for the nearly 240, 000 enrollees so far. ”I don’t want to be in the business of speculating or making commitments about things I can’t personally control,” Gutierrez says. ”I don’t think any of us really know” what’s going to happen with the repeal of the ACA. Gutierrez says he is not predicting precipitous changes but adds that he ”can’t speak to the future. Every day is a good day of coverage.” Health insurers, which are threatening to pull out of exchanges in some states, aren’t the main concern in Massachusetts. Gutierrez says he is hearing very little from the state’s ”mature and stable market.” Most plans that sell insurance through the Health Connector are nonprofits based in the state. And they may have less reason to worry that healthy members will flee, leaving insurers to cover the high costs of ill members. Massachusetts residents would still be required to buy insurance, by state law, even if the ACA mandate is repealed. But if federal funds shrink or disappear, it’s likely coverage would become very expensive for the 178, 000 men and women who expect to receive subsidies or tax credits for insurance purchased through the exchange. ”We’re interested in maintaining broad and affordable access to coverage,” Gutierrez said, but ”that will depend on the shape of any subsidies that change or happen in the new scheme.” Many Massachusetts residents are wondering whether the state could revert to the law passed in 2006, which became a model for Obamacare. The individual mandate is still on the books, but the employer mandate and other elements were replaced with provisions in the federal law. Martha Bebinger, WBUR, Kevin Patterson, CEO, Connect for Health Colorado, The view from Kevin Patterson, the CEO of Connect for Health Colorado, might be summarized as sunny with storm clouds on the horizon. ”I think we’re feeling like things are going really well,” he says. Patterson says enrollment numbers for 2017 are running 15 percent ahead of last year. But two things are clouding the future. First, the new Trump administration and congressional Republicans are vowing to undo Obamacare. Second, the Colorado exchange is under fire from state lawmakers. As soon as the legislative session got underway in January, Republicans unveiled a bill to repeal the exchange altogether. They are expected to zero in on a recent federal audit that found the exchange improperly spent millions in federal funds and called for refunds. Patterson says the exchange has made many changes and disagrees with the recommendation to refund the money. The exchange is expected to survive the legislative turmoil, but it still faces the possibility of federal subsidies disappearing under a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But Patterson believes the exchange could carry on. ”I do think there are things that we’ve learned that could be applied in a new era or whatever   is,” he says. Still, he worries an Obamacare repeal without a timely, adequate replacement could cause some insurers to pull out of the exchange or charge higher rates. Already consumers saw premiums go up and choice go down this year. And this is pressing  —   insurers have to file rate requests in Colorado in May. ”So the clock is ticking,” Patterson says. ”Somebody has to give us a little more guidance I think to the industry around what the new world is going to look like. And I think the sooner we do that the better it is for every consumer.” But, beyond 2017, he says, the exchange could look to expand its other lines of business beyond the individual marketplace. That could include helping small employers and public sector employers not in the marketplace figure out insurance packages and benefits. ”I think that’s somewhere where we can show some more value,” he says. Colorado’s exchange is also flirting with the possibility of working with neighboring states, particularly those in the Mountain time zone. ”We’re kind of used to working together as Western states on problems that are really unique to us,” Patterson says. ”That’s where I would start.” John Daley, Colorado Public Radio, This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, local member stations and Kaiser Health News."
645,"The fireplace is on. A couple of westies are running around excitedly. And two tables are set in the dining room. The dinner party on this brisk winter night in Maplewood, N. J. has a distinctly foreign flare: chicken shawarma and falafel are on the menu. And while the conversation includes typical talk about work  —   it also deals with war. ”Every day is becoming terrible,” explains Hayder Alqaysi, who fled Baghdad with his mother and sister. ”You understand what I mean? I cannot live there.” This is what is known as Syria Supper Club, in which Muslim refugees from Syria and Iraq join groups of mostly Jewish New Jerseyans for dinners that are part fundraiser, part cultural exchange. Women from the refugee families cook the elaborate feasts the Americans host the meals. In January alone, 14 meals have been scheduled, all with different cooks. Hosting this week is Kate McCaffrey, a member of Montclair’s Bnai Keshet synagogue, which has organized various efforts to help refugees from Syria and Iraq acclimate to the New Jersey community. ”This refugee project really came out of a sense of outrage over the refugee crisis last summer,” says McCaffrey, an anthropology professor at Montclair State University. ”I was reading the news and it was so upsetting, seeing all these people at sea, drowning at sea, and feeling our country was doing nothing. I reached out to the rabbi and said: ’What are we doing?’ ” Among the first actions taken by McCaffrey and Melina Macall, her partner on this project, was a Christmas Eve dinner that Bnai Keshet hosted in 2015 in which Syrian Muslims and New Jersey Jews feasted on the traditional American Jewish Christmas meal of Chinese food. The synagogue later hired one Syrian woman to cater monthly Saturday lunches after Shabbat services  —   now, there is talk of having her cater bar and bat mitzvahs. It’s that talent for cooking among many of the Syrian women who have settled in places like Paterson and Elizabeth that inspired the Syria Supper Club idea: How about these women cook dinners at Americans’ homes, enabling them to meet their new neighbors while making some   money in the process? ”We have multiple objectives to this. One part is to fundraise,” McCaffrey says. Attendees sign up online and pay $50 to attend the meal. The money goes to the Syrian cooks so they can buy the food  —   then the women keep the rest. Given the difficulty their husbands have had in finding work in New Jersey and the limited resources provided by the federal government and charitable organizations, the funds are critically helpful. ”But I think in addition to that we are providing some affirmation of their talents, of their capabilities, of their humanity in a political climate where they’ve been demonized. And for the guests it’s an opportunity to get outside their bubble to meet people different from them.” When dinner is served, the Syrian women sit down and eat with the guests, often along with other refugees who have become friends with the organizers. Language barriers are overcome with laughter, Google Translate and volunteer translators  —   tonight, it’s Mazooz Sehwail, an Arabic professor at Montclair State University. It took three days for the cook on this night, Khlood Al Nabelsi, to prepare a delicious   Syrian dinner. The presentation, with   vegetables and spices sprinkled in a pattern on top of the hummus, makes dinner guests gasp as they gather around the table and introduce themselves. ”My name Khlood, from Syria,” Al Nabelsi says. ”Me, happy. I am happy for cooking.” Dinner guests tell Al Nabelsi  —   and Alqaysi, an Iraqi refugee here with his mother and sister  —   about how they themselves are the children and grandchildren of Jewish refugees who fled countries in Europe beset by war, persecution and religious strife. ”The symbol of America, the Statue of Liberty, the poem engraved on the bottom, says: ’I lift my lamp beside the golden door,’” says Sheila Fisher of Fort Lee. ”And let’s all hope America leaves the golden door open.” Over dinner, there are questions, like: Why is Al Nabelsi keeping her jacket on while she eats? The answer isn’t totally clear, but it leads to a conversation about how some refugees lack heat in their new apartments. Later a simple question about how to say ”cheers” in Arabic warrants an explanation about Muslim restrictions on alcohol. And like at any dinner, there’s talk about work. Alqaysi, who earned a degree in electrical engineering before he left Baghdad, just started working at the   at a Dunkin Donuts in New Jersey. He has funny stories to tell about trying to understand American coffee orders, handing over as many as 10 sugars and distinguishing between whipped cream and with cream. Alqaysi unabashedly says that he wants American friends social isolation is a challenge in the refugee community. ”I want to make more friend, because I don’t have friend,” he says. ”I need to know this culture. I want talk to them, like I talk to you.” President Trump, who once vowed to end immigration of all Muslims, including refugees, isn’t mentioned at dinner. There isn’t any talk of Gov. Chris Christie, who described    Syrian orphans as potential national security threats. Nonetheless, one of the Jewish guests, Melissa Polaner, has politics on her mind. ”It’s important for me to express my political views in this way, and it’s important for me to express my religious views in this way  —   to make people understand that Jews and Muslims have so much in common and there are so many more things that connect us than separate us,” she said. ”And a lot of that gets lost in the national dialogue, but when you are sitting across from someone at the table, it’s easy to remember that.” After dinner, several of the women are in the kitchen cleaning dishes and kibbitzing. McCaffrey, who grew up Catholic and converted to Judaism when she married her husband, threw herself into this work after her children graduated from high school. She constantly texts with dozens of refugees, helping with problems big and small. On this night, she finds out that one of the cooks in the Supper Club just lost her father. Their home was bombed in Homs, Syria. McCaffrey turns around and makes some tea for Al Nabelsi, who will soon be heading back to her apartment, where her husband is babysitting their three children. Before she leaves, in broken English and with help from a translator, Al Nabelsi strains to show her deep appreciation for McCaffrey. ”I’m speechless in here about her kindness,” she says. ”She’s the person who does not differentiate between different sects, different religions  —   a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim. She loves to help humans regardless of their religion.” Dinners for the Syrian Supper Club are booked through March. This story comes to us from member station WNYC in New York."
646,"Updated 2 p. m. ET, President Trump’s freeze on immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries cites the potential threat of terrorism. But here’s the twist  —   it doesn’t include any countries from which radicalized Muslims have actually killed Americans in the U. S. since Sept. 11, 2001. The president’s executive action, which he signed Friday at the Pentagon, applies to these countries: Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Sudan. Yet no Muslim extremist from any of these places has carried out a fatal attack in the U. S. in more than two decades. In contrast, here are the countries of origin of radicalized Muslims who carried out deadly attacks in the U. S. beginning on Sept. 11, 2001: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. The two lists are completely distinct, raising questions about the reasoning behind the White House plan. ”These seven countries were identified by the Obama Administration as needing further travel scrutiny,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Sunday on ABC’s This Week. ”There are 46 other countries with Muslim populations that are not part of this and I think that’s an important thing to note.” But there were many critics. ”I think this is an overreaction,” says Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, who has tracked Muslim extremism in the U. S. for years. ”We just haven’t seen a large number of   answering the call to revolutionary violence that the   Islamic State and other groups have been pitching at them,” he adds. The nations on the White House list include several mired in civil wars, as well as those that host extremist groups. All have had fraught relations with the U. S. American drones or warplanes have conducted airstrikes in five of the seven. The executive action read: ”Deteriorating conditions in certain countries due to war, strife, disaster, and civil unrest increase the likelihood that terrorists will use any means possible to enter our country.” Existing visa restrictions, Citizens from the seven nations in Trump’s order already faced great difficulty in obtaining visas, gaining refugee status or immigrating to the U. S. ”The U. S. immigration vetting system is extremely thorough. That is perhaps why we’ve seen so little violence by immigrants and refugees in the United States,” said Kurzman. ”As someone who brings over international students, international scholars for conferences and training programs, I know how hard it is to get even extremely upright folks through that system.” The 19 terrorists on the hijacked planes used in the Sept. 11 attacks were from four countries not on the new White House list: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. Since then, radicalized Muslims have carried out a number of deadly attacks in the U. S. The precise count varies among groups that track the terror threat, but most groups cite fewer than 10 lethal attacks and fewer than 100 deaths, including New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. The deadliest single attack was at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last June, which left 49 dead. The man responsible was Omar Mateen, whose parents were from Afghanistan, though he was born in New York. Afghanistan is not on the White House list. In a few cases,   nationals have carried out lethal attacks. They include Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband, was responsible for the San Bernardino, Calif. shooting that claimed 14 lives in December 2015. She was born in Pakistan but spent most of her life in Saudi Arabia until she came to the U. S. in 2014 on a fiancée visa to marry Syed Rizwan Farook. He was born in Chicago, to a family originally from Pakistan. Neither Pakistan nor Saudi Arabia are on the White House list. Similarly, the Boston Marathon bombing was carried out by two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Tamerlan was born in the Soviet Union (now southern Russia) and Dzhokar was born in Krygyzstan. Those countries are not on the White House list. Here’s a list of attacks linked to radicalized Muslims in the U. S. since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:"
647,"It was a bright hot day in June. Or possibly July. And the clocks almost certainly weren’t striking thirteen, because they don’t do that in this country. But it WAS the summer of 1984. I was 9 years old, and my father was handing me a   paperback with an   white and green cover his old college copy of George Orwell’s 1984. ”Here,” he said. ”I think you’re ready for this.” My dad has always had a weirdly inflated sense of my intellectual abilities. And I was captivated, instantly. I have this pet theory that some books, the ones you encounter as a child and read over and over again, somehow work themselves into your mental DNA so that everything you encounter later in life contains ghostly references to whatever that original text was  —   tubes of saccharine tablets in the grocery store, mystery meat in the high school lunch room, red scarves, glass paperweights, cold April days, rats, the number 101 in any context so many things have that tingle of association. Not that I understood even vaguely what the hell was going on in 1984 the first time I read it. But I was sucked down deep into Orwell’s strange gray world, so different from   ’80s America. To a    stuffed full of fantasy novels, Orwell’s   ability was the big draw the sights and sounds and  —   unfortunately sometimes  —   smells of Airstrip One were alien but vividly real. (Though the less said here about the scene in the holding cell with Parsons and the lavatory pan, the better.) And that’s the thing: I was so caught by that world that I revisited it again and again, at least once a year, all the way through college. Every time I   it, something new would unfold itself from the pages for me  —   first, the tragedy of Winston and Julia, and the way that love is sometimes just naivete. Then, when I was 12, my dad the former political science professor explained totalitarianism to me  —   I was mostly impressed with myself for being able to pronounce the word, never mind understanding the concept, but it added a new dimension to what had become my favorite book. On the next   I began to understand the way language shapes thought, and how Orwell’s villainous Inner Party is determined to eradicate concepts like freedom by removing the ability to speak about them  —   powerful ideas for a budding writer. And finally somewhere in my   I found myself reading the ’Goldstein’s Book’ chapters instead of skipping them as too complicated, and the whole structure of a society built on constant warfare clicked into place here were the ideas driving this world I was so fascinated with, and they made scary sense. The adjective ”Orwellian” gets tossed around with abandon these days. It’s become such a cliche that the intensity of the original experience, the layers of thought and meaning, can get lost in the noise  —   so I invite you to pull up a chair (in that little alcove the telescreen can’t see) pour yourself a glass of oily ersatz Victory Gin, and dive in. You, too, will find yourself rolling down that glorious corridor. You, too, will love Big Brother."
648,"The government of Chile says wildfires that have killed at least 10 people are the worst blazes in the country’s history. Several firefighters are among the dead. ”We have never seen anything on this scale, never in the history of Chile,” President Michelle Bachelet said earlier this week, after her administration declared a state of emergency. ”The truth is that the forces are doing everything humanly possible and will continue until they can contain and control the fires.” Reporting from Rio de Janeiro, NPR’s Philip Reeves said Thursday that hundreds of thousands of acres have been destroyed in the southern and central parts of the country and that an entire town was incinerated. ”Reports say flames ripped through a place called Santa Olga, burning down its kindergarten, post office and about 1, 000 homes,” he said. At least one body was recovered from the ashes in Santa Olga, according to Deutsche Welle, and about 6, 000 residents fled the city as the flames moved in. ”This is an extremely serious situation  —   of horror, a nightmare without an end,” the mayor of the coastal city of Constitucion told the German broadcaster. ”Everything burned.” The   flames have laid waste to forests and vineyards, Phil reported. Chile is a major exporter of wine and grapes and has a growing timber market. While fires are common in Chile at this time of year, ”these have taken on disastrous proportions, thanks to prolonged drought, strong winds and unusually hot weather,” Phil said. In addition to local weather patterns, which themselves are shaped by global climate change, a review of Chile’s wildfires published in November in the journal Global and Planetary Change warned the ”pattern, frequency and intensity” of wildfires in the country ”has grown at an alarming rate” in recent years, in part because of intensive forest management practices that led to a large amount of flammable fuel in the country’s forests. As of Thursday morning, Chile’s National Emergency Bureau was tracking 100 active fires covering about 920 square miles, 30 of which have been contained, according to The New York Times. The newspaper reported: ”In total, 4, 000 people  —   including firefighters, troops and national forestry bureau officers  —   and 46 aircraft have been deployed to combat the fires, according to the National Emergency Bureau. ”Some residents, lacking any training or protective gear, have used tree branches and bottles of water to try to douse the flames.” The Chilean government has appealed for international help. The U. S. Embassy in Santiago said earlier this week that the U. S. government was donating $100, 000 ”for the local procurement and delivery of firefighting equipment, such as chainsaws and weather monitoring tools requested by the National Forestry Corporation.” The U. S. Agency for International Development and the U. S. Forest Service sent four people to ”assess the situation and advise local authorities.” On Wednesday, a privately owned Boeing 747 ”supertanker” plane arrived in Santiago to help control the fires from the air. Such planes are capable of dumping 20, 000 gallons of flame retardant, Wired magazine reported. The aircraft is owned by Colorado Springs, Colo.  Global SuperTanker Services, according to The Gazette newspaper. The paper reported that the mission, including a   crew, was paid for by Fundación Viento Sur, which is part of the Walton Family Foundation and run by Ben Walton and his   wife, Lucy Ana Walton de Avilés. The New York Times reported the price tag for the supertanker was $2 million. The plane is being deployed in the Maule region, north of the destroyed town of Santa Olga, according to Deutsche Welle."
649,"Much has been written about the 20 million people who gained health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and what could happen to these patients if the ACA is repealed without a replacement. But some people don’t realize that hospitals nationwide could take a big financial hit on several fronts, too. First, it’s likely that fewer patients would be able to pay their hospital bills, health policy analysts say, so the institutions would be stuck with that bad debt, as they were before Obamacare. ”If the Medicaid expansion goes away wholesale, and things go back to the way they were before this expansion was in place, a lot of those hospitals would see an increase in their uncompensated care costs,” says Rachel Garfield, an analyst with the Kaiser Family Foundation. The American Hospital Association estimates that hospitals across the U. S. could lose more than $160 billion from the reduction in Medicaid revenue and the increase in unpaid medical bills. Then there’s this: The ACA has used financial incentives to encourage hospitals to experiment with ways to improve their care of patients, while reducing health care’s cost. That sort of experimentation has included a sizable upfront investment by many hospitals. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, for example, signed agreements with physicians and insurers to create accountable care organizations, in hopes of saving money in the long run. With an ACO, insurers pay doctors for making sure the patient is getting the best and most appropriate care, instead of paying for every test and procedure a doctor does. ”We have now more than 20 different programs,” says Dr. Timothy Ferris, an internist and medical director of the Mass General Physicians Organization. ”Video visits, electronic consultation with specialists, home hospitalization, [and] programs for patients with diabetes and heart disease. I would be worried that a repeal of the ACA would undermine our ability to invest in services for our patients.” Ferris acknowledges that most of those experiments haven’t yet saved money. But they need more time to work out the kinks safely, he says. ”One of the things that it’s difficult for people outside of health care to appreciate  —   particularly politicians  —   is how long it takes to make significant improvements in the delivery of care,” Ferris says. ”You have to be very careful when you make changes.” Ferris says the threatened repeal of the ACA makes him worry ”that the progress we’ve made over the past five years would be threatened.” Many other hospitals across the country have invested in accountable care organizations  —   often overhauling their medical records systems, hiring staff and creating new services. Dennis Keefe, head of a large hospital chain called Care New England in Rhode Island, says he, too, worries about the future of his ACO, Integra. ”I think, if there’s a real change in direction away from these alternative payment models, we will be assuming risk to care for a population,” Keefe says. ”We have invested enormously to be successful in this area.” But these seismic changes in the way hospitals do business were predicated, he adds, on   support from the federal government  —   support that might disappear if the ACA is repealed. This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with NPR, Rhode Island Public Radio and Kaiser Health News. The Kaiser Family Foundation supports Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program that produces news reports heard on NPR and published on NPR. org. "
650,"American composer Philip Glass turns 80 years old on January 31. To mark the occasion, we asked several of Glass’ colleagues and collaborators to pick a piece of his music and write about it. You can read essays on NPR Music by Paul Simon, filmmaker Errol Morris and composers Nico Muhly and David Lang. We also asked Laurie Anderson. She wrote about Glass’ piano Etude No. 10, saying she finds ”new ways to breathe” each time she plays it. We also wanted to talk to her about first meeting Glass and collaborating with him in the blossoming communal arts scene of writers, dancers, sculptors and composers in lower Manhattan in the early 1970s. Some of the music that fueled that artistic cooperative came from Glass, the young experimenter who held extended rehearsals in his SoHo loft. Anderson recalls listening to those musical marathons for eight hours in a row, staring at the ceiling and letting the sound wash over her. In 1981, the song ”O Superman” became a hit for Anderson, first in the U. K. and helped launch her career outside of Manhattan’s art circles. She’s since made albums, films,   pieces and written books. She married Lou Reed in 2008. She continues to collaborate with Glass on projects and in concert. Anderson says she’s continually inspired by Glass’ generosity, open mind and fresh ideas  —   even when those ideas sometime push her to uncomfortable places. In the interview, which you can listen to as an All Songs +1 podcast, she recalls a time after Reed’s death in 2013 when she was rehearsing with Glass and he asked her to find some tape of Reed’s voice to work into a new piece. She felt it wasn’t the right time. But after Glass insisted, she realized how powerful the music became and they have performed it in concert several times. Listen to a   discussion about Glass’s music, the SoHo artistic community and why we are ”collapsing under the weight of our own stories” at the listening link above, and read edited highlights below. ”It’s looping around on itself in ways that my own mind does. I began to listen to Phil’s music at the same time I began to meditate, so they’re forever bound together for me. Also, I found I could listen to Phil’s music in a way I’d never listened before, which was in a kind of meditative state. Not expecting it to do giant crescendos and then loop back to the theme, but to be persistently there.” ”I found it completely fascinating and I’d never heard anything like it before, and I went to many, many of those rehearsals in the early ’70s and, as many artists did, we would go and listen to eight Farfisas at   levels. And we would lie on the floor and look at the ceilings of these lofts, and after eight hours later, we would just leave. I remember the sculptor Sol LeWitt saying, ’I do my best work at Phil’s rehearsals. ’” ”If I’m working late at night on my own music, now and especially in the past, I’d be working late until I almost started hearing in a different way and became less interested in rules and more in just the pure sound. And that comes from duration, I think. I feel that with Pauline Oliveros’ music and with much of Brian Eno’s music. I feel it with Phil’s music  —   it’s very immersive. And of course, of those three, Phil is the more driving one. He’s got a propulsive thing. In a way, it’s really just keeping you in place and awake. When I say driving, you’re not going anywhere.” ”OK, this is SoHo when it was completely dark. No street lights and no stores. We were all doing our lofts, so we were driving pickup trucks, wearing work clothes. At that time none of us thought we would ever be professional artists or that anyone would ever pay us for doing any of this. So it was this really crazy innocent moment. ”We also believed that we were about to change the world. So we had this megalomaniacal idea about what we were doing in this   crazy downtown scene, which involved sculpture, dance, music, writing  —   all kinds of things. And maybe at that time, you could say there were 300 artists in SOHO. Probably not more were living and working there. It was a really tiny group. We all knew each other, and we all helped each other. ”So for Phil’s rehearsals, if people needed help carrying amps upstairs, I would do that. It was a very egalitarian time. And it’s easy to forget this, but it wasn’t that far from the ’60s. There was a complete counterculture that didn’t really need the official culture. It was very isolated from it. We had our own drugs, our own food, our own music, our own dances, our own clothes  —   our own everything.”"
651,"I’m in the middle of tapping out an email to my dad, deleting and retyping sentences. On Friday night I’ll cook an abridged Chinese New Year Eve dinner, I write. Maybe I’ll cook noodles (symbolizing happiness, longevity) or dumplings (symbolizing wealth). I don’t tell him what I’ll do exactly. This is the first time in my adult life, apart from drinking parties organized under the guise of making dumplings for Lunar New Year, that I’ve paid attention to this holiday. My dad is unbothered by the truncated menu. In his email back to me, he focuses more on the train he’ll take to New York, the one after 3 p. m. when the station offers free parking. Chinese New Year had always felt to me more like stiff spectacle than warm family tradition, and fleetingly, I feel guilty for hijacking his holiday by moving it from his place to mine. I’d invited him because it was time for a visit and because I didn’t want to make the   trek to his house in Connecticut. I wonder if, with my laziness, I’ve sped up the generational   of customs that comes when a kid assumes more leadership in a family. Like hosting a Lunar New Year dinner. I also wonder if I’m cheapening a tradition. When you’re the child of immigrants, assuming ownership of rituals you don’t cherish is fraught. How, if at all, do you carry this tradition forward? The Lunar New Year of my youth: Dad pushes our kitchen table to the center of the room. He’s clearing space for the family to stand and pray. He and mom coat the table with platters of fish (symbolizing surplus, prosperity) black moss noodles (more prosperity) roast duck, poached chicken with ginger and scallion oil. Before we eat, my parents set out framed photos of our dead relatives (symbolizing filial duty, I guess) next to the food offerings.  Earlier in the day, my sisters Stephanie and Caroline and I trim our hair (symbolizing good luck) fold joss paper into bullions and cut up tissue paper into teeny shirts and pants. My parents set the paper on fire to send to the ancestors, a flaming postal service for the dead.  We light incense. Clasping the puffing sticks in our palms, we bow three times (symbolizing . .. I don’t know) and dispose of them outside on the back deck. The smoke from the incense licks our eyeballs and clings to our winter jackets, which we wear throughout the night (symbolizing we’re cold).  We light more incense, bow over and over and over for each dead relative, then walk out back into the snow and drop the smoldering sticks in a   Folger’s coffee can. Years later, when my mom dies, we add her photo to the altar. I make tissue dresses for her, which my dad burns. This is the only day he acknowledges her presence and her death. I don’t really get this holiday, but I bow three times. I eat the fish, the noodles, the duck, the chicken. I don’t buy what it symbolizes, but it means something. As I do several times each week, I called my dad on my way to the subway station. We talked logistics for Friday. I told him we could burn incense on my fire escape, which could defeat the purpose of fire escapes. (Our neighbors called the cops one Lunar New Year when they thought our house was on fire.) ”If there’s one thing I cook, what should it be?” I asked him. ”Well,” he said, ”fish.” He launched into a brief but    ramble about how in Chinese, the word for fish, yú, is a lot like the word for prosperity, yúshēng. I was  . My lifelong    of having to cook food that looks back at me had returned. Why didn’t I just suggest we go to a Chinese restaurant, like so many other   and gorge ourselves on an elaborate spread? And I didn’t even want to think about getting on the F train and smelling up a subway car with the perfume of dead fish. How do I carry this tradition forward? I asked friends and strangers on Twitter how they celebrate the holiday. I got a lot of tweets about   red envelopes and the glutinous rice cake called nian gao (symbolizing more money, more status, healthy children). It seemed like their family’s versions of the New Year are kind of . .. joyful. But I needed more. I wondered what the holiday meant in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Chinese immigrants were first coming to the U. S. How did they do things back then? How did they handle this generational   thing? I turned to NPR’s researchers for help and got a virtual stack of articles. They were mostly brownsplainy and   stories about parades and firecrackers. But one article from 1913 in The San Francisco Call caught my eye. The reporter wrote that the holiday was a ”fizzle.” On Chinese New Year, the writer noted, the stores in Chinatown must remain closed per tradition. But ”the younger spirits —  revolutionists —  wanted to keep the stores open and neglect the celebration,” the reporter wrote. ”These young republicans held their celebration, observing the Gregorian calendar.” It seems that this day has always been divided by generation. To see if my   angst was legitimate, I asked Janelle Wong. She’s the head of the Asian American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She crunched some numbers from a 2012 Pew Research Center report, and I saw I wasn’t so unique. She told the story of assimilation with five numbers. ”Among Chinese Americans, over 85% of   immigrants celebrate the Lunar New Year,” she wrote in an email. ”The proportion who celebrate LNY falls to about 80% among   Chinese Ams and further down to about 60% by the  . In comparison, about 80% of   Chinese immigrants celebrate Thanksgiving, and this rises to over 90% of   and close to 100% of the  .” All across the country this weekend, major cities with established Asian populations will roll out Lunar New Year parades with great fanfare, including some big ones in San Francisco, New York, Washington D. C. and Las Vegas. There will be dragon dances on Chinatown streets that are narrowing with gentrification. I will be in my old Brooklyn apartment with my dad, burning incense on my fire escape. I called him for the second time this week. I wanted to know how he felt about me hosting. My dad’s not big on feelings, and he responded by talking about the weather how he might have to bail on our plans if it snowed. I tried again. Was he happy that I’m hosting the New Year dinner this time? I could hear his shrug through the phone. Yeah, he said eventually, sounding close to happy, this is how ”culture gets propagated.” It’s odd to think about traditions propagating. They aren’t exactly cultivated the way a plant cutting spawns more plants. To me, it’s like they’ve been jammed into some generational paper shredder. They emerge on the other end, made of the same wood pulp. Just . .. different. Clearly, I was in a Lunar New Year Crisis (symbolizing guilt) so I called Russell Jeung. He’s a San Francisco State University professor who wrote a book about sustaining faith traditions. In a call that felt part Dear Prudie, part Dear Professor, Jeung helped me through my LNYC. He told me this is normal that a lot of people he talked to for his research said that  —   while they celebrate the holiday  —   they ”don’t understand a lot of the meanings behind the practices.” What’s left, Jeung said, are things done for ”food and fun.” There are no scriptures or doctrines that teach people how to do Lunar New Year, and that’s the beginning of Jeung’s explanation for why I might be experiencing what he called ”dissonant acculturation.” Here’s the rest: Like Lunar New Year. It was hard to know if I should be comforted that my ”dissonant acculturation” is really out of my hands that the forces of American culture make it tough to hold on to this tradition. ”Should I feel guilty?” I asked Jeung toward the end of our conversation. It always comes back to guilt. ”No!” he said. Then he reconsidered. ”Well, yes. Because that’s part of the process. It’s not guilt, it’s gratefulness. Or, maybe it’s guilt over . .. lack of gratefulness. That’s part of the ritual. That’s actually the useful function of these rituals to use shame and guilt so you become more moral.” Not the best sell for someone on the fence. In a wave of remorse or nostalgia or something, I text my sisters. I tell them that I don’t usually do anything for the holiday. I tell them that I don’t trim my hair. I usually don’t even bother with the food. I feel bad acknowledging this. Stephanie, the oldest, is the first to text back. ”I think the burning things and ceremony are soothing and comforting,” she writes to me and Caroline. ”I like buying into the Chinese superstitions because it somehow makes me feel prideful of being Chinese. . .. It’s like honoring being Chinese, and whoever taught it to you.” Later that night, I try to decide which photo of my mom I should use when my father and I pray. It connects us to a past we shouldn’t forget. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy into the symbolism behind Lunar New Year. But I made the trip to Fei Long Market in Brooklyn on Thursday. And I bought the damn fish."
652,"At any other time of the year, Shengping Lane bustles with life. But the Lunar New Year holiday is near, half the city has left for their hometowns and Shanghai has returned to the Shanghainese. The only vendor left in the alley sells calendars, but soon he’ll pack up, too. It’s the time of year when Shengping Lane lives up to its name: 升平 or ”Rising Peace.” It’ll soon be the Year of the Rooster, and Yuan Shuizhen is preparing chicken feet in her tiny kitchen for the big meal. The    wipes her hands, retreats outside and plops down on a chair along the side of the alley to chat with friends. ”All the outsiders have left for home,” says Yuan, leaning over to peer down the narrow lane. This is the time of year when hundreds of millions of Chinese workers return to their hometowns. Nearly half of Shanghai’s 26 million people weren’t born in Shanghai, and many of them have already left. ”It’s much quieter this time of year  —   less crazy,” Yuan says. Her two friends nod. The three grannies go through a list of food they’ll make for their families: Beef, fish, dumplings, hotpot. After a meal with family, they’ll go to the Buddhist temple to pray and burn incense. ”When I was young, we’d go to the cemetery to worship our ancestors,” says Yuan. ”Then we’d cook one pot of rice, serve it in small bowls, and we’d eat it for the next five days. Now we cook meals every single day. Life has improved.” Yuan’s friend Ni Jindi agrees, but the    still grumbles about her grandchildren. They’re all working professionals, and they rarely have time to visit their grandmother here in the lane. This is the only time of year she gets to spend time with them and her  . ”They’re leaving on the third day of the holiday to go travel somewhere,” says Ni with a wave of her hand. ”I don’t know exactly where they’re going. I’m too old. I’ll stay here.” She’ll have company. Her two friends are   too, whose families will also fly somewhere exotic after the first of the year: Japan, Thailand, the United States. With their relatives gone and the holiday setting in, Rising Peace Lane will grow even quieter, with just the chatter of three grannies sharing memories."
653,"The day after his inauguration, President Trump placed a call to the acting head of the National Park Service, Michael Reynolds. ”I can confirm that the call took place. I can’t comment on the content of the conversation,” National Park Service spokesman Tom Crosson said in an email to NPR. Trump reportedly was upset over the agency’s retweeting of    photos that unfavorably compared the crowd sizes at his and former President Obama’s inaugurations. The retweet was later removed. ”It was a, ’What’s going on?’ type of thing,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The New York Times on Thursday night. ”Why is the National Park Service tweeting out comparison photos? That was the bigger issue there.” The Washington Post, which first reported the phone call, said Trump ordered Reynolds to provide photos of Inauguration Day crowds on the National Mall on Jan. 20, with the intent of proving the media ”had lied in reporting that attendance was no better than average.” As NPR’s Jessica Taylor reported on Saturday: ”Press secretary Sean Spicer delivered a fiery broadside against the Fourth Estate from the White House Briefing Room Saturday evening, claiming that reporters had engaged in ’deliberately false reporting’ in the past 24 hours since President Trump took the oath of office. And, after berating the press, he walked away without taking any questions. ” ’Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,’ Spicer claimed.” Speaking Saturday at CIA headquarters, Trump referred to his ”running war with the media” and called reporters ”among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Talking about the crowd that attended his inauguration, Trump said, ”I looked out, it looked like a million, a million and a half people.” The National Park Service does not give official crowd estimates. The president also said of the crowd, ”It went all the way back to the Washington Monument.” But as Jessica reported: ”According to aerial photos and multiple NPR reporters on the ground, the crowd was nowhere near the Washington Monument. The mall area near the monument was sparsely populated, and Trump didn’t offer any verification for where the 1 million to 1. 5 million estimate came from, or for knocking down one news report’s estimate that there were only 250, 000 people in attendance.”"
654,"President Trump tweets a lot. With tens of millions of followers on Twitter, Trump proposes policy, shares his latest actions and reacts to the news. But 140 characters rarely gives the full context. During the president’s first 100 days in office, we attempted to do just that for key tweets."
655,"Rafael Nadal has reached the final of the Australian Open, where he will face longtime rival Roger Federer in a matchup that answers the prayers of tennis fans eager to see a ninth Grand Slam final between the pair. Nadal outlasted Grigor Dimitrov in a nearly   match Friday. ”For me, it’s a privilege” to face Federer again, Nadal said after his semifinal. By reviving a rivalry that began in earnest when they slugged it out in the 2006 French Open, Nadal and Federer, now 30 and 35, respectively, provide a bookend to the women’s bracket, where Venus and Serena Williams will play in the Australian Open’s final for the first time since 2003. The   Nadal needed a gritty win over No. 15 seed Dimitrov to reach the final, winning     7( 7) (5) 6( 4) (7)  . Nadal had been poised to win in four sets  —   but Dimitrov used his mobility and a booming serve to prolong the match at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, and his creativity and lashing backhand gave Nadal fits. Nadal was on the losing end of two key challenges late in the match, as in the final sets, two of Dimitrov’s angled shots  —   one on either sideline  —   were shown to have caught a sliver of the line. Fate seemed to turn against Nadal in the final set, as Dimitrov held serve by using a        shot (after losing his footing near the net) to set up a baseline winner that Nadal couldn’t reach. But after both players held serve through the set’s first eight games, Nadal finally broke through to go up  . One day earlier, Federer had booked his spot in the title match with his own   victory over Stan Wawrinka. On Sunday, Nadal will appear in his first Grand Slam final since the 2014 French Open  —   and Federer will be trying to break a drought of his own: He hasn’t won a Grand Slam since Wimbledon in 2012."
656,"Niya Kenny pulled out her cell phone and began recording. It happened in 2015, after a classmate had refused to hand over her own cell phone during class and was being pulled from her chair by a police officer based at their school, Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S. C. When Kenny loudly protested and, like her classmate, refused to hand over her phone, she too was arrested. The charge: disturbing a school. Kenny’s story is one of several featured in a new investigation from Education Week, ”Policing America’s Schools,” exploring the debate over school discipline, the role of police officers in schools, and why it is that black students are arrested at disproportionately high rates in much of the country. Education Week will roll out the results of its investigation over the next few weeks, including the tool below that allows users to explore their state and   data more closely. In the   school year, according to a new analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center, black students accounted for 16 percent of students enrolled in public schools but 33 percent of arrests in those schools. In 10 states, black students’ share of arrests in schools with at least one arrest exceeded their share of enrollment by at least 20 percentage points. NPR Ed spoke with Education Week staff writer Evie Blad about the project. The interview below has been edited for clarity. What stood out to you from the investigation’s findings? That the disparities we see in arrests and discipline referral rates are most persistent for black students across a majority of states. Just looking at arrests in 43 states and Washington D. C. black students made up a larger share of students arrested than they did the population in schools that had at least one arrest. So, they’re more heavily represented in the group of students that face contact with law enforcement in schools. In most states, there are a couple hundred arrests. In some, the number is small enough that it doesn’t take a lot to move a percentage point. But we found that, in 28 states, the share of arrested students who are black is at least 10 percentage points higher than their enrollment in schools that arrested students. And in 10 states, the gap is at least 20 percentage points. There’s a pretty big difference between their representation and their share of arrested students. And the same is true for referrals to law enforcement. What did you find in terms of a student’s likelihood of being in a school with a law enforcement officer? At both the middle school and high school level, black students are most likely to be in a school with a   law enforcement officer. At the high school level, in general, officers are more common. So, 74 percent of all black students were in schools with an   officer, followed by 71 percent of both Hispanic and   students, 65 percent of Asian students, and 65 percent of white students. In a middle school, it’s about 59 percent of black students, and the next lowest group is Hispanic students at 49 percent, followed by white students at 47 percent. So, the disparity is a little more severe. Elementary school police officers are far less common so there’s a little bit of a closer clustering of races. Do we know whether a student who attends a school with a law enforcement officer is, for that fact alone, more likely to be arrested? It would be hard to look at this one piece of federal data and draw that conclusion definitively because there are so many differences between schools. But other researchers have explored this. There’s some research that came out in the last year that compared student arrests based on specific offenses, like vandalism, fights without a weapon  —   things like that  —   at schools that were demographically similar. They found that the rates were higher if a school had a   officer. In theory, schools that have officers should be treating them like the officers you would call in off the street. So, if I have an officer and a student is doing something wrong, would I call    for this student’s behavior? But, civil rights groups feel that schools aren’t setting clear enough boundaries for officers and some of them are getting involved in routine discipline. Some [groups] also feel that the hiring of law enforcement and the push for school security are driving resources away from student supports like counselors and social workers who might be able to remedy some of these issues before they escalate. One of the things that interested me about your reporting is the fact that some states have codified tougher penalties for being disruptive in class, which may lead to higher arrest rates for students doing things that, in many places, would not justify a call to   . Right. So, that’s been a big focus in recent years. In 2015, one video that got a lot of headlines was of a girl being arrested in South Carolina. A   officer pulled her out of her chair and dragged her across the floor before arresting her. The charge that she and her classmate [Niya Kenny] were arrested under was disturbing a school, which is a South Carolina law. A lot of folks argue that it was originally written to apply to people who came in from the outside and disrupted public schools but that it’s often applied to students. That law specifically limits things like obnoxious behavior. [Kenny] is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the disrupting a school law in South Carolina. In other states, folks argue that laws against disorderly conduct are applied pretty broadly and subjectively  —   both in schools and on the street and that, if you have any kind of an implicit bias, that’s where it will come into play. Interesting. Can you think of other states that have laws like this? It’s a little difficult to spell out because the laws have different names. But they’re pretty broadly spread throughout the country. Some states have done a better job of issuing guidance through their departments of education to help schools put boundaries around how those laws are applied. But in many states, the complaint is that, if things are too subjective and too broad, then there’s not enough consistency in how they’re applied. Where do we stand now on practices being used in schools to not only minimize arrests but suspensions too? People tend to think of arrests as a safety issue and suspensions as a discipline issue. But I think a lot of folks would tell you that this is all kind of on a continuum of how schools a.) deal with student behavior and b.) approach their climate. How do they support students and remedy their behavior so that it doesn’t continue if they do something wrong? There’s been a big push in recent years to explore how schools handle things like classroom removals  —   if there’s a way to reduce suspensions and expulsions. Rather than sending a student home for misbehavior, doing things like restorative practices. That means asking students to sit with their peers to discuss the Why behind their behavior and how it affected them and to find a way to stop doing it in the future. That is hard work for schools. It requires   from administrators and teachers. It requires a lot of training and a lot of thought and a lot of work. But some researchers argue that it’s a more effective way of ensuring that students behave better in the future and that discipline is fair in resolving these situations."
657,"Frauke Petry is a paradox. The petite    German chemist with a pixie cut is well known for being tough as nails, chewing out journalists and wresting control of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party a couple of years after it was founded. But Petry looked a little lost as the AfD hosted last weekend’s summit of Europe’s populist stars next to the Rhine River in Koblenz. She shifted awkwardly onstage next to charismatic National Front leader Marine Le Pen, her   ally from France, who posed with Dutch isolationist phenomenon Geert Wilders as he snapped selfies on his smartphone. Petry’s party and its counterparts across Europe are seeing an unprecedented surge in support. Wilders’ Freedom Party is now polling ahead of its rivals in the Netherlands, where elections are scheduled in March. Le Pen has a shot at the French presidency a month later. AfD has managed to win seats in more than half of German state legislatures over the past couple of years and is expected to do the same in parliamentary elections this fall. That’s the most support any nationalist faction in Germany has received since World War II. Compared to the fiery oratory of Le Pen, who riled up the largely German audience at the summit with predictions of a populist toppling of the EU, Petry drew more polite applause with her speech that sounded rather like a history lecture on the declining state of Europe. She’s more relaxed and conversational when I meet her in Leipzig, arriving in jeans with her youngest child, Tobias, in tow. The elementary   boy is recovering from a cold and clings to her legs as she coaxes him to unpack his toys at a colleague’s desk and play. Petry tells me she married her   boyfriend, Marcus Pretzell, right before Christmas. He’s a member of the European Parliament and head of the   Westphalia AfD branch. The party recently announced that she’s pregnant with their first child, which is her fifth. Call it practicing what you preach: Petry believes Germans having more children is the way to solve the worker shortage and other problems resulting from her country’s aging population, rather than relying on immigration as the government does currently. ”It will be hard because you cannot force people to have children, obviously, and we do not want that anyway,” she says. But she’d like to see the government provide financial incentives to encourage German couples ”to have more children, to start having children earlier”  —   in their 20s, rather than in their 30s or later. As to why she thinks Muslim asylum seekers are a danger to Germany, Petry suggests reading Machiavelli. ”The principles of migration have always been the same,” she explains. ”It’s a question of period of time, process and numbers, and if migration population in the long run [outnumbers] the ethnic population of this country, the country will disappear, it will change dramatically. And that’s what we see when we talk about illegal migration today in Germany and Europe.” Petry claims to have no problem with Muslim immigrants who have assimilated into German society. But she completely rejects Chancellor Angela Merkel’s claim that Islam belongs to Germany. ”If you talk about the religious differences, we do have serious problems with Islam and it’s much easier to integrate someone from France, or from Poland, from Spain, from Britain or from wherever in Europe, into a European culture like the German culture than someone from a Middle East country,” she says. ”I think that’s obvious.” The fear of German extinction is something Petry and her AfD party have successfully used to rally support in local elections over the past couple of years. Martin Kroh of the German Economic Research Institute in Berlin says that is not how the controversial party started out. AfD was founded in 2013 by economists, business leaders and academics who opposed German bailouts of the Eurozone. Their criticism of Merkel and the EU resonated with many Germans who were fed up with their country footing the bill for the euro debt crisis. Even so, AfD failed to get enough votes to meet the 5 percent threshold required to enter the German parliament in 2014. The following year, Petry and her allies took over. ”The party changed from this moderate, economic Euroskepticism to more   populist statements and also   positions, and also being more conservative on family policies,” Kroh says. A Jan.   Jan. 23 poll by the German research firm INSA for the German newspaper Bild shows 14. 5 percent of German voters plan to cast ballots for Alternative for Germany in national elections this September. Many of the votes are shifting from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic   bloc. According to the poll, the bloc’s approval rating dropped to 32. 5 percent and if it keeps declining, Merkel will have a tough time forming a new coalition government. Her political allies are worried enough to have taken stances against migrants and the European Union that sound a lot like AfD’s positions. Petry smiles when I ask her about that. ”These ideas have already been there for quite a while, but they were called racist or xenophobic or something else,” she says. ”Politicians of all the other parties realize that all the   solutions up to now haven’t worked.” Still, Petry is pushing her party to tone it down, especially when it comes to  . The AfD is considering kicking out its Thuringia branch head, Bjoern Hoecke, for recently condemning the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. He told supporters in Dresden on Jan. 17: ”We Germans are the only people in the world who would plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” Le Pen, Wilders and other European populist leaders say Petry should be the next German chancellor. But she isn’t prepared to address a run in our interview. ”Our party has to enter the German parliament, first of all,” she says. ”And I’m willing, and my party is willing, to change the political situation in Germany and in Europe. Anything else apart from that is way too early to discuss.” She’ll likely need a parliamentary majority to become chancellor because  —   like Wilders’ Dutch opponents  —   no mainstream German party is willing to partner with Petry or her AfD."
658,"Some say you have to have loved and lost to appreciate the beauty of the bolero. Since its inception in Cuba in the early 20th century, the music has been designed for thoughtful and emotional consideration of the joys and pains that come with loving someone so intensely, it becomes like a religion to adore that special someone (an actual bolero lyric). When the members of Richmond, Virginia’s Miramar first heard the music of Puerto Rican composer Sylvia Rexach, they were intrigued that she wasn’t as well known as other popular bolero writers. So they came up with an album’s worth of her songs to cover, and have been wowing audiences across the country with their exquisite renditions of her songs. When they pulled into NPR to play behind Bob Boilen’s desk, Miramar’s members made time stop with a performance that swept us off our feet, ably backed by friends of theirs from Richmond who played gorgeous string arrangements behind the band. So turn the lights down low, clear out the   carpet and find your dance partner for this one. Dedication To Sylvia Rexach is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) ”Sin Ti” ”Estatua” ”Urgancia” Rei Alvaresz (vocals, maracas) Laura Ann Singh (vocals) Marlysse Simmons Argandoña (piano, organ) Hector Barez (percussion) James Farmer (bass) Sebastian Cruz (guitar) Ellen Riccio (violin) Treesa Gild (violin) Kimberly Ryan (viola) Schuyler Slack (cello). Producers: Felix Contreras, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Nick Michael, Kara Frame, Morgan Noelle Smith Production Assistant: A Noah Harrison Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
659,"You may remember Mary Johnson from a 2011 StoryCorps conversation with a man that could have easily been her enemy. She spoke with Oshea Israel, the man who murdered her son, Laramiun Byrd. Mary met Oshea while he was serving time in prison for the crime. After his release, they became close and sparked a remarkable relationship. ”My natural son is no longer here. I didn’t see him graduate. Now, you’re going to college,” she said to Oshea back then. ”I’ll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn’t see him get married. Hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to experience that with you.” ”Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner that which you are, is my motivation,” Oshea said. ”You still believe in me. And the fact that you can do it, despite how much pain I caused you, it’s amazing.” Since that interview she has been telling her story in local churches. She also fell in love and in 2015, married a man named Ed Roy. He had served time in prison, and later, also lost a son, Mandel. ”We met when my first born and my one and only son was murdered,” Ed tells Mary in a recent StoryCorps conversation. ”And a couple of my daughters had asked me to go to the church to hear you speak.” He says he wasn’t ready to forgive, but he was at a loss. ”Like I shared with you, I thought God took my boy and was punishing me for my own crimes. I had joined the gangs early and pulled my first armed robbery at 11 years old. With you being there, I saw hope. You took me under your wing. That’s why I called you my angel,” he says. Just before they got married, Ed says he had a dream. ”Your son was saying, ’Yeah, Mom! Alright!’ You know, ’Right on!’ And my son was saying, ’Yeah, Dad! ’Bout time you got it right!’ Ed says. Oshea served as a groomsman at their wedding. ”He is my spiritual son,” Mary says. The anniversary of Laramiun’s murder is Feb. 12. ”That empty hole’s always going to be there in our hearts,” Ed says. ”But I feel like when we together and we able to listen to one another’s heartbeats. It says a lot.” ”I’m thankful, I really am,” Mary says. ”You’re a good man.” Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jasmyn Belcher Morris and Liyna Anwar. StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps. org."
660,"As the toll of the opioid epidemic grows, scores of doctors have lost their licenses and some have gone to prison. Pharmacies are being sued and shuttered. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are under investigation and face new rules from regulators. But penalties against companies that serve as middlemen between drug companies and pharmacies have been relatively scarce  —   until recently. In the past month, two major drug distributors, also known as wholesalers, have formally agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle claims that they failed to report suspicious orders for controlled substances to the Drug Enforcement Administration, as required by law. McKesson Corp. the largest such company in the U. S. agreed Jan. 17 to pay a $150 million fine. And in late December, Cardinal Health reached a $44 million settlement with the federal government. That’s on top of another $20 million that Cardinal Health agreed this month to pay the state of West Virginia, which has been among the hardest hit by opioid overdoses. Other distributors have also agreed to pay smaller amounts to West Virginia within the past few months. AmerisourceBergen, for instance, will pay $16 million. ”Have the distributors gotten the message? I would hope so,” said Frank Younker, who worked at the DEA for 30 years and retired as a supervisor in its Cincinnati field office in 2014. ”The distributors are important. They’re like the quarterback. They distribute the ball. . ..There’s plenty of blame to go around.” The death toll from drug overdoses topped 52, 000 in 2015, including 33, 000 involving an opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the epidemic began with prescription pills, it is now being driven largely by heroin and various synthetic opioids. The fines, some of which had been in the works for years, come as news organizations have raised questions about the significant role distributors have played by failing to stop or report pharmacies that appeared to be dispensing more pills than seemed reasonable. The Charleston   reported in December how drug companies shipped nearly 9 million hydrocodone pills over two years to one pharmacy in the town of Kermit, W. Va. population 392. All told, the newspaper reported, drug wholesalers distributed 780 million pills of oxycodone and hydrocodone in the state over six years. ”The unfettered shipments amount to 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia,” the story said. The Washington Post reported in October how DEA leadership delayed and blocked enforcement actions as the overdose epidemic grew. Civil case filings against distributors, manufacturers, pharmacies and doctors dropped from 131 in fiscal 2011 to 40 in fiscal 2014, the Post reported. Immediate suspension orders (the toughest sanction the DEA has) fell from 65 to 9. Later, the Post reported why that may have been: The drug industry had hired dozens of officials from the DEA, leading some current and former officials to ask whether the industry sought to hire away those who presented ”the biggest headaches for them.” In response to written questions for this story, the DEA said it has always held distributors ”accountable for preventing the diversion of controlled and abused prescription drugs, including the opioid painkillers.” Asked if its recent fines were too little, too late, the agency replied, ”We don’t think so. We hope large fines such as this one [against McKesson] will get the attention of the companies’ leaders and stockholders and prompt them to be responsible corporate citizens, because people are dying as a result of the diversion of the opioid drugs they sell, and that can’t continue.” In statements released when the distributors finalized their settlements, the companies said they have improved their performance in recent years. McKesson noted that the settlement covers reporting practices dating back to 2009. ”Since 2013, McKesson has implemented significant changes to its monitoring and reporting processes,” the company said in a statement. As part of the settlement, the DEA will suspend the registrations of four of McKesson’s distribution centers, on a staggered basis, blunting the effect of the punishment. ”Pharmaceutical distributors play an important role in identifying and combating prescription drug diversion and abuse,” John H. Hammergren, chairman and chief executive officer, said in the statement. ”McKesson, as one of the nation’s largest distributors, takes our role seriously.” The DEA had previously taken action against McKesson in 2008 for failing to report suspicious orders, a factor cited in the latest fine. Cardinal Health’s fine was the last aspect of a 2012 settlement with the DEA, which included a   suspension of its Lakeland, Fla. distribution center. ”These agreements allow us to move forward and continue to focus on working with all participants in addressing the epidemic of prescription drug abuse,” Craig Morford, its chief legal and compliance officer, said in a statement last month. Federal prosecutors who worked on the McKesson case said that distributors play an important role in the overall system in which controlled substances get distributed. ”What Congress envisioned is that there would be gatekeepers along the way in this closed system,” said Kurt Didier, an assistant U. S. attorney in Sacramento, in an interview. ”It starts with the physician writing the prescription and the pharmacist filling the prescription. In between, you have entities like the distributors. ”In this overall scheme, a distributor is obligated to report to DEA prescriptions or orders that it views are suspicious,” Didier said. The agencies regulating the industry have had their own problems. The   reported that the West Virginia pharmacy board didn’t pay much attention to its own rules requiring that wholesalers report such orders. The board also had not examined reports from distributors regarding suspicious orders by pharmacies, nor had it shared those with law enforcement. For its part, the DEA also has been faulted several times by the Government Accountability Office for, among other things, how it sets annual quotas for the amount of controlled substances that can be produced, the information and guidance it provides to the entities it regulates, and how it uses confidential informants. Jim Geldhof, who retired in January 2016 after more than 40 years with the DEA, most recently as a manager in the Detroit field office, said the recent fines are important, but he wonders if they will make any difference. ”It’s going to be pretty hard to undo the damage that’s been done,” said Geldhof. ”Do they get it? I don’t know. I don’t have a real lot of faith in industry frankly.” ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom based in New York. You can follow Charles Ornstein on Twitter: @charlesornstein."
661,"When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival asked playwright Lisa Loomer if she’d be interested in writing a play about Roe v. Wade, she was understandably skeptical. The 1973 Supreme Court decision, which legalized a woman’s right to an abortion, marked a historic moment, but more than 40 years later the issue is far from settled. Loomer says she wasn’t sure Roe v. Wade would make good theater, so she started reading about key players on both sides of the issue. She says, ”That, for me, was the story of the divide in American culture. I thought [Roe v. Wade] was a great prism for looking at that divide.” But Loomer knew her play needed to be  . She says, ”I wanted people to feel, as they watched the play, that their point of view was represented, if nothing else because that helps people be more open and willing to hear another point of view.” The result, Roe, is currently playing at Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. It opens by introducing its two main characters: Norma McCorvey, aka ”Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, and Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued the Roe side of the case. McCorvey was a        who, in 1969, found herself poor and pregnant for a third time. The play shows her pleading with her doctor to give her an abortion. She tells him she tried to get it done illegally, but the place she went to ”looked like a ghost town, like somebody’d moved out of there real fast. There was blood all over the floors, roaches, sheets like filthy rags.” Her doctor’s response: ”Maybe you should have thought about consequences before you got pregnant for a third time.” Weddington was also in her 20s, but she was a very different person. The daughter of a Methodist minister was one of only 40 women at her Texas law school of 1, 600 students. As it happened, she already knew a lot about abortion: She’d had one in Mexico, something she didn’t reveal until years later. In 1970, Weddington and another young female attorney filed a suit in Texas that challenged the state law on behalf of all Texas women seeking an abortion. The Supreme Court heard the case in 1971, and the play puts the audience in the middle of the action. In Roe, the lawyers make their arguments facing the audience, and audio of the real justices’ responses (acquired from Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute) plays from the back of the theater. Loomer says, ”I thought it would be more dramatic than actors onstage, and more daunting for Sarah [Weddington] to face the voices of the real judges.” The case was reargued in 1972, and the Supreme Court didn’t rule in favor of Roe until 1973  —   far too late for McCorvey to get an abortion. But the play doesn’t stop there  —   it goes on to explore the personal and public battles that ensued. Weddington joined the Texas House of Representatives and continued to speak out for a woman’s right to choose McCorvey worked in abortion clinics, but then reversed her position on the issue and became involved in the   rights organization Operation Rescue. In one scene, an Operation Rescue activist named Ronda tries to talk a woman out of getting an abortion. She explains that when she got pregnant with her daughter, her fiancé wanted her to abort. She says, ”I was in my doctor’s office and I happened to see a picture in one of those pamphlets they give you. I saw the precious little hands and feet. And no, I may not be a scientist or a medical person, but I have eyes just like you do, and no one, no one could tell me that this was a fetus and not a human being.” Loomer’s play is full of nuance and complexity. When one character’s account doesn’t line up with another’s, the characters break the fourth wall to explain the discrepancy. No one is portrayed as flawless or a hero everyone is human. And that’s what theater is for, Loomer says. ”I think of the theater as a place where we come together, sit together in the dark, to contemplate an issue from a very, very human point of view.”  Roe may be a history play (it’s part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s groundbreaking series American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle) but, according to Loomer, so much of what happens in it is still happening right now."
662,"Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts during a routine test on the launchpad. The accident shocked NASA as the agency was rushing to meet President Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to have men on the moon by the end of the decade. The test was a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 1 crew  —   Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The ultimate goal was to check out the command module, NASA’s first   spacecraft that would take astronauts to the moon. The crew was rehearsing the real launch, which was about a month away. They were suited up and in the capsule running through checklists and testing equipment. But something sparked in the   environment. Within seconds, the capsule filled with flames, smoke and toxic gases. NASA Engineer John Tribe was working in the control room when it happened. ”It was incomprehensible to us how on earth we could have a fire in the cockpit,” Tribe says. The astronauts were killed almost instantly. The entire incident lasted less than five minutes. ”We had imagined the worst, we’d hoped for the best, it was not to be, ”Tribe said. ”We’d lost three of our team.” The accident halted the Apollo program as NASA scrambled to figure out what went wrong. Reporter George Alexander was one of only three journalists allowed to visit the capsule after the fire. ”What burned? I’d have to say just about everything that was in there except for these few odd bits and pieces,” Alexander said. ”Like a page which had only its edges slightly browned. This bit of parachute harness. But everything else burned.” The capsule was pressurized with 100 percent oxygen. In that environment, something not considered a fire hazard was extremely combustible. The hatch of the capsule opened inward, making it difficult for the crew to open it. After the accident, there were hundreds of significant changes to the capsule and safety procedures. The redesigned capsules would use a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, reducing the fire risk. And a new hatch was designed that could be opened in just five seconds. Only 21 months later, NASA sent humans back into space aboard Apollo 7. And less than a year after that, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11 on the moon. Astronaut Michael Collins was also on that mission. He says if the fire on Apollo 1 hadn’t happened, it’s likely a similar accident would have occurred in space  —   and that could have led to the program’s cancellation. ”Without it, very likely, we would have not landed on the moon as the president had wished by the end of the decade,” Collins says. The successes of the Apollo lunar program overshadowed the loss of the crew. For 50 years, NASA kept the Apollo 1 command module locked up  —   until now. Beginning Friday, the hatch from the burned capsule will be put on public display at the Kennedy Space Center as a tribute to the sacrifices of Grissom, White and Chaffee."
663,"Updated at 5:40 a. m. ET Sunday, Federal Judge Ann Donnelly in Brooklyn, N. Y. granted a request by the American Civil Liberties Union and issued a stay late Saturday on the deportations of valid visa holders after they have landed at a U. S. airport. The ruling by Donnelly temporarily blocks President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration signed Friday. According to NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang: ”In her order, Judge Ann Donnelly cited ”substantial and irreparable injury to refugees,   and other individuals” from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, as well as a strong likelihood that deporting these individuals would violate ”their rights to Due Process and Equal Protection guaranteed by the United States Constitution.” The stay will last until a court hearing is held on the merits of this case brought by the ACLU and other legal organizations. It applies to ”all people stranded in U. S. airports,” according to a statement by the ACLU. They say the stay will affect 100 to 200 people detained at U. S. airports or in transit. The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement a few hours later, saying it ”will continue to enforce all of the president’s Executive Orders in a manner that ensures the safety and security of the American people.” The department continued: ”The president’s Executive Orders remain in place —  prohibited travel will remain prohibited, and the U. S. government retains its right to revoke visas at any time if required for national security or public safety. The president’s Executive Order affects a minor portion of international travelers, and is a first step towards reestablishing control over America’s borders and national security.” In response to the order, in Chicago, all remaining detainees were freed after being detained by Customs and Border Protection agents at Chicago O’Hare International Airport Saturday. At least 16 people were detained most had legal status and green cards, NPR’s David Schaper reports. In Virginia Saturday night, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a temporary restraining order affecting 63 people detained at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D. C. It ordered authorities to ”permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained” at Dulles, and said authorities are ”forbidden from removing” the permanent residents for seven days. Also Saturday, Judge Thomas S. Zilly of the U. S. District Court of the Western District of Washington at Seattle granted an emergency stay of removal for two people, which orders authorities not to remove them from the country pending a hearing later this week. Reuters reported that a senior Homeland Security official said roughly 375 travelers were affected by the order: One hundred and nine in transit to the United States were denied entry into the country and another 173 people were stopped by airlines from boarding an aircraft to the United States. The original story continues below: President Trump’s executive order on immigration is sending shockwaves across the U. S. and the globe. Just one day after he enacted a ban on the admittance of all refugees to the United States, temporarily freezing immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries, confusion, chaos and fear are roiling international airports. Refugees are being barred from boarding U. S.  flights. Immigrants are being detained at U. S. airports. Protests are rising up at JFK and Los Angeles airports. Thousands of leading academics have signed a petition denouncing Trump’s actions. And top technology companies whose staff have been affected, are criticizing the move by the president. To cement the exigency of this move, on Saturday afternoon the State Department issued the following statement. ”Urgent Notice: Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals, JANUARY 27, 2017, Urgent Notice Per the Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals signed on January 27, 2017, visa issuance to nationals of the countries of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen has been suspended effective immediately until further notification. If you are a citizen of one of these countries, please do not schedule a visa appointment or pay any visa fees at this time. If you already have an appointment scheduled, please DO NOT ATTEND. You will not be permitted entry to the  . We will announce any other changes affecting travelers to the United States as soon as that information is available.” Earlier in the day, several Iraqi refugees in Cairo, who had been cleared for resettlement in the U. S. were blocked from boarding their flight to New York City. And in Iraq, NPR’s Jane Arraf reported that ”members of Yazidi minority, one of the biggest victims of ISIS, were prevented from boarding despite having visas.” Green card holders  —   legal permanent residents of the U. S.  —   are also included in the ban, according to a senior Trump administration official. The official says they will need a    waiver in order to return to the U. S. if they are currently outside the country. Almost 200 Google employees affected, NPR’s Aarti Shahani told our Newscast that the CEOs of leading technology companies are taking a stand. ”Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to staff on Friday that the executive order affects at least 187 of his employees and that it’s, quote, ”painful to see the personal cost” of this move by the president. He said the company is ”upset” about any immigration restrictions that prevent ”great talent” from coming to the U. S. ”Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his facebook page that ”We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat.” ”Travis Kalanick, chief of Uber, wrote in an email to his staff (and posted on Facebook) that about a dozen employees were affected, and that this ban will impact many innocent people. He said it’s an issue he plans to raise this Friday  —   when he goes to Washington. He is part of President Trump’s business advisory group.” Expedia, Inc. a U. S. company that owns and operates several global travel brands, also issued a statement in response to Trump’s order. In an email sent to NPR from its director of policy communications, Philip J. Minardi he noted that CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said: ”Ours is a nation of immigrants. They are at our roots they are our soul. The President jeopardized that with the stroke of a pen. As Expedia, Inc. we will do everything we can to protect and help our employees and travelers. That’s our job. Hopefully our government can do its job thoughtfully and with respect for our immigrant past.” Detained at airports, At major U. S. airports, NPR’s Kirk Siegler reports international refugee assistance groups are sending attorneys and translators to support new arrivals who are being detained. Two Iraqi men were held at Kennedy Airport in New York on Saturday. The ACLU and other legal organizations filed a writ of habeas corpus for the two men Saturday in an attempt to obtain their clients’ release. One of those men, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, was later released from detention on Saturday, U. S. Rep. Jerry Nadler tweeted. Both Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi had been granted U. S. visas after the federal government ”deemed both Petitioners not to pose threats to the United States,” the court filing reads. The filing says both men are being held at the airport by Customs and Border Protection ”solely pursuant to an executive order issued” Friday. ACLU attorney Cecilia Wang tells NPR that Darweesh had arrived with his wife and child, but that he was held behind as his family was permitted to proceed. For his part, Alshawi’s wife and child live in Houston with green cards, Wang says. Brandon Friedman, a U. S. Army veteran and former Obama administration official, explains to NPR’s Scott Simon that Darweesh worked with him as a translator during his service in Iraq. Darweesh was ”approved for a special immigrant visa, given for his time and service to the U. S. government,” Friedman says. Late Friday, Friedman began tweeting about his opposition to Trump’s order, as well as a photo showing a pair of men he said helped his team and were ”no longer welcome in the U. S.” ”Hameed was one of the first people to sign up to work with us. He helped interpret, he hooked us up with things that we needed and helped us generally get through the communities that we were operating in in Iraq,” Friedman tells Simon. ”And he put his life on the line. He risked his family’s life to do that.” In a joint statement, Reps. Nadler and Nydia Velazquez say they are continuing to work for the release of 11 other people still held at the airport in New York. News of both sets of detainments follows on the heels of Trump’s Friday order, which also halted all refugee admission to the U. S. Trump’s freeze on immigration applies not only to people from Iraq and Yemen, but also Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. ”Deteriorating conditions in certain countries due to war, strife, disaster, and civil unrest increase the likelihood that terrorists will use any means possible to enter our country,” the executive order reads. Order shuts door to all refugees, NPR’s Scott Horsley explains further: ”The order shuts the door to all refugees for four months and suspends entry of Syrian refugees indefinitely. It shrinks the overall refugee program by more than half. Trump told a Christian broadcaster that preference will be given to Christian refugees from the Middle East.” Colleges and universities around the U. S. have been advising students from the seven listed countries  —   including lawful permanent residents  —   not to leave the U. S. until there is further clarity on the new rules. Students at Princeton, Stanford and Chapman University, among others. reported letters from their respective schools recommending caution. The Chronicle of Higher Education noted one Iranian student in Yale’s Ph. D. program who says he may be stranded after leaving the U. S. for a research trip. As NPR’s Greg Myre reports, Trump’s executive order ”doesn’t include any countries from which radicalized Muslims have actually killed Americans in the U. S. since Sept. 11, 2001.” Greg notes that the countries of origin of radicalized Muslims who have killed Americans on U. S. soil, beginning on Sept. 11, are instead Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Russia, United Arab Emirates and Pakistan."
664,"Even as President Trump takes steps to restrict visitors from some   countries, he and his family continue to do business in some of the others. Ethics experts question whether that might indicate conflicts between Trump’s business interests and his role as U. S. president. The executive action, ”Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States,” targets seven nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Trump has no business interests in those countries. One other thing they have in common, as NPR’s Greg Myre writes: ”No Muslim extremist from any of these places has carried out a fatal attack in the U. S. in more than two decades.” The 19 terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, Myre points out. They are among the   countries not affected by Trump’s immigration freeze, but where Trump does business. He has significant commercial interests in Turkey and Azerbaijan, is developing properties in Indonesia and Dubai, and has formed companies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. His daughter Ivanka said in 2015 that the company was looking at ”multiple opportunities in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia  —   the four areas where we are seeing the most interest.” Critics said it appears that Trump is picking favorites, overlooking terrorist links in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey that have their own history of terrorism. And there appear to be    questions, which could raise legal and constitutional concerns for the Trump White House. Norman Eisen, a former ethics adviser to President Obama and a current fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told NPR in an interview: ”I don’t believe that our Constitution allows the president to order State Department and other U. S. government employees to discriminate between otherwise identical people, favoring those from countries he likes because they give him unconstitutional foreign emoluments, and punishing those from other countries that do not pay such personal and illegal tribute to him.” Emoluments are gifts. A provision of the U. S. Constitution, called the emoluments clause, prohibits U. S. officials from taking gifts of value from foreign officials or governments. Eisen said of Trump: ”Normally he would, of course, have freer rein legally in these foreign policy, immigration and refugee matters, but his open and notorious violation of the Constitution changes that. This is the corrupt misconduct of a medieval potentate, not an American president.” Speaking with NPR Friday, Eisen said the executive action may lead to lawsuits, for example by American citizens whose family members are now barred from joining them in this country. ”These decisions about who to let in and not to let into the United States can now be challenged, because there’s an unconstitutional basis for the president’s decision,” he said. The Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, hit the same point harder, saying Trump was ”  U. S. foreign policy”: One might think that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the two countries that nearly all the   hijackers came from  —   and which are currently known to be backing ISIS and other terrorists, in Saudi Arabia’s case, and facing serious terror attacks on their own soil largely in response to government repression, in Egypt’s  —   would be included in Trump’s twisted analysis as potential sources of terrorism. But no, those countries were ignored. Conflicts of interest? Nah, just a coincidence."
665,"On Friday, an executive order was released that indicated the United States is banning the entry of Syrian refugees and temporarily suspending immigration for anyone from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. To me, this policy looks to be based on nothing but prejudice against Muslims. This has happened before. In 1939, the United States refused entry to another group of refugees: Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Refugees are by definition the most vulnerable people among us. Families don’t choose to sacrifice everything they have and leave their homes unless their homes become like the mouth of a shark. Scapegoating people who are fleeing for their lives is an inhumanity that no person with a heart should be able to defend. Here is how Afghanistan, my family’s home for a thousand years, became like the mouth of a shark. In 1979, a decade of   ”cooperation” turned into a   occupation. Dissent was not tolerated. Tens of thousands of people  —   teachers, laborers, farmers, preachers and students  —   were rounded up and tortured in a newly completed prison,    outside Kabul.   government officials who did not immediately pledge allegiance to the new,   regime were rounded up, too. My grandfather, Gen. Ghulam Farooq Khan, was one of them. From 1964 to 1975, he had served as Afghanistan’s equivalent of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces, before becoming president of Afghanistan’s war college. The Soviets twice imprisoned him, for months at a time, at one of their secret prisons. They kept him in solitary confinement, starved him, deprived him of his medication and tortured him via electroshock. Despite their best attempts at coercing him, he refused their offer to make him king if he publicly supported the occupation of Afghanistan. Every morning, my aunt would go to the    prison and wait with a pair of fresh clothes and his heart medication in the hopes that the guards might give it to him. They never did. Every evening, she would return to see if he would be among the prisoners who were released that day. Every night, my family ate dinner in silence, not knowing if his body would be delivered to their door. Slowly, other family members began to disappear as well: generals, doctors, writers. We later learned they were kept in the same prison. Some of them even communicated with each other. Some of them never made it out. One relative began an   newsletter that another aunt would surreptitiously throw into people’s backyards at night. The Soviets began to call my aunt ”The Scorpion.” My uncles had to go into hiding. My grandmother couldn’t leave the house. Shortly before I was born, after my grandfather had been released from prison a second time, he died of a heart attack. My grandfather’s death in 1984 was a turning point. His rank in the government certainly had made our family a target for the Soviets  —   but it also meant that those loyal to the former government respected my grandfather and tried to help our family as an act of solidarity. Without that protection, my family became even more vulnerable. By 1988, members of our extended family had already begun to leave the only country they ever knew. It was simple: There was blood in the water and it was only attracting more sharks. The regime began to raid our homes, looking for contraband that could prove we were spreading insurrection. To fool them, my mother would hide my grandfather’s hunting rifles and military paraphernalia in the large barrels of rice we kept in our pantries. On the nightly news, there were rumors of air raids. My family was told that homes with electricity would be targeted because planes could spot them in the night sky. I think of Aleppo when I remember my grandmother sewing heavy black curtains to hang on the windows lest the light betray us. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, mujahideen factions tried to fill the vacuum the Soviets left. It was the beginning of Afghanistan’s descent into civil war, which led later to the arrival of the Taliban, who would bring with them a way of life no one in my family would recognize as Islam. It was clear we had been lucky enough to make it this long, but now we had to leave. I remember those last days before we left in 1990. I was five, but when you see your family trying to say goodbye to their world and prepare for a new one, that’s something you never forget. Mujahideen were launching rocket attacks in our city. I remember riding in my father’s Volkswagen that was the same color as that special blue I’ve only seen in Kabul skies, when a rocket flew past my head. I remember looking for loose tiles in our bathroom floor with my aunt. She was holding the only valuables our family had left, a photo album of pictures of my grandfather. They had sold everything else to get money for the plane tickets out of Kabul, the forged exit papers that would fool the authorities into letting us leave and bribes for the smugglers. She told me that she wanted to find a safe place to hide the photos, somewhere a thief wouldn’t look. I remember her saying when it’s safe again, when we return, at least we will know no one will have thought to look under the bathroom floor. She was convinced we’d come back in a month, maybe a year at most. I remember my father ripping open my mother’s coats to replace the shoulder pads with   cash that we would need along the journey. Finally, we left. I can’t properly explain the connection my family has to that land. ”Home” isn’t the right word. What’s the word for a land that has your blood in its soil and whose soil is the flesh that makes up your body? Whatever that word is, that is what we were forced to leave. We didn’t know where we were going. We weren’t looking for a ”better life,” we were just looking for life. Our journey out of Afghanistan took us to India, Pakistan, China. Finally, we boarded a plane from Tokyo to San Francisco. We landed at SFO  —   my mother, my father, my grandmother and me. In the airport, we claimed asylum and were brought before a judge that same day. I was separated from my parents because each of us had to be interviewed separately. I remember looking at the judge and saying the only English word I knew: ”Water.” He granted us asylum. My parents and I were naturalized and became citizens in 2000. But today’s refugees will not be so lucky. Why? Because my family was lucky enough to seek refuge in a small window of time dominated by a fear of the Communist Party, not a global religion of 1. 6 billion people. Because some are afraid that the Syrian or Yemeni or Libyan or Sudanese or Iranian or Iraqi family fleeing conflict or persecution is instead coming to take our jobs or threaten our way of life. I’m an American, and that is not my morality. I hope it isn’t yours, either. History will judge us. Bilal Askaryar helps manage the Turquoise Mountain: Artists Transforming Afghanistan exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. He holds a master’s degree from the American University School of International Service. He arrived in the United States as a refugee fleeing the war in Afghanistan when he was 5 years old."
666,"President Trump’s temporary ban on the admission of refugees is not going over well with the churches and religious organizations that handle most refugee resettlements in the United States. ”The faith groups are going to kick and scream and object to every aspect of this disgusting, vile executive order,” says Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a Jewish refugee society. ”[It] makes America out to be something that it is not. We are a country that welcomes refugees.” Of the nine agencies that resettle refugees in the United States, six are   groups. ”Each one of us brings together a network of communities, of social service agencies, of churches, of synagogues that are working on welcoming refugees to our communities,” Hetfield says. ”It’s so much better for refugees to be welcomed by members of a faith group than by government bureaucrats.” For Jewish and Christian groups, the commitment to help refugees reflects their understanding of God’s commandments. Throughout the Hebrew Bible  —   the Old Testament to Christians  —   the Israelites are reminded that they were themselves aliens once, in the land of Egypt. The book of Leviticus, for example, dictates: ”The alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you you shall love the alien as yourself.” Such guidance continues in the New Testament: The book of Matthew quotes Jesus as telling his followers, ”I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing.” Such passages have inspired the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which has resettled a   refugees and migrants since its founding in 1939. ”It is deeply ingrained in our faith and our understanding of the Bible that we’re called to welcome the stranger and love and serve our neighbors,” says LIRS President Linda Hartke. ”Not the neighbors that we choose, but the neighbors that God gives to us.” The idea of prioritizing Christian refugees, as President Trump says he wants, does not come from Hartke’s church or from other Christian groups. The news that Trump wants to close the door to refugees, especially from Syria, has alarmed those Lutheran congregations that were prepared to accommodate refugees. ”My phone is ringing off the hook,” Hartke says, ”from people in local churches who want to know when they can receive a refugee family. Those are hard calls to take  —   to have to tell people that the president’s decisions will likely mean that there won’t be refugees that they can be welcoming in the months and perhaps years ahead.” Hartke says the faith groups active in refugee resettlement have been ”strategizing” in recent days over how to respond to the president’s executive action. Their views vary. ”It’s important that we not see this as a partisan issue,” says Sean Callahan, president of Catholic Relief Services. ”Some people may see this as challenging the president, but he got elected on the basis of statements [about refugees] that he made. What we need to do is clarify what those promises actually mean. We have found that the refugees who have come to the United States have been thoroughly vetted. . .. They have been placed in homes, and actually it’s been an enriching experience as opposed to a threat. We need to do a better job of getting these stories out.” Trump’s decision to halt the refugee flow has more support among evangelicals  —   most of whom voted for him  —   but it is not exactly a blanket endorsement. The executive action on refugees came as thousands of people were in Washington for what   opponents call the annual March for Life rally. Several speakers at an Evangelicals for Life conference, however, emphasized that their broader concern was the promotion of human dignity. ”If [the refugee ban] is a temporary pause to create a screening process that helps find people who are trying to get in to do harm to this country, I understand that,” says Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family. ”But I would also support a robust program to   immigration, because that’s what this country is built upon, and it’s a great Christian tradition to bring people who are hurting.” Trump’s executive action did get wholehearted support from Franklin Graham, the son of famed evangelist Billy Graham. Graham, who participated in Trump’s inauguration, told the Huffington Post that a suspension of the refugee program and sharp limitations on immigration from some   countries did not strike him as challenging God’s commandments. ”That’s not a Bible issue,” Graham said."
667,"President Trump signed a record number of executive orders and presidential memoranda his first week in office  —   a total of 14 compared to President Obama’s 13. But something is noticeably absent from those directives  —   ethics for the executive branch. Update, 5:32 p. m. Jan. 28: Today, President Trump signed an executive order with ethics guidelines for the executive branch. We don’t yet have the language of the proposal, but the White House says it contains a   ban on lobbying after leaving the administration, and a lifetime ban on lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. When we get the legal language, we’ll write a separate story comparing it to similar actions from past presidents. (The original story continues below.) Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama all took executive action their first week in office to send a signal to the American public about their commitment to ethics. President Bush signed a presidential memorandum about the standards of ethical conduct, including no conflicts of interest, no solicitations of gifts and a reminder of laws that say senior government employees can’t immediately lobby the agencies they worked for. President Clinton’s first executive order, signed Jan. 20, 1993, said senior executive branch employees couldn’t lobby their former agencies for five years. It also said that they couldn’t engage in activity on behalf of a foreign government or political party  —   ever. Sound familiar? It’s very similar to Donald Trump’s calls on the campaign trail to ”drain the swamp.” His proposal was almost exactly the same as President Clinton’s order  —   a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government and a   ban on those officials becoming lobbyists upon leaving the administration. But now a week into his presidency, Trump still hasn’t made his   policies official. Although his transition team did announce that people serving in the administration would have to sign a strict ethics pledge, it’s not clear whether that has happened. When asked whether President Trump had plans to sign an executive order on executive branch ethics, an administration spokeswoman said she had nothing to announce at this time. Instead, Trump’s directives focus on showing that he’s keeping his other campaign pledges. He signed a memorandum withdrawing the United States from the   Partnership, as well as directives to undermine the Affordable Care Act, temporarily halt refugee resettlement in the United States, revive the Keystone XL Pipeline, and build a wall on the U. S.  border. According to Phillip Cooper, a professor of public administration at Portland State University and author of By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action, the language in Trump’s directives has been more bold than is typical. ”If you look at that language, right after the first paragraph or so, when it gets into the policy stuff, you can see that a lot of it is right out of the campaign,” he says. Cooper also says that executive actions are to be expected in the early days of an administration. ”In terms of scope and content, the first few things he’s done are pretty dramatic. In some of the previous administrations, we’ve seen a lot of symbolic things happen right away, responses to campaign promises, but in this case, clearly, he’s going after some of the most controversial issues.” But just because a president signs an order on something he pledged during the campaign, doesn’t mean it will become a reality. President Obama, for example, never was able to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, despite signing an order to do so his first week. And as for those ethics directives, presidents can grant and have granted waivers."
668,"The U. S. Justice Department said it has ”no comment” on whether its Office of Legal Counsel has reviewed any of President Trump’s executive orders, which have met with criticism this week because of vague language and possible conflicts with legal precedents. The department’s own website says: ”All executive orders and proclamations proposed to be issued by the President are reviewed by the Office of Legal Counsel for form and legality, as are various other matters that require the President’s formal approval.” The OLC, a small but powerful unit within Justice, advises the executive branch on constitutional questions and the limits of executive power. It is frequently called upon to decide complex problems, especially when two different agencies are in conflict. During the George W. Bush years, it drew criticism for opinions that paved the way for harsh detainee interrogation tactics. During the Obama administration, the office blessed the legality of weaponized drone strikes against an American citizen overseas. Earlier this month, a career lawyer in the office concluded that Trump’s hiring of    Jared Kushner for a top post in the White House did not violate federal   law. The prospect that administration lawyers are not reviewing a series of executive orders flowing out of the White House in its first week is raising eyebrows in legal circles. ”OLC is supposed to review all executive orders for legality before they are issued,” Matthew Miller, a former spokesman for the Obama Justice Department, pointed out on Twitter in response to this reporter. ”Longstanding practice under admins of both parties.” In fact, Miller said, under a   federal rule, the president is supposed to submit proposed executive orders and proclamations to both the Office of Management and Budget and the Attorney General, who reviews the materials for both ”form and legality.” The White House in years past has at times bypassed the OLC altogether on sensitive matters of national security or has overruled informal, oral advice from lawyers there. For instance, in 2011, the Obama White House rejected the judgment of Justice Department and Pentagon officials and decided it had the authority to continue military operations in Libya without seeking approval from Congress. Legal scholars and veterans of the OLC said the ultimate legal power resides with the president himself. And, they said, at times during a transition to a new administration, the coordination between the Justice Department and the White House on issues of law and policy can take time to mature. Still, Walter Dellinger, who headed the OLC during the Clinton administration, said it’s ”essential that any order issued by the President be reviewed for lawfulness by the career lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel. That is not a task that can be left to White House staff if we are going to be a nation of laws.” Officials at the Constitutional Accountability Center, a   public interest law firm and think tank, said Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department, Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, should answer questions about whether he’ll ”commit to requiring OLC to perform its   role of reviewing such orders in the future.”"
669,"Opponents of abortion rights are more likely to be Republican than Democratic. And Donald Trump was the   rights presidential candidate in the 2016 election. But that doesn’t mean the 2017 March For Life on Friday was exactly a Trump rally. The red Make America Great Again hats that speckled the crowd at Trump’s inauguration last week were few and far between, and marchers ranged from enthusiastic Trump supporters to people who fear what his presidency might mean  —   despite his opposition to abortion. Multiple attendees said the rally was not about politics. Rather, they said, it’s about one thing only. Abortion is the top voting issue for Sue Thayer, 57, who runs what she described as a ”  pregnancy center” in Storm Lake, Iowa. She’s an independent, and for her, she said, the issue transcends party. She spoke of meeting members of the Democrats for Life at a local hotel. ”And I was like, ’Oh, we know there’s two of you,’” she said, hastening to add, ”That’s a joke.” For her, party is far less of a priority than abortion. She said she told a recent Democratic Party caller to her house that she’d happily donate to any candidates opposed to abortion rights the party might have. ”There aren’t very many [Democrats],” she said. ”So typically my first issue in voting is, are they  ? But typically that lines up with the Republican Party. I vote based on abortion.” Another   quickly shut down NPR’s questions when we asked her about her political party. ”I would rather not even talk about that,” said Mary Lou McGrath, a    massage therapist from Pawling, N. Y. ”I really am here because not, ’Why not?’ More like, ’Why? Why wouldn’t I stand for life over death?’ So that’s really why I’m here today.” She added, ”It totally transcends politics. I really hate politics.” The crowd was not entirely apolitical. Make America Great Again hats and Trump scarves and winter hats were in the mix, but finding them required some searching. Vice President Mike Pence and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway represented the White House, addressing the rally crowd. But the attendees weren’t all sold on Trump’s   credentials. His past wavering on the issue made some nervous. ”I’m praying for him that it’s not just a matter of expediency,” said Father Don Bedore, a Catholic priest from Kansas. ”And the future will tell. I mean, it’s hard to look into another person’s heart and see what’s there.” Craig Eller, a    government worker from Chesapeake, Va. who said he considers himself a conservative, said of Trump’s abortion positions, ”Yes, of course it concerned me during the election, and I’m just going to wait and see. I support anyone who supports life. I don’t know what’s in Donald Trump’s mind, but I know that I believe that a child in the womb is a member of the human family, and I’m going to do what I can to make other people, help them recognize that as well.” Not that everyone in the crowd shared that kind of doubtfulness. For many   opponents, a Trump presidency, combined with a   Congress and a Supreme Court that already has one opening, is an exciting prospect. ”I think it’s our best chance really since Roe v. Wade to turn things around and have more of a culture for life,” Thayer said. Trump is expected to announce his Supreme Court nominee Thursday to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. NPR’s Nina Totenberg has reported that the pick is down to three, all conservatives. For her part, Thayer knows very well that it’s possible to change one’s mind on abortion. She worked in a Planned Parenthood clinic before becoming an   opponent, so when asked if Trump’s positions on abortion rattled her  —   he once called himself ”very  ”  —   she empathized. ”I was   and now I’m ” Thayer said. ”And so no, that doesn’t scare me at all.” Hannah Millershaski, 18, wearing one of Trump’s signature red hats, said she was excited about the possibility that Trump might appoint Supreme Court justices who would oppose abortion rights. ”I see a great future for America with him in office,” she said. While   opponents are more likely to be Republican than Democratic (and advocates are more likely to be Democratic than Republican) views on the issue don’t fall neatly along party lines. According to an October poll from the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of Republicans believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, leaving    who believe it should be legal in all or most cases. Likewise, 18 percent of Democrats believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases  —   a small but by no means insignificant share. That means that some of the abortion opponents at the march didn’t exactly fall in line behind all of Trump’s policy choices. Father Bedore is one of them, and he worries about immigration in particular. ”I’ll be honest, where I live, and in my ministry, I encounter a lot of Hispanic families, a lot of people that come up from Mexico, wonderful people,   people, and they work hard. They have a place,” he said, adding that some of the immigrants he knows are in the country illegally. ”I know people who have been in the process for 15 years, 18 years, and nothing has happened. And it’s not fair to them, and that’s one area that I really want to see some work done.” Likewise, those Democrats Thayer met at the hotel were represented at the march. Kristen Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, attended with others from her group. Like many Democrats, she was not exactly excited about Trump’s win. ”I wasn’t optimistic about what he could do for the country,” she said. But she still appreciates his   opposition, and this Democrat is still hopeful on a few other issues. For example, she is still hoping that some parts of the Affordable Care Act, like allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance, will be maintained under a Trump presidency. In addition, she is hopeful on one women’s issue in particular. ”Oddly enough, I actually have a greater hope of passing paid maternity leave under the Trump administration,” she said, ”simply because his daughter made that a big priority. And I think we have a real opportunity there.”"
670,"Tennis star Serena Williams has taken her   23rd Grand Slam singles title with a win against her sister Venus at the Australian Open Saturday. The win moves Serena to the top spot in the number of major tennis titles during the Open era, which began in 1968. It’s Serena’s seventh Australian Open victory, winning     against her older sister. She now returns to the No. 1 spot after losing that ranking in September to Angelique Kerber. Despite an intense game in the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne, the two sisters were all smiles and compliments in the   ceremony. ”There’s no way I could be at 23 without her,” Serena, 35, said of her sister. ”Thank you Venus for inspiring me to be the best player I can be.” ”Serena Williams. That’s my little sister, guys,” Venus said. ”Your win has always been my win.” The last time the two sisters faced off for the Australian Open was in 2003, which resulted in a win for Serena. She now has a   career record against Venus, which includes a record of   of Grand Slams, The Associated Press reports. With a combined age of 71, the sisters made up the oldest women’s Grand Slam final. At 36, Venus was the oldest Grand Slam finalist in 23 years. ”I really elevated my game somehow,” Serena told ESPN afterward, saying she still thinks she’s in the prime of her career. ”I really wanted to get to 23 so bad, more than you can imagine” she added. The Australian Open continues Sunday, when Roger Federer is scheduled to face off against Rafael Nadal in the men’s final."
671,"Michael Glatze was a hero to the gay community. And then he was a villain. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, he was a leading advocate for LGBT rights, a devoted student of queer theory, and an editor at the influential XY magazine. Then, after a health scare at 29, he renounced his gay identity, embraced Christian fundamentalism, married a woman, became a pastor of his own church, and started calling his old friends ”abnormal.” As Glatze pivoted from one sexual and religious identity to another, his own motivations remained inscrutable he was, and remains, a true iconoclast in an era where the kind is practically extinct. How can one man embody such extremes within himself? If we could answer such a question, we’d be closer to understanding how such extremes can coexist in the same country in the first place. I Am Michael, a dramatization of Glatze’s life based on a New York Times Magazine story by his former friend and colleague Benoit   finds a way to speak authentically to both halves of its subject’s journey, and refuses to judge any of it. This was the right decision, even if it sometimes feels like   Justin Kelly is taking the easy way out of tough questions in the process. James Franco plays Glatze with his usual mercurial air, smartly deployed so that each of his actions, no matter how contradictory, comes to feel sincere in his eyes. Despite some wooden line readings, Franco gives himself fully to the challenge of rendering Glatze with truth and resolve. If you had the misfortune of seeing his most recent performance as a repulsive, infantile tech bro in Why Him? then this is a welcome reminder he can be a fearless and sensitive actor. After an opening in which Glatze ”counsels” a confused gay teenager to choose to be straight, the film flashes back to a galvanizing moment for gay America: the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Living in San Francisco with his   boyfriend Bennett (Zachary Quinto) Glatze recognizes at that moment an urgent need for young gay men to know they aren’t alone in the world. When Bennett’s new job moves the pair to Halifax, they invite a third into their bedroom (Charlie Carver) and embark on a new   tour of gay youth to make a documentary and, ultimately, break ground on Young Gay America magazine. One of the things that defines Glatze as a character is how he dives into everything with utter conviction, and at first it’s not all that apparent that something may be eating at him inside. But when a sudden rush of panic attacks lands him in the hospital, and he finds himself revisiting memories of his dead parents, it’s enough to instill in him the kind of panic that accompanies those seeking an afterlife. He would like to get to Heaven, a place whose American ambassadors in the 2000s insisted was only for heterosexuals. Once Glatze decides to abandon his partners in Halifax and seek a new purpose for himself, we, along with Bennett, must square the image of the man we’ve come to know in the film’s first half  —   passionate, principled, proud  —   with the one who emerges in the back half, who abandons everything to attend Bible school in Wyoming as the film circles back to the state a full ten years after Shepard’s death. ”I’m not an ’ .’ I’m just me,” Glatze tells his new girlfriend, Rebekah (Emma Roberts) a fellow Bible scholar. And indeed, Kelly’s script is careful to show its protagonist as only himself, on the outside of communities looking in, whether on a brief detour to a Buddhist meditation retreat or sparring with his instructor at Bible school. The film nestles a powerful point about belonging and trying to live in accordance with one’s own truth, though an   on clunky dialogue and Glatze’s narration (via his blog posts) can make things feel too plodding and telegraphed. I Am Michael is being released a full two years after its Sundance premiere, despite the presumably marketable participation of Franco, Quinto, Roberts, and executive producer Gus Van Sant. (In the interim, Kelly and Franco   on a very different    queer story: the   crime drama King Cobra.) One assumes the long wait was due to the film’s uncompromising subject matter, since explicit sex and explicit prayer don’t often mix onscreen. But perhaps it’s good fortune we’re seeing this movie emerge in a 2017 America. Two years ago, it would have been easy to simply interpret the movie as another one of Franco’s playful public tweakings of his own sexuality. Today there’s more meat to the story. Glatze’s journey across an entire ideological divide to find the best version of himself, on what the film insinuates may be a fruitless quest, now happens in the context of a country that is doing the same, with an outcome just as uncertain. Perhaps, in this sense, he was a prophet."
672,"Republican lawmakers meeting in Philadelphia this week say they want their replacement of Obamacare to be done by spring. There is no consensus on a plan yet, but several Republicans in Congress have already circulated proposals that could reduce or eliminate features of the federal health law that have benefited older Americans. Here are some examples: Prescription drugs, The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicare’s prescription drug benefit. Before the ACA, people on Medicare had to deal with a gap in that insurance coverage that came to be known as the doughnut hole. That’s the point at which Medicare would stop paying part of the cost of drugs, and beneficiaries would have to buy them at full price. Then, when the patient’s    costs reached a level deemed to be ”catastrophic,” Medicare would start paying most of the cost of the drugs again. A 2011 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that when patients had to pay full price, they’d skip some of their prescribed medications  —   and that could, potentially, result in sicker patients and higher costs for Medicare. Gradually, the ACA has been closing the doughnut hole coverage gap. According to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, beneficiaries have saved more than $23. 5 billion in prescription drug costs. It’s unknown if this program would be maintained in a Republican plan that replaces the ACA. Medicaid, Medicaid is commonly thought of as the program that provides health care for the poor. But it also pays for   care for a lot of older people, including the majority of nursing home residents. One idea in some of the Republican proposals for replacing the Affordable Care Act is to turn Medicaid from a guaranteed benefit into a block grant to states. States would get a fixed amount of money from the federal government, and could make their own decisions on how to spend it. That’s an idea that’s been popular for some time among conservatives such as House Speaker Paul Ryan. They argue that states know their needs better than Washington does, and the block grant would give states flexibility in meeting those needs. Critics fear this could do away with many protections that federal law currently provides for vulnerable older people. They also worry about what might happen in an economic downturn, when the demand for Medicaid goes up, but the amount of federal money allocated for it stays the same. For example, would states have to choose between cutting services for poor children versus cutting programs for the frail elderly? Limiting the cost of insurance premiums for older adults, Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could charge people in their 50s and 60s many times more than they’d charge a younger person for the same policy. The affordable care act put a limit on that. Now Insurance companies can only charge older people three times as much as they charge people a few decades younger. But the various GOP replacement proposals either set higher limits  —   five or six times higher  —   or they don’t have any limits at all. A study sponsored by the Rand Corporation and the Commonwealth Fund found that if older Americans were charged five times more for insurance than younger people, about 400, 000 would no longer be able to afford to buy health insurance."
673,"Just as President Trump takes power promising to ramp up oil and gas production, a sudden resignation in a key agency threatens to put such projects on hold across the United States. On Thursday, Norman Bay, one of just three current members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said he would resign effective Feb. 3, even though his term isn’t up until next year. His announcement came shortly after Trump decided Bay’s fellow commissioner, Cheryl LaFleur, would serve as the Commission’s new chair. ”I think [Bay] was perhaps disappointed that Commissioner LaFleur was elevated above him,” says Carolyn Elefant, an energy lawyer who represents landowners negotiating with pipeline companies. After Bay’s abrupt decision, Elefant says she’s ”heard in some FERC circles he’s being criticized for that.” The resignation could mean costly delays for some major pipeline projects. The independent agency oversees the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil. It’s supposed to have five commissioners, but Bay’s departure leaves FERC with just two  —   not enough for the required quorum to make decisions. Some projects that have been through years of regulatory review and were nearing the finish line could now be in limbo for months. That includes new multibillion dollar transmission pipelines intended to alleviate a glut of natural gas in the Appalachian basin. If approved, they will supply markets including the East Coast, Midwest, Gulf Coast and Canada. It’s unclear what impact the FERC delay might have on the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, which Mr. Trump aimed to green light through executive actions this past week. Williams Partners’ Atlantic Sunrise pipeline is among those awaiting final word from FERC. The pipeline would ship gas from northeastern Pennsylvania southward and connect into a larger network of existing lines. ”The president clearly recognizes that natural gas infrastructure is critical to U. S. economic growth, job creation and expanding the American manufacturing base,” says Williams spokesman Chris Stockton in an email. ”We believe this administration will prioritize filling the commission’s vacancies so that critical natural gas infrastructure projects like Atlantic Sunrise can be approved.” The project has faced intense criticism from local opponents, who recently built encampments and are working with activists who participated in the protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline. On Friday the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, a trade group representing pipeline operators, sent Trump a letter urging him to act quickly to fill the vacancy. ”The most significant barrier to building this infrastructure is often the permitting and approval process,” wrote INGAA president Donald Santa. ”We must have a functioning FERC to move forward with building this critical energy infrastructure.” Even if the president chooses someone quickly, the process will likely take several months  —   the appointment requires Senate confirmation. Sen. Lisa Murkowski ( ) chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, says she will make it a top priority. ”After next week, FERC will need a full complement of commissioners as soon as possible so that it can tackle the important work on its busy docket,” Murkowski said in a statement. ”The senate’s challenge will be to promptly consider, without undue delay, FERC nominations once they are received.” In the meantime the agency’s Acting Chairman Cheryl LaFleur says the next few days before Bay leaves will be busy ones. ”The commission is working to get as many orders out as we can in the time we have left with a quorum,” she says. ”I am confident that, with the strong team we have here at the commission, we can continue to do our important work.” This story is from StateImpact Pennsylvania, a collaboration between WITF and WHYY covering the fiscal and environmental impact of Pennsylvania’s energy economy"
674,"It’s been a strange week. Tensions are high. If you haven’t yet, you should probably take a break to watch Migos rap a children’s book. Llama Llama Red Pajama is a story by Anna Dewdney about a baby llama getting tucked in for bed by his mama. Migos is the   rap crew responsible for ”Bad and Boujee,” a catchy trap anthem that is currently the No. 1 song in the country. (Culture, the group’s second album, is out today.) The moment that turned the     single into an ersatz lullaby came Monday at the studios of Los Angeles radio giant Power 106, where morning host J Cruz asked MCs Quavo, Takeoff and Offset if they’d try reading the book over the beat to their hit on air. Migos isn’t the first to do this: The Cruz Show has lately made Llama Llama Red Pajama a regular gauntlet for artists in the interview chair, who are asked to recite the words in their signature cadence and embellish as they see fit. D. R. A. M. and Jeezy both accepted the challenge and did fine, approaching it with humility and quiet bemusement. Both clips were served to YouTube for easy sharing  —   but neither has had a fraction of the impact of Migos’ appearance, retweets of which number more than 100, 000. So what is it about this one? For one, it’s an uncanny match of performer and material. Migos’ flow is a genre unto itself, deadpan observations that fly out of the speakers in bursts of   staccato. The trio’s songs hammer words and phrases into new meaning by way of sustained, ardent repetition. Llama Llama Red Pajama has that DNA in its title alone, a phrase whose inherent rhythm can be shouted into a slogan  —   compare its meter to ”Liar, liar, pants on fire” or ”Remember, remember, the 5th of November.” And as in the rest of Dewdney’s Llama Llama series, the book is full of   internal rhyme, the kind a child trips over at first and then becomes determined to master. The three rappers make their way through the text easily because it’s in an aesthetic language they already speak. But perhaps more important is the atmosphere in the room, which is a mixture of delight and anticipation  —   because no one there, from the DJs to the entourage to the group itself, knows what’s going to happen from one line to the next. Watch the artists’ faces as the song gets going: They might be smiling, but they aren’t joking. Handed a task that’s ludicrous on its face, they treat it with the focused intent a rising MC devotes to the   freestyles that are a more traditional rite of passage on rap radio. And because they take it seriously, the door is opened to the kind of magic moments you see in disciplined improv: One player introduces a setup (”Mama kisses baby’s hair”) the next carries it forward (”The mama, the mama, the mama, the mama”) and the last takes it home (”Whoo! MAMA. ”) They know their roles instantly, without a word of preparation. One can’t help wondering what Dewdney, who died in September, would have made of this reading. We do know her work was meant for children to hear aloud: There’s a   joy in the shapes of these words, waiting to be loosed by an eager voice (watch the author’s own performance if you need proof). That Migos, who has built a career on the most sensuous contours of the English language, could unlock the same joy in adults is both lucky and very, very funny. But it isn’t at all surprising."
675,"Oxford, Miss. is a town steeped in Southern identity. ”In many ways this is an archetypal Southern town,” says John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, which is based in Oxford. ”There’s a courthouse square at the center, there are beautiful homes with rolling lawns framing it.” And there’s the University of Mississippi, known as Ole Miss, a campus once rocked by deadly riots over racial integration. To some, Oxford might seem an unlikely place for a native of India to achieve star status as a chef. But Vishwesh Bhatt  —   or Vish, as everyone calls him  —   isn’t exactly cooking Indian food. He’s the chef at Snackbar, an upscale restaurant that serves Southern and French food with a twist. He uses traditional Southern ingredients, like catfish, grits or mac and cheese  —   but he prepares them using flavors and techniques of his native India. Think garam masala home fries, daal hush puppies and his signature dish: okra chaat. Bhatt throws thin slices of okra into a   basket for about a minute, then tosses them with tomatoes, cilantro, chiles, chopped peanuts, lime juice, salt, pepper and chaat masala, a zesty spice mix used in Indian street food. The result is savory, crunchy, tangy  —   it’s both Southern and Indian. For Bhatt, food has been a bridge between the two Souths he’s called home: the American South, and the Global South. Bhatt was born and raised in Gujarat, India. When he was 17, his family moved to France briefly before coming to America. Their first stop was Austin, Texas. He was 9, 000 miles from home. Everything was different  —   until he went to the supermarket. ”And there were beans and tortillas and I was like, wait, I know what all these things are. I didn’t know a tortilla was a tortilla, to me it was a flat bread, and I was like, I recognize this,” Bhatt recalls. Chiles, cumin, cilantro  —     cooking shares many of the same ingredients as the Indian food he grew up with. ”I loved it,” Bhatt says. ”That was where I first made the connection between how similar things were between India and the U. S.” Food became a way for Bhatt to make himself at home in his new country. When he went to college in Kentucky, he studied political science, but he also learned to cook. It was a matter of survival: The dining hall fare was so bad, he says, he really had no other choice. Luckily, he did have some tools. ”My mom had sent me with like a thing of spices, a tin of spices,” he says, you know, mustard seeds, tumeric, some garam masala.” He still has it. Bhatt wasn’t flying completely blind in the kitchen. As a child, he had spent countless hours helping his mother prepare large family feasts back in India. It was mostly busywork like shelling peas, he says, but those family meals were formative. ”Everything leading up to the meal to me was fun,” he recalls. ”As a kid, it was the one time I felt I was a part of things.” The adults around him, he says, were often having conversations he didn’t understand, ”but this, I understood.” Soon enough, Bhatt was hosting his own dinner parties for college friends. He says it felt natural. ”It was therapeutic, almost,” he says. ”This was a way for me to become part of this larger group.” But it took Bhatt more than a decade to realize cooking was his true calling. In the meantime, he moved on to graduate school at Ole Miss in Oxford. And that’s where he met John Currence, a celebrated Southern chef and restaurateur who eventually became Bhatt’s mentor and boss. Currence remembers Bhatt as a constant presence at his restaurant. ”He was curious and he just really liked to eat,” Currence says. Currence says Bhatt had a natural talent  —   he cooks in a way that’s intensely personal. ”You know, Vish is so beautifully influenced by the food of his family, particularly his mother,” Currence says. But Bhatt wanted to explore other cuisines, too, so he ended up going to culinary school in Miami. After that, he cooked French food. And Southern food. And Caribbean food. Even a little English food. But for years, the one thing Bhatt didn’t want to cook professionally was . .. Indian food. Currence has known Bhatt for more than 20 years, and from time to time, he says, he would suggest that Bhatt open an Indian restaurant.  ”Vish’s sort of stock reply was, ’But I don’t ever want to be the cliche Indian guy in a small Southern town in a little bitty Indian restaurant,’ ” Currence says. Still, when Currence tapped Bhatt to be the executive chef of Snackbar, which opened in 2009, those Indian influences finally started creeping into Bhatt’s menus. It wasn’t exactly intentional, Bhatt says. ”You move forward and then you realize you want to leave what you are  —   or what you think you are  —   behind, but that’s always a part of you,” Bhatt says. It doesn’t really go away.” Currence, who owns Snackbar, still remembers one particular dish: A Keralan fish curry served with a Southern staple  —   collard greens  —   that came finely chopped and creamed in a coconut milk Indian saag. ”I was literally moved to tears,” Currence says. ”Here I was, experiencing that moment where an individual becomes a chef. ”It has been the most beautiful evolution,” Currence adds. ”And it was at that point that people started talking about that restaurant as a place of significance.” In the years since, Snackbar has become a favorite hangout for the Oxford community, a sort of clubhouse for locals like Julia Jimenez. ”I come for happy hour maybe once, every other week  —   more if I can talk my husband into it,” Jimenez, who was dining with three friends, says with a laugh. (Also among the diners that night: a crew from Southern Living magazine.) Now, at age 51, Bhatt is a   finalist for best chef of the South from the James Beard Awards  —   considered the Oscars of the food world. For Bhatt, the recognition is still surprising. ”It’s insane. I mean, I still have trouble believing it,” he says. Bhatt says he very much considers himself a Southerner. ”This is home,” he says. ”This is where I’ve spent more time than anywhere else.” Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance  —   which is part of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss  —   says Bhatt’s food tells a larger story about the South. ”Just the hint of okra and the knowledge that okra is beloved in West Africa, beloved in India and beloved in the American South  —   those connections in a way spin out a story of Southern culture,” says Edge. ”It both confirms what you think about the South and subverts it at the same time. That’s what’s great about his food,” he adds. It’s food rooted in the Southern past, while also pointing to where the South is going, as a strong economy attracts immigrants from all over. ”We live in a place that is changing rapidly and I think for the better,” Edge says. ”The South is not losing anything in those changes  —   it’s gaining much. It’s gaining okra chaat.” And it’s people like Vish Bhatt who keep the taste of the American melting pot ever evolving. The radio version of this story includes music from blues musician Mississippi Fred McDowell. It was recorded by William Ferris and is part of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "
676,"Despite his 22 years in LaGrange, Ga. Louis Dekmar had not heard of Austin Callaway  —   but some members of his community knew Callaway’s story well. Callaway, a      in police custody, was abducted at gunpoint by a mob. Hours later, Callaway was discovered with five bullet wounds in his head. He died shortly afterward in the hospital. The police department did not pursue an investigation into the lynching. A grand jury’s only comment on it was to recommend better jail cell locks. That was Sept. 8, 1940. On Thursday Chief Dekmar, a white man, stood before a gathering at Warren Temple United Methodist Church, and he apologized. ”As LaGrange police chief, I sincerely regret and denounce the role our police department played in Austin’s lynching, both through our action and our inaction,” Dekmar told the assembly. ”For that, I’m profoundly sorry. It should never have happened.” Dekmar was joined during that remembrance by Mayor Jim Thornton and other authorities in the town. The full remembrance was   on Facebook by LGTV LaGrange Television for viewers outside the bounds of the church, and can be watched in the video above. Dekmar’s speech begins at about the   mark. It was a moment long in coming  —   nearly   of a century, in fact. For Dekmar, the path to this apology began several years ago, when he learned of a comment one elderly black woman made to another while waiting to see detectives: ”They killed our people,” the woman said. It was only after some research that Dekmar learned of Callaway’s story. And it was only with the help of the NAACP, local politicians and LaGrange College that a formal remembrance of Callaway could finally come together. He tells NPR that the comment shared between the two women hammered home a crucial point for him. ”Despite the fact that very few people are alive today that were alive then, the attitudes about the police department  —   and the attitudes as it relates to the city government in general  —   is influenced by those experiences which are passed down through generations,” Dekmar says. And those memories, and the distrust of law enforcement that they engender, create a filter between the police department and the community. He says that’s why moments like Thursday’s ceremony, however tardy they are in coming, remain necessary. This is particularly true given the racial makeup of the community in LaGrange, which is about 48 percent  . Dekmar says law enforcement in the area is about 14 percent black, though he says his department has worked hard to improve diversity within its ranks. Resentment toward police persists among members of the local black community, he says  —   ”and rightfully so,” given the memories of lynchings like Callaway’s. ”Apology is never enough,” Kristen Reed, who attended the remembrance, told reporter Sam Whitehead of Georgia Public Broadcasting. ”I don’t think an apology is ever enough for a murder or for a lynching and for the injustice that followed.” Still, after the ceremony, Reed noted the rarity of such a moment. ”For them to feel the need to say they were sorry sends a message, especially in a climate like this,” Reed said. And for Dekmar, it’s that small step that matters. ”We don’t expect ever to erase the past,” he says. ”But what I hope last night will do is interrupt the past.”"
677,"Updated at 7 p. m. ET, By the time the sun rose on Sunday in the U. S. the chaotic weekend set in motion by Trump’s executive order on immigration was beginning to give way to greater clarity  —   in some respects, at least. That order  —   which temporarily bars citizens from seven largely Muslim countries, as well as all refugees, from entering the U. S.  —   was blocked in part by a federal judge in Brooklyn on Saturday night. Addressing a lawsuit brought by two Iraqi men detained Saturday in New York, Judge Ann Donnelly issued a stay that would temporarily prevent federal agents from deporting anyone who entered the U. S. with a valid visa. Three additional federal district courts have issued orders of more limited scope pertaining to President Trump’s executive order on immigration. Trump, for his part, issued a statement Sunday defending his executive order. ”America is a proud nation of immigrants and we will continue to show compassion to those fleeing oppression, but we will do so while protecting our own citizens and border,” Trump said in his statement. ”The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror. To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religion   this is about terror and keeping our country safe.” It should be noted that the executive order signed Friday tells officials to ”prioritize” people suffering from   persecution  —   provided that those people are members of a ”minority religion” in the   countries covered under the ban. In many of those countries, Christianity is the main minority religion. Meanwhile at major international airports, both across the U. S. and around the world, Trump’s defense and the judge’s ruling did little to ease the maelstrom of protests, outraged politicians and lawyers scrambling to offer legal help to refugees who had been blocked or detained. From the detainees to the protests, from the administration’s defense to questions of what happens next  —   here is what we know Sunday. Trump’s executive order bars citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. That includes those who hold green cards as legal permanent residents of the U. S. to enter the country, they will need a    waiver, which officials say will be granted as long as there is no evidence of the person presenting ”a serious threat to public safety and welfare.” That last detail came as a surprise to Hessam Noorian and his wife, who were detained for more than five hours with their    son at Chicago’s O’hare Airport. She is a citizen he has a green card. They had been returning from a trip to Iran when they heard President Trump might ban travel by refugees, the couple told NPR’s David Schaper. ”But I didn’t know this applied to green card. I thought as long as you have green card, then you’re are safe, you are fine,” she said. After they had been questioned and searched by authorities, they were released. Others, like a traveler from Iraq who spoke with NPR’s Jeff Brady, remain less certain. His wife said he was detained at Philadelphia International Airport. A   later, as she spoke with Jeff, she had still not been able to reach him to learn what had happened. At the same airport, federal authorities deported two families from Syria despite legal paperwork to enter the U. S. On Sunday, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney announced that the rest of the passengers detained Saturday would be released, and that ”all new passengers arriving today will be treated the same as they would have been prior to the executive order.” At least 63 people were detained at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D. C. And a lot of unanswered questions linger on Sunday, according to NPR’s Hansi Lo Wang. Hansi offers more details on what appears to be a deepening struggle between immigration attorneys and the Customs and Border Protection there: ”Immigration attorneys at Dulles International Airport say they’re having difficulty getting access to any detainees as granted by an order by a federal judge in Alexandria, Va. ”They say Customs and Border Protection officials are telling them detainees on site are not allowed to speak to the lawyers here. Lawyers say they are considering filing a motion saying that federal officials are not complying with the judge’s order.” In Seattle, lawyers ”were able to spare at least two people placed on a departure flight back out of the U. S.,” reports Liz Jones of member station KUOW. ”But at least one refugee from Somalia was deported.” Sara Assali of Allentown, Pa. told Bobby Allyn of WHYY that she had been expecting six members of her Orthodox Christian family from Damascus, Syria, on Saturday. That reunion had been 14 years in coming, Assali said, and all six had finally obtained their visas in 2015. But Assali said U. S. Customs and Border Patrol detained her family members and told them they would need to fly instead to Doha, Qatar, or risk losing green cards and visas. ”We weren’t expecting this because we paid everything. The green cards have been paid for, the visas have been paid for, everything has been approved,” Assali said. ”To suddenly be told, ’No, you no longer qualify to enter the country,’ it kind of comes as a slap in the face.’ ” By the end of Saturday, protesters had gathered outside several airports and inside baggage claims to register their objection to Trump’s executive order. Mayor Marty Walsh addressed the demonstrators outside Boston’s Logan International Airport, asking them to ”join us” and ”stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters.” At New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, where The Associated Press reports 12 refugees were detained Saturday, the protests assembled early in the day and gathered momentum by nightfall. ”I never thought I’d see the day when refugees, who have fled   countries in search of a better life, would be turned away at our doorstep,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement supporting the demonstrators. ”This is not who we are, and not who we should be.” The international airport in Charlotte, N. C. drew protesters on Saturday, as well. The demonstrations there grew more acrimonious than most, as six people were arrested after police and protesters ”engaged in a brief skirmish,” reports Nick de la Canal of member station WFAE. But the Rev. Jay McKinnon, an organizer of the Charlotte protests who spoke to de la Canal, said he would not be dissuaded from further protest. Trump is ”doing what he said he would do,” McKinnon said Saturday. ”It’s a resistance to that  —   to his policies, to him thinking that this is okay in our name.” In his statement, Trump cited ”what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months,” in defending his own executive order  —   which bans refugees from all over the world for 120 days. Trump’s order also bans Syrian refugees indefinitely. Republican leaders in both houses of Congress have backed up the president. On ABC’s This Week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he supports a tightening of the vetting process, according to Reuters. The news service reports that McConnell added: ”I also think it’s important to remember that some of our best sources in the war against radical Islamic terrorism, are Muslims, both in this country and overseas. . .. We need to be careful as we do this.” On Friday, House Speaker Paul Ryan released a statement praising Trump as ”right to make sure we are doing everything possible to know exactly who is entering our country.” His spokesperson, AshLee Strong, also told The Washington Post, ”This is not a religious test and it is not a ban on people of any religion.” Trump has told the Christian Broadcasting Network that preference will be shown to Christian refugees from the Middle East, where most of the seven banned countries are located. On Sunday, he again singled out Christians from the Middle East in a tweet, saying, ”Christians in the   have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!” ”What do we say to the family of someone who gets killed because we didn’t take these steps?” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Sunday on This Week. ”Protecting this nation and our people is the No. 1 priority of this president and our government.” Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, told CBS News that 109 people were detained on Saturday, ”most of whom were moved out,” and an additional 170 people were stopped before they could get on planes to the U. S. Priebus appeared to offer contradictory statements on whether green card holders are affected by the executive order  —   first appearing to say the temporary ban does not apply to them, then walking that statement back when asked to clarify. Some GOP lawmakers sounded a more critical note than the administration, however. ”It is clear from the confusion at our airports across the nation that President Trump’s executive order was not properly vetted,” Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham said in a joint statement, noting media reports that the administration consulted little or not at all with the departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security before signing the order. ”Such a hasty process risks harmful results. We should not stop   holders from returning to the country they call home. We should not stop those who have served as interpreters for our military and diplomats from seeking refuge in the country they risked their lives to help. And we should not turn our backs on those refugees who have been shown through extensive vetting to pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors, most of them women and children.” Trump responded to the statement by tweeting that McCain and Graham are ”sadly weak on immigration.” ”The two Senators should focus their energies on ISIS, illegal immigration and border security instead of always looking to start World War III,” Trump tweeted on Sunday. Initially, British Prime Minister Theresa May was noncommittal in her judgment of the executive order. On a diplomatic trip in Turkey on Saturday, May deferred to Trump, telling reporters only that ”the United States is responsible for the United States’ policy on refugees.” Overnight, however, the line from 10 Downing Street drew a slightly sharper contrast. ”Immigration policy in the United States is a matter for the government of the United States, just the same as immigration policy for this country should be set by our government,” her office said through a spokesperson, according to The Guardian. ”But we do not agree with this kind of approach and it is not one we will be taking.” German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, speaking at a news conference in Paris, ”questioned how such orders could be imposed by a country that embraces Christian values like the U. S.,” NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Berlin. Still stronger rebukes came from the countries listed on Trump’s immigration freeze. ”President Trump is dealing with Iraq as if the U. S. had no relationship with the country,” Razaq   a member of Iraq’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told NPR’s Alice Fordham. ”When in fact the US leads an   coalition working to improve Iraq’s armed forces and thousands of American soldiers, officials and advisers are operating there.” Others in Iraq took an even harder line, Alice reports. ”A spokesman of a powerful bloc of paramilitary forces says all Americans should now be banned from Iraq, and all Americans in Iraq should be deported,” Alice says. In a series of tweets, Iranian Foreign Minister   accused the U. S. of hypocrisy, calling the executive order ”a gift to terrorists.” ”Collective discrimination aids terrorists,” Zarif said, ”by deepening fault lines exploited by extremist demagogues to swell their ranks.” NPR’s Peter Kenyon reports Iran is promising reciprocal action against Americans seeking Iranian visas  —   ”but Zarif says unlike the U. S. move, it will not be retroactive, meaning U. S. passport holders with valid Iranian visas will be allowed in,” Peter says. The temporary stay issued by the federal judge in Brooklyn appears to cover as many as 200 people across the country, NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports. But that stay, which addresses only those who traveled to the U. S. before the immigration freeze was enacted, means only that they cannot be deported immediately. Carrie breaks it down: ”Judge Ann Donnelly found that sending the travelers home could cause them irreparable harm to the refugees and no harm to the us government. The judge didn’t make a broad ruling about the constitutional claims in the case.” The Department of Homeland Security says that it intends to continue enforcing the order, and that it retains the right to revoke visas. The department ”will comply with judicial orders,” U. S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. But the statement noted that ”approximately 80 million international travelers enter the United States every year. Yesterday, less than one percent of the more than 325, 000 international air travelers who arrive every day were inconvenienced.” As far as enforcement is concerned, Hansi says that many of the passengers and lawyers at Dulles Airport outside D. C. are taking a ”   approach” as they try to figure out the implications of the temporary stay on the ground. In the meantime, protests against the executive order were organized for Sunday in at least half a dozen cities across the country, including New York City, Houston and Washington, D. C. directly outside the White House."
678,"Leaders in the U. S. technology sector say President Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from some   countries will sow confusion in their businesses and undercut the diversity that has been a linchpin of the industry’s growth. The CEOs of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Apple all issued statements condemning the ban and complaining that the order was pushed through so quickly it left great uncertainty about the status of some of their best employees. ”Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we would do,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a message to his staff. ”I’ve heard from many of you who are deeply concerned about the executive order issued yesterday restricting immigration from seven   countries. I share your concerns. It is not a policy we support.” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote a memo to his employees that was highly critical of Trump’s order. He warned that it could prevent at least 187   Google employees from entering the United States and orders staff members who are traveling abroad to return to the United States immediately. ”It’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues,” Pichai wrote. ”We’re upset about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the US.” Dean Garfield, CEO of the Industry Technology Information Council said: ”This decision came without comment or advance notice and has injected a tremendous amount of uncertainty for a wide range of people, including employees within the tech sector.” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also said he was concerned about the impact of the executive order, noting that his wife Priscilla’s parents were refugees China and Vietnam, and his own   had come to the United States from Germany, Austria and Poland: ”We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation. ”We should also keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help. That’s who we are. Had we turned away refugees a few decades ago, Priscilla’s family wouldn’t be here today.”"
679,"President Trump’s executive order on immigration late Friday ignited nationwide protests  —   and a slew of legal challenges. At least four federal judges across the country have blocked part of the order and temporarily ensured refugees and travelers who reached U. S. soil would not be deported. Here’s an explanation of what happened so far and what could come next. The order suspended new refugee admissions for 120 days. It capped the total number of refugees allowed into the country this year at 50, 000, far lower than the Obama administration had allotted. And travelers from seven countries  —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   are barred for 90 days. Border Patrol agents and lawyers said the order and statements by top White House officials have not made clear how Green Card holders, or lawful permanent residents, are to be treated. The American Civil Liberties Union sued in Brooklyn over the detention of two Iraqi clients at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Late Saturday, Judge Ann Donnelly issued a temporary restraining order barring the deportation of as many as 200 people. Judge Donnelly cited ”irreparable harm” they would face, and she demanded that the Trump administration provide a list of all affected refugees and travelers. Later, a federal judge in suburban Virginia ordered that travelers be allowed to consult with volunteer attorneys. And another judge in Massachusetts ruled the travelers not only were free from deportation, but that those being held must be released from federal detention. There are reports from pro bono lawyers that border agents may not be complying with some of those directives from the federal judiciary. White House officials said the policy is designed to protect U. S. borders and to restrict the entry of terrorism suspects. The Department of Homeland Security said fewer than 1 percent of the average 325, 000 people who journeyed to the U. S. on Saturday were ”inconvenienced.” DHS said the president’s order remains in place and ”the U. S. government retains its right to revoke visas at any time if required for national security or public safety.” On NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Green Card holders would not be affected ”moving forward,” but he went on to say that they would ”be subjected to further screening” at the border. The president has sweeping authority on matters of immigration. Federal law allows the president to suspend people or classes of people if he determines their entry is ”detrimental” to the nation. But a 1965 update to that law, the Immigration and Naturalization Act, clarifies that people should not experience preferences or discrimination on account of their ”race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.” Trump’s order appears to grant some religious preference to Christians and to target seven   countries, though his order points out that people from those countries had already been singled out for extra vetting during the Obama years. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, immigrants rights groups and other advocates are likely to file more lawsuits in the coming days on the grounds that the order violates the 1965 immigration law, the right to due process, and the First Amendment clause that bars Congress from establishing a religion, among other things. White House officials insisted they did not set out to create a ”Muslim ban.” But Trump associate Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that Trump had reached out to him and others about how to make such a ban, which Trump proposed on the campaign trail in December 2015, legal. And the son of national security adviser Michael Flynn tweeted about a ”Muslim ban,” as well. Those statements could be used by refugee advocates to demonstrate the administration’s intent. Democrats argue that key offices within the State Department and the Justice Department were in the dark about the immigration order before it was made public. They want to know if Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, the nominee to be attorney general, advised Trump on the order  —   and whether Sessions will commit to making sure Justice Department lawyers are consulted in the future. The Senate Judiciary Committee is supposed to vote on Sessions’ nomination on Tuesday. If he passes that vote, Sessions could be confirmed by the full Senate by the end of the week."
680,"President Trump has reorganized the National Security Council by elevating his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and demoting the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bannon will join the NSC’s principals committee, the top interagency group for discussing national security. The National Security Council is the staff inside the White House that coordinates   by the president on such matters, in coordination with outside departments including the State Department and the Pentagon. It’s an unusual decision, NPR’s Mara Liasson reports. ”David Axelrod, for instance, who had a similar job as Bannon in the Obama administration, never sat in on principals meetings,” she added. When such figures seen as part of the political wing of the White House have participated in broader National Security Council meetings, it has sparked sharp criticism from the national security establishment. Former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said last year that President George W. Bush instructed his top political adviser, Karl Rove, never to appear at a National Security Council meeting. It wasn’t that Bush didn’t value Rove’s counsel, Bolten said  —   clearly he did. ”But the president also knew that the signal he wanted to send to the rest of his administration, the signal he wanted to send to the public, and the signal he especially wanted to send to the military, is that, ’The decisions I’m making that involve life and death for the people in uniform will not be tainted by any political decisions,’ ” Bolten remembered. Before joining Trump’s inner circle during the 2016 campaign, Bannon was the head of Breitbart News, a   media outlet that has promoted conspiracy theories and is a platform for the   movement, which espouses white nationalism. Bannon was extremely influential during the first week of the administration  —   he is said to be part of a small group inside the White House driving the flurry of executive actions this week, Mara has reported. Some of those orders have provoked criticism that Bannon and other administration officials are not coordinating with other agencies on major policy changes, Mara says, such as the chaos and detentions at airports following Trump’s executive order on immigration. The NSC principals committee is defined as ”the   senior interagency forum for considering policy issues that affect the national security interests of the United States.” It’s chaired either by national security adviser Michael Flynn or homeland security adviser Tom Bossert and now includes the secretaries of state, defense and the Treasury, plus the attorney general, White House chief of staff and the president’s chief strategist, which is Bannon’s position. On the other hand, the director of National Intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will now attend Principals Committee meetings only when ”issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed,” according to the presidential memorandum issued on Saturday. As NPR national security editor Philip Ewing explains, Trump ”is shaking up the wonky process by which the executive branch makes its toughest decisions on national security  —   the big question is how much that will matter.” Here’s more: ”On paper, these are big changes: Past administrations ran their National Security Councils with a Great Wall of   between the political team at the White House and the nonpartisan specialists who help with  . The explicit inclusion of Bannon means that Trump’s top adviser on messaging, strategy and other partisan issues means he could also be part of decisions about policy toward adversaries, military actions and other such decisions. ”What does it all mean, in practical terms? It’s too soon to say. Former national security council staffers say their    meetings and process were not governed by whatever formal instruction issued by their respective presidents. Political staffers from the White House have attended meetings in the past. The committees invite who they think they need to invite given the topics under discussion  —   something that will likely continue under [national security adviser Michael] Flynn.” Attorney John Bellinger, who served on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, told NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered on Sunday that presidents structure the National Security Council in the ways they think work best for them. ”There’s no law against the president taking advice from anyone he wants,” Bellinger said. He also said the headlines about the ”demotion” of the Joint Chiefs chairman and the director of national intelligence were overblown. Bellinger said time would tell how the council practically operates under Trump and Flynn, but that some of its dealings legitimately might not need to involve those leaders  —   when leaders meet to plot their strategy for responding to a hurricane, for example. Top security officials from the Obama administration are blasting the decision. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under Obama and George W. Bush, called the demotions a ”big mistake” in an interview with ABC News. ”I think that they both bring a perspective and judgment and experience to bear that every president, whether they like it or not, finds useful,” Gates said. Former national security adviser Susan Rice called the move ”stone cold crazy.” In a sarcastic tweet, she said: ”Who needs military advice or intel to make policy on ISIL, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK?” White House press secretary Sean Spicer responded in an interview with ABC News. ”That’s clearly inappropriate language from a former ambassador,” Spicer said. ”We are instilling reforms to make sure that we streamline the process for the president to make decisions on key, important intelligence matters. You’ve got a leader in Gen. Flynn who understands the intelligence process and the reforms that are needed probably better than anybody else.” Spicer also defended Bannon’s qualifications. ”Well, he is a former naval officer. He’s got a tremendous understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape that we have now,” Spicer said. Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told CBS News, ”I am worried about the National Security Council. Who are the members of it and who are the permanent members? The appointment of Mr. Bannon is something which is a radical departure from any National Security Council in history.” McCain added that, ”One person who is indispensable would be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in my view.”"
681,"Updated at 6:55 p. m. ET, They began Saturday as a series of   demonstrations outside several major airports. But by Sunday, the protests against President Trump’s temporary immigration freeze had leapt from those airports to squares and plazas in cities across the U. S. Outside the White House, in Boston’s Copley Square and Battery Park in New York City, immigrant advocacy groups have organized protests to register their discontent with the executive order Trump signed Friday. That order bars all refugees from entering the U. S. for 120 days, as well as citizens of seven largely Muslim countries for 90 days. The freeze also applies to green card holders, who are legal U. S. residents they will need a    waiver to enter the country, which officials say will be granted so long as there is no evidence of the person presenting ”a serious threat to public safety and welfare.” ”Protecting this nation and our people is the No. 1 priority of this president and our government,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Sunday, arguing that the immigration ban is the best way to do that. Groups of protesters across the country disagree with that assessment  —   so much so that they make their objections readily evident with signs and chants, rallies and marches in at least a   different cities. With the help of NPR and member station reporters on the ground, here are some postcards from Sunday’s major protests. ”A lot of people say they had a visceral reaction when they heard the news either Friday or Saturday,” says Jack Lepiarz of member station WBUR. Reporting from Boston’s Copley Square, Jack tells NPR’s Lulu   that the plaza, which is roughly the size of a football field, has been packed with protesters of the executive order. ”They say there need to be more protests like this,” Jack says, referring to conversations he had with demonstrators there. ”It’s almost a show of force, as one woman said, where you get the bodies out there and tell the people in office that this is not OK.” Meanwhile, outside the White House, the crowd of protesters rippled with the chant ”no hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,” according to NPR’s Parth Shah. NPR’s Parth Shah reports the crowd has rippled with the chant ”no hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here.” ”I did not think it would be me I thought it would be refugees,” University of Maryland student Lames   a protester in D. C. tells NPR’s Wynne Davis. ”Because I am here as a guest, I am here as a visitor. I am not a threat to the country. It was really a shock . .. I didn’t expect it to be students, as well.” Kebsi, who is from Yemen, says that Saturday night she told her parents that under the order, she cannot see them for the next two years  —   because if she leaves the country, she will not be able to return to finish her degree at University of Maryland. Others, like D. C. resident and middle school teacher Trisha Sanghavi, echoed the sentiment heard by Jack in Boston. ”This is what D. C. is going to look like every weekend now,” Sanghavi told NPR. Chris Chester of WAMU reports that what began as a rally outside the White House has now transformed into a march toward the Capitol. Mayor Bill de Blasio was among a slate of speakers  —   also including Sens. Cory Booker and Chuck Schumer  —   to address the crowd that packed Battery Park from end to end. ”We cannot just luxuriate in our freedoms and our liberties,” Booker told the crowd. ”We must earn them by fighting to expand them to all citizens and all people.” Chuck Schumer made note of his middle name Ellis, a reference to New York’s Ellis Island, the famous gateway for immigrants to the U. S. in the early 20th century. Protesters also made the most of their setting in Battery Park, which is the launch point for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Many people dressed in variations on the theme of Lady Liberty, bearing fake torches and hats depicting the iconic monument, according to NPR’s Kat Chow. Even as demonstrators have taken to the streets in several cities, protests continue to pack major international airports in the U. S. The arrivals hall at Los Angeles International Airport filled not only with signs and loud chants  —   well before the protest’s scheduled start time  —   but also with a number of lawyers, NPR’s Kirk Siegler reports. He notes attorneys scattered throughout the crowd holding signs of their own, only these signs are offering their free legal services for those who could use them. And there may indeed be some who do. Some distressed family members are in the gathering too, Kirk reports. He says it is believed that there are still people detained behind the main gates. By a quirk of coincidence, the protest in Houston was held outside the George R. Brown Convention Center  —   where festivities were well underway for next week’s Super Bowl in the city. Laura Isensee of member station KUHF says it made for a surreal juxtaposition, as football fans in Houston Texans jerseys walked past chanting protesters with signs. She reports that among the crowd were members of a nearby church, just out of a Sunday service, along with members of the Muslim community and Black Lives Matter activists. The protesters numbered more than 1, 000, according to the Houston Police Department. Outside the departures area of the city’s major airport, as well as inside by the ticketing counters, protesters packed into a peaceful demonstration, reports Kabir Bhatia of WKSU. He says the mood of the crowd was almost joyful, as protesters chanted slogans and occasionally ”parted the Red Sea” to allow travelers to enter the airport. ”I’m just so glad,” one girl, a Syrian immigrant, told the crowd with a megaphone. ”It just blowed up my heart when I saw everyone’s here for the same reason I am.” Thousands of people gathered at   adding their voices to protesters all over the country, in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration order. On Saturday, 11 people with green cards were detained at customs but they were all released. Our WABE member station reporter Molly Samuel spoke with some of protesters, among them, Kathy Taasoobshirazi, a pediatrician whose parents emigrated from Iran. ”I just want people to know that Muslim people are not terrorists. Iranian people are not terrorists. We love America, we’re proud to be Americans, but we’re proud of our culture, too. We deserve the same rights and we are contributing to society,” Taasoobshirazi said. Also among the thousands who chanted, cheered, and held up signs on Sunday was Ashley Loftin fromn Decatur who came to the protest with her mom. ”We always say come to America, here’s the American dream. And by the whims of one person they just changed everything, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Loftin said. Brian Levenson also added his voice, noting it’s the first time he’s joined a protest. ”Usually it feels like either there are enough voices, or there’s enough opposition built into our system that I don’t really have to worry about it. But, man, I am worried. I am really worried.” Congressmen John Lewis and Hank Johnson, Mayor Kasim Reed, and a state senator were among the officials who came to the airport over the course of the weekend."
682,"Hundreds were detained at airports around the country Saturday in a chaotic and confusing day following President Trump’s Friday night executive order temporarily banning Muslims from seven countries. It spurred protests and backlash  —   even from some in Trump’s own party, for either mismanagement of the rollout of the order or the values it represents. But one thing Trump’s executive order did  —   and why many are referring to it as a Muslim ban  —   is indicate a   for Christians. Here’s the controversial language: Trump hinted that he would be prioritizing Christians before the order was released on Friday. Here’s the transcript of Trump’s exchange with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody: BRODY: ”Persecuted Christians, we’ve talked about this, the refugees overseas. The refugee program, or the refugee changes you’re looking to make. As it relates to persecuted Christians, do you see them as kind of a priority here?” TRUMP: ”Yes.” BRODY: ”You do?” TRUMP: ”They’ve been horribly treated. Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.” It’s true that 99 percent of the 12, 587 refugees from Syria admitted in 2016 to the U. S. were Muslim and less than 1 percent were Christian. That would outpace Muslims’ population in Syria, which is 93 percent. But that’s based on 2010 numbers. With the civil war going on and the millions who have been displaced, it’s nearly impossible to tell exactly what the most current percentages are. Another possible reason for the lower percentage of Christians being admitted from Syria to the U. S. is the protection they have received from the Assad regime. As the Christian Post reported in 2015: ”Christians, who have been caught in the crossfire of the Arab Spring and civil war, have found a measure of protection under Assad’s dictatorship. In October, the Catholic Herald reported on comments from one of Syria’s leading Christians who said [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s intervention, while possibly motivated by selfish reasons, is helping and giving hope to Christians.” Why would Assad do that? His regime loves to paint itself as a protector of minorities, and there are still a large number of Christians in the Syrian capital of Damascus, for example, where Assad’s government is centered. What’s more, if the implication is that the U. S. is not admitting Christian refugees or that the U. S. is making it difficult, that’s not true at all. In fact, the number of Christian refugees to the U. S. in 2016 was almost equal to that of Muslim refugees  —   37, 521 to 38, 901, according to the Pew Research Center, which is basing its numbers on figures from the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump took to Twitter Sunday morning to defend himself on the need to prioritize Christians. He said they were being ”executed in large numbers,” reiterated his call for ”extreme vetting” and warned of the U. S. turning into Europe, which has dealt with terrorist attacks and bombings since the rise of ISIS: The Obama administration did formally accuse ISIS of carrying out a genocide against religious minorities, including Christians in Iraq and Syria. Offices at the State Department have been involved in the U. S. response, though this did not include putting Christians at the top of the line for the U. S. resettlement program. But here’s the reality: While Christians in Iraq and Syria have been killed by ISIS, Muslims have been the group’s victims far more frequently and represent the strong majority. Shiite Muslims are killed by ongoing waves of ISIS bombings of Shiite neighborhoods, and Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces have been victims of mass ISIS executions. But even as ISIS claims it fights for Sunni Islam, fellow Sunni Muslims have also been killed and displaced in greater numbers than Christians. That is in part because ISIS operates mostly in Sunni areas. Hundreds of thousands of Sunnis have been displaced from ISIS areas, as Sunnis, who try to oppose the group or have ties to the Iraqi government, are targeted. And Muslims have fought ISIS more than anyone else. This includes Kurdish Sunnis and Arab Sunnis and Shiites, who are on the front lines and often allied with U. S. advisers in the battle against ISIS, as well as Turkmen Muslims. Some of the most horrific videos from ISIS have shown the killing of Sunni Muslims who have fought the group, like a Jordanian pilot and Turkish troops shown burned alive. Certainly, it’s the case that Christians were terrified of ISIS and fled. ISIS has desecrated churches and shrines. Some Christians have lived in   areas and paid a tax to the terrorist group. And there have been Christians killed and kidnapped  —   88 Eritrean Christians from Libya who were kidnapped by ISIS in 2015 two months after 28 Ethiopian Christians were executed 262 Assyrian Christians kidnapped from the Tel Tamer area in Syria and held for ransom 50 killed in Tel Tamer in suicide bombings. But that pales in comparison with the mass murder of Muslims  —   massacres in Iraq 1, 700 Iraqi air force cadets executed or missing from Camp Speicher, a former American military base near Tikrit the slaughter of hundreds of the   tribe in Syria and the massacre of Syrian army POWs at Tabqa in 2014. That’s not to mention the hunting down of Yazidis. As far as Europe goes, there is an ocean between the U. S. and Europe, and the U. S. already has very strict procedures in place for refugees, as NPR’s Brian Naylor has reported. NPR’s Jane Arraf also contributed to this post."
683,"Less than 24 hours after White House press secretary Sean Spicer had spouted numerous falsehoods about inauguration crowd size and more, Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s Meet the Press to defend him. In the process, the counselor to President Trump coined a phrase that’s now destined to follow Trump throughout his presidency  —   ”alternative facts.” The Trump administration’s pushback on easily verifiable facts is unprecedented and shows that the Trump we saw on the campaign trail and in debates  —   who was freewheeling with facts and assertions and often peddled wildly exaggerated claims  —   had not changed once he took the oath of office. And it’s only Week 1. Below we’ve rounded up some of the White House’s assertions here that are exaggerated or just flat out false. President Trump told members of Congress during a Monday evening meeting that there were 3 million to 5 million illegal votes cast in last November’s election.  In an interview with ABC News’s David Muir on Wednesday, he repeated those claims, saying that, ”You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states. They’re registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion.”  THE FACTS: This is not true, no matter how many times Trump and his surrogates repeat it. The administration has never provided proof of this claim, and the studies they have cited do not, in fact, support the claim. Even the authors of those studies have said that the studies are being misused by Trump. Analyses do show that a tiny bit of voter fraud does happen, but there is no evidence of voter fraud on this scale that would be a scandal of ”astronomical proportions,” as NPR’s Mara Liasson said to Spicer this week. Trump also pointed to a frequently cited Pew study as evidence, which Muir pushed back on, saying correctly it showed ”no evidence of voter fraud.” Trump said the author was ”groveling again. You know, I always talk about the reporters that grovel when they wanna write something that you wanna hear but not necessarily millions of people wanna hear or have to hear.” THE FACTS: That Pew 2012 report does show that 2. 8 million people are registered to vote in more than one state and that 24 million registration records ”are estimated to be inaccurate or no longer valid.” But that is not evidence of fraud unless people vote in both states. And the author is not ”groveling” when he simply pushes back because his report is taken wildly out of context and twisted into falsehoods. It is not a felony to be registered in two states  —   in fact, several Trump family members and advisers are registered in two states. ”No, no, you have to understand, I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever. In terms of counties, I think the most ever or just about the most ever. When you look at a map it’s all red.”   —   Trump to ABC, Jan. 25, THE FACTS: Trump did have an overwhelming victory, countywise. But he still lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. And his Electoral College victory ranked 46th out of 58 presidential elections. ”He won overwhelmingly with 306 electoral votes, the most since any Republican since Reagan. He’s very comfortable with the depth and breadth of the support that he got from the American people and the 33 states that voted for him, the nine of 13 battleground states, the 2, 600 counties. He’s very, very pleased with that.”  —   Spicer at Jan. 24 briefing, THE FACTS: While Trump should have gotten 306 electoral votes according to the state by state results, he in fact will only end up with 304 because two electors in Texas defected when Electoral College voters cast their ballots Clinton had several defectors, too. And Trump’s victory wasn’t the largest GOP win since Reagan  —   George H. W. Bush won 426 electoral votes in 1988. ”I got a standing ovation. In fact, they said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl and they said it was equal. I got a standing ovation. It lasted for a long period of time. What you do is take  —   take out your tape  —   you probably ran it live. I know when I do good speeches. I know when I do bad speeches. That speech was a total home run. They loved it.” Trump in ABC interview  ”I had a standing ovation like you wouldn’t believe. ...They actually  —   they were standing from the beginning. They didn’t even sit down. It was one standing ovation, the whole thing.” Trump in interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Jan. 26, THE FACTS: Trump never told the CIA officers to sit at the beginning of his speech, and it’s standard protocol without a directive from the president, they wouldn’t have sat down, as Huffington Post’s S. V. Date explains. And there were about 400 staffers at the speech. There were 71, 088 fans who attended the Super Bowl last year where Manning led the Denver Broncos to the championship. So, no  —   it was not ”equal” to the reception Manning got by any measure or standard, and it’s not clear who ”they” are that Trump claims made this false claim. ”I had the largest audience. I did. I had the largest audience. If you add the television, you add all the sources, the largest audience in the history of inaugurations. I did. They try and demean it so much. And when you look at pictures  —   I would love to show you a picture, when I was in that speech, I looked at, it was a sea of people and they want to demean it. I don’t even know when that picture was taken by the way, to be honest with you. But it wasn’t taken from where I was. They take a picture from the back, from the Washington Monument, a backward picture. They are so demeaning and they are so dishonest.” Trump interview with Hannity, THE FACTS:    photos taken during the same time frame of Trump’s inauguration and President Obama’s inauguration clearly show a larger crowd eight years ago along with empty areas along the mall, as we debunked earlier in Spicer’s weekend tirade. According to Nielsen, 30. 6 million people watched Trump’s inauguration  —   which is certainly notable  —   but 38 million people tuned in for President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. It’s tougher to determine how many people streamed the inauguration, which has grown as a platform in eight years. But CNN reported they actually had a larger streaming audience for Obama’s inauguration than Trump’s. And as for the ”backward” picture  —   the Obama photo was taken from the exact same angle. ”Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough to get into the United States? If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair.” Trump’s interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Jan. 27, THE FACTS: This Pew Research study shows that roughly the same number of Muslim refugees and Christian refugees were admitted to the U. S. in 2016. And while Christian refugees from Syria were admitted in far less numbers than Muslim refugees from the same country, they make up only about 5% of the population in Syria. As the Washington Post   finds, when looking at Iraqi refugees, Christians made up about 15% of those admitted to the U. S. even though they make up less than 1% of the Iraqi population. As Glenn Kessler of the Post writes, ”The basic fact is no one understands why there is such a disparity. The president could highlight that situation without suggesting that something nefarious is going on.” ”Chicago is like a war zone. ...when President Obama was there two weeks ago making a speech, very nice speech. Two people were shot and killed during his speech. You can’t have that.” Trump in ABC interview, THE FACTS: As the Chicago Tribune reports, police records show that, ”Not only did no homicides take place in Chicago during Obama’s address of about an hour Jan. 10, but the official Police Department records and the Tribune’s crime database show that no shootings at all occurred over that time frame.” ”Here in Philadelphia, the murder rate has been steady  —   I mean just terribly increasing.” Trump speaking to the GOP House retreat in Philadelphia on Jan. 26, THE FACTS: There were just 277 homicides in Philadelphia in 2016, down from 280 the year before, the Washington Post reports. And that is steadily down from 10 years ago when there were 391 murders in 2007. While there have been 27 murders so far in 2017  —   10 more than this time last year, as the Post notes, ”that is too small a sample size to say violence is ’terribly increasing. ’” ”And the President’s top priority is to retain and attract American jobs, which have already seen happening through his actions on Carrier, Sprint, General Motors and so many more.” Spicer on Jan. 23 press briefing, THE FACTS: When Trump touted back in December that he had saved 1, 000 Carrier jobs from going to Mexico  —   a frequent campaign stump speech promise when he was in the Midwest  —   it was hailed as evidence that his aggressive approach to keeping manufacturing jobs would work. In fact, the Carrier deal saved less than half of the jobs there, though the broader deal did also save jobs at the United Technologies’ factory elsewhere in Indiana. However, some of those Carrier jobs will eventually be lost to automation. Ultimately, about 1, 000 jobs will still move to Mexico. The deal also included $7 million in tax breaks for the company, which even vocal Trump supporter Sarah Palin called ”crony capitalism.” After Trump called out GM for making their Chevy Cruze in Mexico, the company pointed out that the main model sold in the U. S. is manufactured in Ohio. The company later announced they would move a production for parts from Mexico to Michigan, adding 450 jobs, and also moving more IT jobs back to the United States. Trump claimed credit, but GM leaders said the move had been planned for a long time. ”. ..buy America and hire America is at the core of the president’s plan to create an economy that works for everyone. ..” Spicer on Jan. 23 press briefing, THE FACTS: Many of Trump’s own signature pieces sold at his clubs and clothing from his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line are made overseas. ”This memorandum counters through dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.”  —   White House press secretary Sean Spicer during afternoon briefing, THE FACTS: There were nearly 2. 8 million federal workers when Obama took office. As of December 2016, there were just a little more than 2. 8 million. That’s not exactly a dramatic increase, as this chart shows. The only dramatic increase happened in April 2010, when the government hired hundreds of thousands of temporary census workers, which happens every 10 years."
684,"Next Friday, the Labor Department will issue its first jobs and unemployment report of Donald Trump’s presidency. Forecasters expect little change in the jobless rate, which was 4. 7 percent in December. That’s down from 10 percent during the depths of the recession in late 2009. Trump repeatedly claimed during the campaign that the federal government was understating the real unemployment rate. ”Don’t believe these phony numbers,” Trump told supporters early last year. ”The number is probably 28, 29, as high as 35 [percent]. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent.” Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, echoed that sentiment during his confirmation hearing. ”The unemployment rate is not real,” Mnuchin told the Senate Finance Committee. ”I’ve traveled for the last year. I’ve seen this.” The Labor Department actually publishes a variety of unemployment statistics, though none comes close to the figures Trump cited. The headline number of 4. 7 percent counts only those who have actively looked for work in last four weeks. A broader measure of unemployment counts anyone who has looked unsuccessfully for work in the last year. That figure was 5. 7 percent in December. Adding in   workers who would prefer to work   brings the figure to 9. 2 percent  —   the government’s most comprehensive measure of unemployment and  . None of these jobless measures counts people who have dropped out of the labor force altogether. The labor force participation rate  —   currently 62. 7 percent  —   has fallen 3 percentage points since former President Obama took office eight years ago. Some of that decline is a result of demographic trends, as aging baby boomers retire voluntarily. The drop may also reflect lingering fallout from the Great Recession. If you counted everyone who’s not in the labor force as ”unemployed,” you would get a jobless rate of 37. 3 percent. But that’s obviously inflated, as it includes retirees, college students and voluntary    parents. Stronger wage growth might pull more people back into the labor force, and more   policies might encourage    parents to return to work. The aging population, however, will continue to put downward pressure on workforce participation. That will make it difficult for the new president to achieve his goal of adding 25 million jobs over the next decade. For comparison, the country added 15. 5 million jobs under President Obama from the trough of the recession in early 2010. Today, the economy is closer to full employment, so there’s much less slack to take up. The jobs report coming out next Friday reflects employment and unemployment around Jan. 12, so this is really the final assessment of the Obama administration’s job record. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said in a press conference he doesn’t expect Trump to give the new report much attention: ”He’s not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether the American people are doing better as a whole.”"
685,"A tiny     device might someday make taking antibiotics safer and more efficient. Think of it as a tiny submarine scooting around inside your stomach, fueled by the acid there. Oral antibiotics are commonly prescribed   drugs. Once an antibiotic is swallowed, it takes a trip to the stomach, where there’s lots of acid. That stomach acid can break chemical bonds in the antibiotic and deactivate it. To keep that from happening, doctors often prescribe   medications like Prilosec or Prevacid. But they can cause side effects such as headache, diarrhea and fatigue. So scientists at the University of California, San Diego, came up with a device designed to both reduce stomach acid and deliver medication without the side effects. The swallowable device reacts with stomach acid release of tiny hydrogen bubbles. The bubbles scoot it around the stomach, and a magnesium core reduces acidity as it goes. The tiny device is covered by a special polymer, like a jacket, that is sensitive to changes in the acidity. Once the acid in the stomach is neutralized, the polymer dissolves and the submarines unload their antibiotic payload. The micro submarine is only 20 microns across, about   the width of a human hair. It might sound like an episode of The Magic School Bus, the cartoon series that miniaturized children so they could explore inside the body, but the authors think it could be a big improvement in drug delivery. The study was led by Joseph Wang, the chair of nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego. He says that the way that the scooting submarine delivers the drug actually helps the drug work better. ”This active movement of the carrier improved the therapeutic efficiency in addition to the neutralization of the stomach [acid).” The device isn’t ready for use in humans yet, but preliminary testing in mice shows that it’s safe and effective, at least there. The study was published Jan. 20 in Angewandte Chemie International Edition."
686,"When MoniCa Singh, then 19, went to visit her parents in Lucknow, India, in 2005, she had just finished her first year at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. She hoped to complete her degree and pursue a career in fashion design. Then her life changed in a flash. As she was driving down the street, a   acquaintance waved and motioned her to roll down her car window. Over the years, she had refused his persistent marriage proposals but his sociable gesture seemed to signal that was in the past. So why not? Suddenly, two bicyclists carrying a bucket pulled up beside her and spilled its contents over her face, hands, legs and body. The burning sensation was, she remembers, excruciating. Was it hot coffee, she wondered before passing out. When she awoke in a hospital trauma unit, she learned it had been sulfuric acid  —   the highly corrosive and potentially fatal chemical that has become a weapon used by spurned men to disfigure and injure the women who have said no to them. The two bicyclists were convicted the acquaintance was not. Singh’s traumatizing experience was not a singular event. Approximately 1, 000 acid attacks are reported yearly in India, according to the Acid Survivors Trust (ASTI) with more no doubt unreported due to fear of reprisals and the unlikelihood of successful prosecution. Acid violence occurs worldwide, the organization notes, but with greatest frequency in India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Pakistan, Nepal and Uganda. For these victims, the road to recovery, physical and mental, is long and rocky. Victims can suffer extensive facial and body disfigurement, lose their sight and experience severe depression and anxiety, fearing others will shun their scarred appearance. Yet acid attacks survivors are finding the courage to reclaim their lives  —   and seeking to raise public awareness and help stop future attacks. Their strategies include taking to the fashion runway, sharing their experiences in comic books and appearing in video resumes that show potential employers they are far more than their scars. After more than a decade and nearly 50 reconstructive surgeries, Singh has managed to forge a new path  —   actually, several paths, as a professional in fashion design, as an advocate who raises awareness of   violence and reaches out to survivors  —   and this fall, as a comic book heroine. Priya’s Mirror tells the story of four   acid attack victims  —   one of them Singh  —   in a fictional context. After being attacked, they’re imprisoned in a castle by a villain. The superheroine Priya rescues them by using a secret weapon, the Mirror of Love. Designed as a   comic book with interactive videos and animation viewable with a smartphone app, the comic book was funded by the World Bank. The Mahendra Singh Foundation, the   violence nonprofit that MoniCa Singh leads, was a  . Acid attack survivors have also, in the past months, become fashion models as well as role models, walking the runways in New York and London. At New York’s Fashion Week, FTL Moda’s runway show featured    Reshma Bano Qureshi, whose path to the runway began two years ago with near tragedy. At the age of 17, accompanied by her sister, she was en route to Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, India to take exams. Suddenly, the two women were accosted by the sister’s   and two of his friends. Her sister’s hands were burned Qureshi herself lost one eye and suffered severe facial scars. She thought of suicide. Then she met Ria Sharma. After coming across photos of acid attack survivor while she was completing her degree at the University of Leeds, Sharma was inspired to found Make Love, Not Scars, the   nonprofit that assists acid attack survivors. She began visiting Quershi and helped   funds for surgery. She also asked Qureshi to participate in a public service ad campaign for #EndAcidSale, produced by the firm of Ogilvy and Mather. An online video features Qureshi giving a seemingly ordinary   and beauty tutorial. Until, that is, she compares the two minutes needed to put on blush to the mere three seconds in which a face can be scarred forever. The video, released in   was aimed at gaining visibility for acid attack victims  —   and getting signatures for a petition for the enforcement of the ban on the open sale of acid in India. The goal was 25, 000 signatures it garnered 300, 000. The success of that video led to the invitation for Quershi to participate in the New York fashion show, where she appeared in a stylish white gown decorated with multicolored geometric panels. Ilaria Niccolini, president of the fashion company FTL Moda, welcomes models like Qureshi and others who don’t fit the usual fashion model. ”Beauty is hidden in places that we wouldn’t necessarily look,” she says. Make Love, Not Scars has also teamed up with Ogilvy and Mather for another online campaign, ”Make Skills, Not Scars.” The portal began in late November with nine video resumes of acid attack survivors and it is dedicated to aiding acid attack survivors on their path to  —   literally  —   showing their faces to the world. ”I love making people look beautiful,” intones Mamta [her last name is not given] in a calm, melodious voice as she looks into the camera. She presents herself as an experienced    beautician looking for a job in Delhi, where she lives. But her   eye and the discolored abrasions on her face and neck tell the story of a different experience, as an acid attack survivor. ”I know what you’re thinking,” she says. ”I could have just written all this down and sent it to you. But I wanted you to see my face too. So that when I’m working to make you look beautiful you don’t look away. That’s why I made this video CV.” And that message is reaching the public. A   BuzzFeed India video featuring Mamta with the Indian   comedian Tanmay Bhat has attracted over 750, 000 views."
687,"President Trump isn’t the first wealthy New York businessman to hold a high public office. Nelson Rockefeller, an heir to one of America’s greatest fortunes, served as the state’s governor in the 1960s, and then vice president in the   in the Ford administration. More recently, billionaire Michael Bloomberg served as mayor of New York City, where he held office for 12 years. To avoid conflicts of interest, Bloomberg cobbled together a plan for disentangling his private interests from his public office  —   but without surrendering ownership of his business empire. Now Trump appears to be trying to follow a similar path. Ethics experts say that using the Bloomberg template won’t be good enough because Trump’s two roles  —   one as president and the other as business owner  —   will come into perpetual conflict, with more serious consequences that could reach far beyond just one city. Still, the new president may see many similarities between his own situation and Bloomberg’s. For example, Bloomberg, who governed as an independent after his 2001 election, repeatedly said he did not consider himself a politician. Instead, he would say he was a businessman spending some time in politics. Bloomberg saw his lack of political experience and business background as a strength  —   believing it gave him more credibility with some of New York’s most powerful companies. During his   run, Bloomberg told New York Magazine, ”Most of the guys that run these big firms, they’re my age. And because of my company, there’s a credibility. They respect somebody who’s not a politician, who’s trying to get things done.” Trump’s campaign rallying cry was that the country needs someone who can ”make good deals.” Like Trump, when Bloomberg was elected, he faced many questions about how he would separate himself from his sprawling business empire, known as Bloomberg L. P. That firm did deals with many of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in New York City  —   including investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. To address some of his conflicts, Bloomberg resigned from the boards of many cultural institutions. But much like Trump, he refused to put his ownership stake of his namesake company into a blind trust. At the time, his stake was worth around $5 billion, which, according to Politico, is about the same as Trump’s estimation of his current net worth. Bloomberg recused himself from    decision making, as Trump has promised to do. But Bloomberg’s managers were not relatives, whereas Trump has appointed his two sons to run his business. Bloomberg, in accordance with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board (COIB) ruling, reserved his right to participate in any talks about selling the company. That is where the similarity between the two billionaires ends. Although critics suggest Bloomberg was not truly successful in preventing conflicts between his business interests and his mayoral role, he was able to satisfy the COIB requirements without divesting. In contrast, Trump is not following recommendations from the U. S. Office of Government Ethics, which works like the COIB, but on the federal level. OGE publicly asked the new president to divest, or at least put his assets in a blind trust not ruled by a family member. Trump says he will not do that, even though presidents traditionally follow OGE guidance. OGE Director Walter Shaub has been highly critical of Trump’s plan. Speaking at the Brookings Institution earlier this month, Shaub denounced it as inadequate and meaningless, saying: ”The plan the   has announced doesn’t meet the standards of the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the last four decades has met.” So the bottom line is: Even if Trump follows Bloomberg’s precedent for managing assets, he is rejecting the recommendations of the ethics officials who guide his public office. That may open up Trump to far more criticism than Bloomberg ever faced."
688,"Updated 9:30 a. m. Jan. 29, In signing an executive order imposing tough ethics standards on executive branch employees, President Trump followed a path laid by the two Democratic presidents who preceded him, almost word for word. ”This is a   lobbying ban,” Trump said at the ceremony where he signed this and two other orders. ”It’s a   ban now, and it’s got full of loopholes, and this is a   ban.” He joked that the senior staff standing near him for the signing had ”one last chance to get out” before they would have to stick to limits on lobbying laid out in the directive. ”This was something, the   ban, that I have been talking a lot about on the campaign trail,” Trump added. By the end of his campaign, supporters were chanting ”drain the swamp,” so this order, like many of his others in the past week amounts to Trump trying to show he’s keeping a campaign pledge. But what Trump is doing is derivative of what his two immediate Democratic predecessors did. On his first full day in office, Jan. 20, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order titled, ”Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees.” Twenty four years, a week and a day later, President Trump signed an order bearing the exact same title. But the similarities don’t stop there. As Trump’s team drafted his order on ethics, they appear to have borrowed heavily from the language used in orders signed by both Clinton and President Obama. Obama also pulled from Clinton, in parts and the ethics directive signed by President George W. Bush is nearly identical to the one signed by his father twelve years earlier. But that’s less surprising given those were presidents using the language of their predecessor from the same party. Perhaps more importantly, Trump not only seems to be lifting from Democratic presidents’ language, but they are presidents he has condemned, including for not ”draining the swamp.” ”The story here is not the copying per se, it is the claim Trump has been making that he is doing something really different, new, and righteous when, apparently, in many respects he is actually copying Democrats he so thoroughly condemned as corrupt,” said John Woolley, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and   of the Presidency Project. The irony, he points out, is that those Democrats had also promised their own version of draining the swamp in response to the Republican president who preceded them. Clinton ended up revoking his order in his final weeks in office, allowing his appointees to go straight into lobbying after all. And the Obama administration granted some waivers to its ethics order. It remains to be seen, of course, if Trump sticks hard and fast to his ban. Trump criticized Clinton for backing off the ban during the 2016 presidential campaign. ”President Clinton did what the Clintons always do  —   he rigged the system on his way out,” Trump said in a statement in October of last year. ”Clinton lifted the executive order so the Clintons and their cronies like John Podesta could start raking in cash.” (Podesta was Clinton’s chief of staff in the White House, founded a lobbying and public affairs firm with his brother and later became Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.) The Trump administration did not reply to a request for comment. ”When a new president’s executive order deals with a subject of operational concern to multiple administrations, it’s not surprising that the president’s lawyers would look to previous iterations as models,” wrote Peter Shane, an Ohio State University constitutional law professor, in an email to NPR after reviewing the overlapping language. Shane focuses on separation of powers law and the application of law to the presidency. ”For a Republican president, reiterating the restrictive obligations prior Democratic presidents imposed on their appointees has the double advantage of using provisions vetted by other lawyers and apparently deemed acceptable to the political opposition,” Shane added. Below, we were able to trace back each bullet point in section one of Trump’s order to either Clinton or Obama  —   nearly verbatim. For clarity, Trump’s order language is in bold, Clinton’s is in italics and Obama’s is plain text: Trump:  ”Section 1. Ethics Pledge. Every appointee in every executive agency appointed on or after January 20, 2017, shall sign, and upon signing shall be contractually committed to, the following pledge upon becoming an appointee:” Obama: ”Section 1. Ethics Pledge. Every appointee in every executive agency appointed on or after January 20, 2009, shall sign, and upon signing shall be contractually committed to, the following pledge upon becoming an appointee:” Clinton: ”Section 1. Ethics Pledges. (a) Every senior appointee in every executive agency appointed on or after January 20, 1993, shall sign, and upon signing shall be contractually committed to, the following pledge (”senior appointee pledge”) upon becoming a senior appointee:” Trump:  ”As a condition, and in consideration, of my employment in the United States Government in an appointee position invested with the public trust, I commit myself to the following obligations, which I understand are binding on me and are enforceable under law:” Obama: ”As a condition, and in consideration, of my employment in the United States Government in a position invested with the public trust, I commit myself to the following obligations, which I understand are binding on me and are enforceable under law:” Clinton: ”As a condition, and in consideration, of my employment in the United States Government in a senior appointee position invested with the public trust, I commit myself to the following obligations, which I understand are binding on me and are enforceable under law:” Trump:  ”2. If, upon my departure from the Government, I am covered by the   restrictions on communicating with employees of my former executive agency set forth in section 207( c) of title 18, United States Code, I agree that I will abide by those restrictions.” Obama: ”4. Revolving Door Ban Appointees Leaving Government. If, upon my departure from the Government, I am covered by the post employment restrictions on communicating with employees of my former executive agency set forth in section 207( c) of title 18, United States Code, I agree that I will abide by those restrictions for a period of 2 years following the end of my appointment.” Trump:  ”3. In addition to abiding by the limitations of paragraphs 1 and 2, I also agree, upon leaving Government service, not to engage in lobbying activities with respect to any covered executive branch official or   Senior Executive Service appointee for the remainder of the Administration.” Obama: ”5. Revolving Door Ban Appointees Leaving Government to Lobby. In addition to abiding by the limitations of paragraph 4, I also agree, upon leaving Government service, not to lobby any covered executive branch official or non career Senior Executive Service appointee for the remainder of the Administration.” Trump:  ”4. I will not, at any time after the termination of my employment in the United States Government, engage in any activity on behalf of any foreign government or foreign political party which, were it undertaken on January 20, 2017, would require me to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended.” Clinton:  ”3. I will not, at any time after the termination of my employment in the United States Government, engage in any activity on behalf of any foreign government or foreign political party which, if undertaken on January 20, 1993, would require me to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended.” Trump: 5.  ”I will not accept gifts from registered lobbyists or lobbying organizations for the duration of my service as an appointee.” Obama: ”1. Lobbyist Gift Ban. I will not accept gifts from registered lobbyists or lobbying organizations for the duration of my service as an appointee.” Trump:  ”6. I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.” Obama: ”2. Revolving Door Ban All Appointees Entering Government. I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.” Trump:  ”7. If I was a registered lobbyist within the 2 years before the date of my appointment, in addition to abiding by the limitations of paragraph 6, I will not for a period of 2 years after the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter on which I lobbied within the 2 years before the date of my appointment or participate in the specific issue area in which that particular matter falls.” Obama: ”3. Revolving Door Ban Lobbyists Entering Government. If I was a registered lobbyist within the 2 years before the date of my appointment, in addition to abiding by the limitations of paragraph 2, I will not for a period of 2 years after the date of my appointment: ”(a) participate in any particular matter on which I lobbied within the 2 years before the date of my appointment, ”(b) participate in the specific issue area in which that particular matter falls or, ”(c) seek or accept employment with any executive agency that I lobbied within the 2 years before the date of my appointment.” Trump:  ”8. I agree that any hiring or other employment decisions I make will be based on the candidate’s qualifications, competence, and experience.” Obama: ”6. Employment Qualification Commitment. I agree that any hiring or other employment decisions I make will be based on the candidate’s qualifications, competence, and experience.” Trump:  ”9. I acknowledge that the Executive Order entitled ’Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees,’ issued by the President on January 28, 2017, which I have read before signing this document, defines certain terms applicable to the foregoing obligations and sets forth the methods for enforcing them. I expressly accept the provisions of that Executive Order as a part of this agreement and as binding on me. I understand that the obligations of this pledge are in addition to any statutory or other legal restrictions applicable to me by virtue of Government service.” Obama: ”7. Assent to Enforcement. I acknowledge that the Executive Order entitled ’Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel,’ issued by the President on January 21, 2009, which I have read before signing this document, defines certain of the terms applicable to the foregoing obligations and sets forth the methods for enforcing them. I expressly accept the provisions of that Executive Order as a part of this agreement and as binding on me. I understand that the terms of this pledge are in addition to any statutory or other legal restrictions applicable to me by virtue of Federal Government service.” Clinton: ”2. I acknowledge that the Executive order entitled ’Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees,’ issued by the President on January 20, 1993, which I have read before signing this document, defines certain of the terms applicable to the foregoing obligations and sets forth the methods for enforcing them. I expressly accept the provisions of that Executive order as a part of this agreement and as binding on me. I understand that the terms of this pledge are in addition to any statutory or other legal restrictions applicable to me by virtue of Federal Government service.” Interestingly, when it came to picking language for the ”waivers” section of the order, Trump’s team chose the language used by Clinton, with one notable exception. Trump’s executive order doesn’t require waivers to be published in the Federal Register, meaning it will be harder for the public and press to determine whether the Trump administration is taking advantage of the loopholes written into the executive order. Obama’s order didn’t require the waivers to be published in the Federal Register either, but the Obama administration had a practice of posting them on the internet and required an annual report from the Office of Government Ethics. Trump’s doesn’t contain the reporting language. Trump:  ”Sec. 3. Waiver. (a) The President or his designee may grant to any person a waiver of any restrictions contained in the pledge signed by such person. ”(b) A waiver shall take effect when the certification is signed by the President or his designee. ”(c) A copy of the waiver certification shall be furnished to the person covered by the waiver and provided to the head of the agency in which that person is or was appointed to serve.” Clinton:  ”Sec. 3. Waiver. (a) The President may grant to any person a waiver of any restrictions contained in the pledge signed by such person if, and to the extent that, the President certifies in writing that it is in the public interest to grant the waiver. ”(b) A waiver shall take effect when the certification is signed by the President. ”(c) The waiver certification shall be published in the Federal Register, identifying the name and executive agency position of the person covered by the waiver and the reasons for granting it. ”(d) A copy of the waiver certification shall be furnished to the person covered by the waiver and filed with the head of the agency in which that person is or was appointed to serve.” Ethics watchdogs are offering a mixed reaction to the Trump executive order. In a joint statement Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Chair Norman Eisen and   Richard Painter say that ”while there are things to like in the Trump [executive order] it tears two major loopholes in the Obama executive order on ethics it replaces.” They say it removes Obama’s ban on lobbyists going to work for the agencies they had lobbied and also gets rid of revolving door restrictions on people who don’t go on to become registered lobbyists but do work to ”influence the system.” Eisen and Painter call it ”shadow lobbying.” They conclude that ”Mr. Trump’s [executive order] while it has some positive features, does not live up to his promise to drain the swamp.”"
689,"Biologist Shaun Clements stands in the winter mist in a coastal Oregon forest, holding a small vial of clear liquid. ”We should be safe mixing it now, right?” he asks his colleague, Kevin Weitemier, above the sound of a rushing stream a few feet away. Weitemier brings a second vial, full of stream water. In deliberate, seemingly choreographed movements, they pour the liquid back and forth between the small containers, mixing two, then three times  —   never spilling a drop. The two move out into the cold stream with the vials. Clements is in the main stream, while Weitemier stays closer to shore. At the same moment, they tip the containers on end. Two trillion particles of   DNA fall into the rushing water. It’s an experiment to figure out how far and how quickly environmental DNA  —   or ”eDNA”  —   travels in different kinds of streams. Big Idea, Occasionally a big idea comes along that promises to revolutionize the world  —   think about things like   cars. For biologists  —   especially those who work with fish and other aquatic plants and animals  —   eDNA is one of those big ideas. The technology is starting to revolutionize how we protect native animals and ensure invasive species don’t take hold. The easiest way to understand eDNA is to imagine yourself relaxing in a steamy hot tub. As you’re soaking, a bubble splashes water into your mouth and you spit it out. A day’s worth of dead skin sloughs off. Finally, toasty warm, you get out of the tub. The   broth left behind is full of your DNA. It has become part of the larger environment. And long after you’re gone, that DNA could be detected  —   if someone knew what to look for. The same holds true for any organism in any body of water. ”All these little critters out there, they’re shedding DNA from their skin cells, urine, feces,” Clements explains. Clements works for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He says Oregon has a lot of waterways and the state doesn’t have the resources to fully monitor endangered fish, look for invasive plants or check in on all the other native species, potentially including mammals like river otters, beavers and bats. With eDNA, doing all of this could get much cheaper and easier. ”Just by taking a water sample, you can tell somewhere in basin above you, there was this range of species and something about their relative abundance,” he says. And this potential has fisheries biologists excited for what lies ahead. ”Environmental DNA sampling really can be a game changer,” says U. S. Forest Service fisheries biologist Mike Young. So Many Variables, Young says biologists and fisheries managers in the West are already really good at using eDNA to find the threatened species bull trout in small streams. That’s because he and other scientists have been working for years to figure out exactly what it means to find bull trout DNA in a water sample. They know what a positive detection indicates about bull trout presence and relative population numbers. ”But let’s say we’re trying to sample to detect western pearl shell mussels in larger stream. .. or Pacific lamprey, or trying to find invasive species in reservoir,” Young says. ”Each water will come with its own probability of detection that’s specific to that species and habitat pair.” DNA will travel differently depending on the habitat and the species. Where and how much DNA there is can be affected by the speed and direction of the water, the amount of sunlight, the number of   bacteria and the season it is. And this is only a partial list. There are multiple variables that still need to be tested. Scientists are only really beginning to scratch the surface. Even so, the technology is beginning to prove its worth for bull trout monitoring in the West and for keeping track of invasive Asian carp, which pose a huge threat to the Great Lakes region. ”We don’t have to know everything about it [eDNA] to make it useful  —   as long as we’re accounting for errors,” says Caren Goldberg, an ecologist at Washington State University. Refine, Refine, Refine, The work of refining the science of eDNA is what Clements is doing out in the woods near Alsea, Oregon. After dropping the synthetic DNA into the stream, he and Weitemier jump in their car and bounce along a logging road to the pink flag marking their fourth collection site, about a   downstream. ”I wasn’t sure I was going to be the person standing in the stream, but I thought there was a possibility,” says Weitemier, who drew the proverbial short straw. Like other scientists in place at the team’s three other collection sites, Weitemier will be   in the   stream for the next hour, taking water samples at regular intervals to see if they can capture any of the DNA released upstream. ”There was a lot of DNA in there  —   trillions of DNA particles. But that was being diluted into millions of liters of this stream,” says Weitemier. ”So we might only recover a very small proportion. .. especially [where] I was sampling at the farthest point from where we put it in.” The samples will be taken back to the Oregon Hatchery Research Center to be filtered. Then the filters will be taken to the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University, where Weitemier works. Even if they did capture the synthetic DNA, other issues could arise. ”The test we use to recover them may not be sensitive enough to see them. But we don’t know. That’s what we’re testing,” he says. But if all goes as planned here, and OSU is able to detect the DNA, Clements will repeat this experiment throughout Oregon. He’ll use the information he gleans from the field tests to figure out how the agency can start using eDNA to monitor and manage fish and wildlife. ”Scientists always say more data is better, managers always say we need to know now,” he says. ”So, we anticipate that along the way we’ll learn a lot.” This story comes to us from Oregon Public Broadcasting and EarthFix, an environmental journalism collaboration led by Oregon Public Broadcasting in partnership with six other public media stations in Oregon, Washington and Idaho."
690,"The Kremlin has given a positive readout of the   phone call Saturday between President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Putin’s overture to the United States to join forces in the fight against international terrorism was the main subject of the   conversation, while thorny issues such as alleged Russian   on U. S. political parties or economic sanctions on Russia weren’t mentioned. Russian state television welcomed the change in tone between Washington and Moscow following open hostility in the last weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency. ”The conversation was supposed to return substance and sense to the   dialogue,” Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the foreign relations committee in Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, was quoted as saying. ”By all appearances that’s what happened.” Although there was widespread speculation that Trump might propose easing U. S. sanctions on Russia during the call, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the Interfax news agency that the subject had not come up. The main topic of the call was how to defeat ISIS, according to statements released by the White House and the Kremlin. ”The two leaders emphasized that joining efforts in fighting the main threat  —   international terrorism  —   is a top priority,” the Kremlin said. ”The presidents spoke out for establishing real coordination of actions between Russia and the U. S. aimed at defeating ISIS and other terrorists groups in Syria.” Putin has been talking about forming an international coalition against terrorists since a speech he gave at the United Nations in September 2015, days before Russia entered the Syrian civil war on behalf of President Bashar  . Trump’s memorandum on devising a plan for defeating ISIS, also signed Saturday, orders U. S. security agencies to include the ”identification of new coalition partners in the fight against ISIS and policies to empower coalition partners to fight ISIS and its affiliates.” Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, cautioned that previous U. S. administrations also tried to use the common threat of terrorism as a way to   relations with Putin. ”It didn’t work under Bush. It didn’t work under Obama,” Lukyanov told NPR. ”There is a big question mark whether it will work now with Trump because the general atmosphere is totally poisoned by the deepest mistrust since maybe Cold War times.” White House press secretary Sean Spicer tweeted a photo of Trump on the phone with Putin. He also spoke with other world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In the picture, Trump is seen together with National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence and strategist Steve Bannon. Peskov said before the talk that Putin would be taking the call with Trump alone. While the White House readout was one paragraph long, the Kremlin statement was considerably more detailed. The conflict in Ukraine was only mentioned in passing, after other issues such as the situation in the Middle East and nuclear nonproliferation. Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 was the reason why the U. S. and the European Union imposed sanctions on Russia in the first place. ”Everything we know about Trump is very, very clear,” said Lukyanov. ”He’ll never do anything just without a return. He believes in deals. And of course he’ll use sanctions for a deal.” Putin, for his part, would never ask for the lifting of sanctions, Lukyanov said. Instead, it’s likely sanctions relief would be part of a grand bargain. In their conversation, Putin reminded Trump that Russia was an ally in the two world wars  —   and said Russia considers the U. S. the most important partner in fighting international terrorism. But even if Putin can win over Trump, the new U. S. president faces staunch opposition to rapprochement with Russia within his own party. Some Republicans in Congress want to write existing sanctions against Russia into law  —   and impose new ones because of alleged Russian interference in the U. S. presidential election."
691,"Whether you travel for work or pleasure, you have probably experienced travel fatigue  —   the distinct exhaustion that comes from too little leg room, bad air, bad food and stress endured while traveling. Travel across time zones is more disrupting, still. Jet lag, as we know it, can make you tired but unable to get to sleep, unable to stay asleep once you get there, disoriented, dizzy, emotionally vulnerable  —   and it can upset your stomach. (For a general discussion of jet lag and travel fatigue, see this.) So it isn’t exactly surprising that jet lag takes a toll on the performance of professional athletes  —   specifically Major League Baseball pitchers  —   who travel across multiple time zones, as was detailed in an article published Monday in one of the world’s top scientific journals, PNAS. It would be surprising if it were not the case. But the real story here isn’t baseball. The real story is jet lag. Jet lag is hard to study outside the laboratory. How do you quantify the effects of the disruption to our circadian rhythms to which travel across time zones can give rise? There are so many variables. Diet, alcohol, class of travel, as well as other circumstances  —   such as whether you have to work at the other end or whether you can rest  —   will all make a difference to your experience of jet lag. Enter baseball. Pro ball players are measured, analyzed, counted and made statistical to the greatest degree possible. Every bit of data is counted up, stored and processed. Major League Baseball is just about as documented as it is possible for a human activity to be. Crucially, for the purpose of this study, baseball players travel a lot for their work and they frequently travel across as many as three time zones. Whether you give a hoot about baseball or not, baseball is a data set unlike any other, if you aim to make a   analysis of the ways disruption to the body’s clock affects what humans do. The study’s authors mined 20 MLB seasons  —   well over 40, 000 games  —   to tease out the precise effects of jet lag on performance. And they came up with some pretty interesting results. One finding is that jet lag affects both home and away teams, but that the offensive performance of the home team is more adversely affected by jet lag. Away team performance did not seem to suffer as much offensively. Why not? The authors speculate that ”the away team has a more structured daily schedule when away from home than does the home team returning home.” And they add that this dichotomy between home and away may be less in evidence with defense because pitchers, ”especially starting pitchers who play every fifth day, have a more structured schedule leading up to their start irrespective whether they are home or away.” Given this, it is somewhat surprising that they also found that both home and away teams, under the influence of jet lag  —   and controlling for home team advantage as well as the difference of playing in different ballparks  —   showed a marked increase in the number of home runs they allowed. This is puzzling, to me anyway, because, as they authors note, this is best explained by difficulties experienced by pitchers as a result of jet lag. There was another finding that didn’t surprise me much because it matches my own travel experience so well: The effects of jet lag are noticeably worse traveling west to east than in the opposite direction. Arguably this is because it is the shortened day of eastward travel that produces the disruption to the circadian clock. Some of this is news baseball teams can use. For example, as the authors suggest, ”a starting pitcher scheduled for a game in which the team is   might travel to the game location a few days ahead of the team, to adjust to the new time zone.” Is there news the rest of us can use in these findings? Maybe this, in the authors words: ”Rather than uniform effects, these results reveal surprisingly specific effects of circadian misalignment on athletic performance under natural conditions.” Could this be true of the effects of jet lag on the rest of us, too? I don’t mean that we’ll all start allowing more home runs. But maybe jet lag’s affects for us regular people could turn out to be ”surprisingly specific”? Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe"
692,"Donald Trump is not only the U. S. president he’s also a golf industry giant. And like other golf course operators, he has a stake in the legal wrangling over a new environmental rule that could dent industry profits. Here’s where Trump is different from his peers: He gets to name the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and this week, the president may appoint a nominee to the U. S. Supreme Court, which soon will hear a case involving the environmental rule. The situation highlights the conflicts between Trump’s two roles  —   one as president, the other as business owner. Although he has stepped back from    management of his companies, he has not sold off his stake in the Trump Organization. His sprawling business empire includes a dozen golf courses in the United States alone. The jewel may be Trump National Doral, just outside Miami. It’s a resort with a hotel and a spa. At a campaign event in October, Trump said he was especially proud of Doral’s four golf courses. ”As you know, the Blue Monster is one of the great courses of the world,” he said. But like any golf course, it is subject to various regulations. And there’s a pending rule that the golf industry hates. In 2015, under the Obama administration, the EPA and U. S. Army Corps of Engineers finalized the Waters of the United States rule to apply clean water regulations to thousands of new streams, lakes and wetlands. Under the rule, the Blue Monster  —   and all golf courses in the U. S.  —   would be subject to closer federal regulation. The rule is opposed by a long list of industries, including manufacturers, farmers and golf course owners like Trump. They have been filing lawsuits that have put the rule on hold. Bob Helland, with the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, says the average golf course has over 11 acres of streams, ponds and wetlands that could be affected. Under the rule, courses may now need federal permission before applying fertilizer or pesticides. ”Many of our routine activities would be deemed as a discharge into waters of the United States and could not move forward without getting a required permit,” Helland said. Trump’s course superintendents are members of Helland’s association. Now, in his role as U. S. president, Trump has pledged to roll back the new environmental rule. His nominee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is also a staunch opponent of the Waters of the U. S. rule. As Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt filed a lawsuit to overturn it. For the Trump administration, overturning the rule isn’t something that can be done through executive order. The EPA would have to restart the lengthy rulemaking process, according to Jon Devine, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. ”Repealing a rule requires a full public process and has to be justified by the law and the evidence available. And in the case of the clean water rule, that’s going to be rough sledding for the Trump administration,” he said. This month, the Supreme Court decided to weigh in, agreeing to hear a case that will determine which federal court has jurisdiction over the rule. It’s possible Trump’s nominee to the court will hear the case. Larry Liebesman, a former EPA and Justice Department lawyer, says any further action will likely be put on hold until there’s a Supreme Court ruling on jurisdiction. ”It gives the administration a little down time to figure out how to handle the situation. It also suggests that maybe Congress may step in and legislate on this issue as well,” says Liebesman, now a consultant with Dawson and Associates. With the threat of a presidential veto gone now, opponents of the rule are hoping Congress takes action to kill the rule. This month, Republican Sens. Joni Ernst from Iowa and Deb Fischer from Nebraska introduced a resolution to begin that process."
693,"At the State Department, there is an easy  —   and usually private  —   way for employees to register their concerns about U. S. policy. It’s called the ”Dissent Channel.” And today, an unusually large number of foreign service officers are using it. A dissent cable says Donald Trump’s temporary visa and refugee ban ”runs counter to American values” and could be ”counterproductive.” The White House says it consulted for ”many weeks” with the State Department before issuing its executive order on Friday, temporarily banning visas for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries and suspending the U. S. refugee resettlement program. State Department officials who were involved in the refugee program deny this. One retired ambassador, Laura Kennedy, says the executive order did not read as though it had been reviewed by State Department lawyers or by consular or refugee officials. ”It is just, as the dissent message makes clear, inconsistent with values, with security aims of the administration, with process, with any number of things,” Kennedy says. The Dissent Channel was set up during the Vietnam War era as a way for foreign service officers and civil servants to raise concerns with upper management about the direction of U. S. foreign policy, without fear of retribution. The cables are sent to the State Department’s policy planning director, who distributes them to the secretary of state and other top officials, who must respond within 30 to 60 days. There are typically about four or five each year. ”Freedom from reprisal for Dissent Channel users is strictly enforced,” according to the State Department. During her   State Department career, Kennedy never signed a dissent cable herself. She remembers one time in the 1990s when more than a dozen diplomats raised concerns about U. S. policy in the Balkans. Last year, about 50 foreign service officers criticized the Obama administration for failing to do enough to protect civilians in Syria. But this executive order, titled ”Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” is generating much more attention. ”I know that many serving officers were horrified by this message,” Kennedy says, referring to the order. The draft dissent cable  —   which has been published by the Lawfare blog  —   points out that the overwhelming majority of attacks on U. S. soil are committed by   or naturalized U. S. citizens, individuals who have been living in the U. S for decades or since birth. And it points out that terrorist attacks carried out by foreign nationals entering the U. S. on visas have come from countries that are not included in the ban, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. On Monday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer was dismissive of the dissent cable. ”I think they should get with the program or they can go,” he said. All this comes at a time when the Trump administration has cleared out top management positions at the State Department without naming anyone new to replace them. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, is still awaiting confirmation."
694,"Former President Barack Obama has criticized President Trump’s immigration and travel ban issued on Friday, saying through a spokesman that he is ”heartened by the level of engagement” over the weekend in opposition to the action. ”In his final official speech as President, he spoke about the important role of citizen[s] and how all Americans have a responsibility to be the guardians of our democracy  —   not just during an election but every day,” Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis said in a statement. ”Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.” It is the first public comment from Obama since he left office just over a week ago and departed for a vacation in Palm Springs, Calif. In his final press conference, Obama signaled he would give the new president some deference but that he wouldn’t hesitate to speak up if he believed the country’s ”core values may be at stake,” including ”systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion.” The former president apparently felt that was in fact happening with Trump’s executive order, which blocked travelers from seven countries, all of which are    —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   for 90 days. New refugee admissions are suspended for 120 days, while Syrian refugees are banned indefinitely. Trump also signaled in a weekend interview with the Christian Broadcast Network that he would give priority to Christian refugees over Muslim refugees. The administration has maintained that the sweeping actions don’t constitute a Muslim ban, though. ”With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion,” the statement from Lewis added. There was confusion across the country over the implementation of the ban, which blocked some valid visa holders from entering and detained many people who had legal status and green cards. Protests sprang up at major international airports, and on Saturday night a federal judge issued a temporary stay blocking the deportation of valid visa holders. Trump has argued that his new policy is ”similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months.” However, as the Washington Post points out, that was in response to a specific threat after Iraqi refugees had been found to be colluding against U. S. troops. And the refugee process was slowed, not halted."
695,"Holding up papers with highlighted text, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said little has changed as it relates to the National Security Council between the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations. He thundered of ”identical language” between (parts of the) 2017 and 2009 memos organizing the NSC. And he went further when it came to George W. Bush’s administration. ”The makeup of the Principals Committee from 2017 is exactly as it was in both 2017 as it was in 2001,” Spicer boasted, brandishing the texts in both hands. ”100 percent identical, except we add the word also.” But that’s not true. President Trump and this White House have come under scrutiny and criticism in some corners in recent days for elevating chief strategist Steve Bannon to the Principals Committee of the NSC and demoting the director of national intelligence as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact, Trump’s Principals Committee, as compared with Obama’s, does exactly that (bolding and italics ours for emphasis): Trump 2017, ”The PC shall have as its regular attendees the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff, the Assistant to the President and Chief Strategist, the National Security Advisor, and the Homeland Security Advisor. The Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed. The Counsel to the President, the Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget may attend all PC meetings. . ..” Obama 2009  —   Presidential Policy Directive  —   1, ”The NSC Principals Committee ( ) will continue to be the senior interagency forum for consideration of policy issues affecting national security, as it has been since 1989. The National Security Advisor shall serve as Chair, and its regular members will be the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, the Chief of Staff to the President, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor, the Deputy Secretary of State, the Counsel to the President, and the Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs shall be invited to attend every meeting of the  . . ..” Compared with George W. Bush’s, Trump’s has far more people in the Principals Committee. The director of national intelligence and the Homeland Security Department did not exist yet. And, of course, there was no ”chief strategist” designated on the Principals Committee: George W. Bush 2001  —   National Security Presidential Directive  —  1, ”The NSC Principals Committee ( ) will continue to be the senior interagency forum for consideration of policy issues affecting national security, as it has since 1989. The   shall have as its regular attendees the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Chief of Staff to the President, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (who shall serve as chair). The Director of Central Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.” Bush’s initial organizational order forming the NSC (above) designates that the CIA director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would attend on an   basis. But that was before Sept. 11. ”In effect, after   the practice was they were in almost every meeting,” David Rothkopf, CEO and editor of the FP group, which publishes Foreign Policy magazine, told NPR’s Scott Horsley. ”The structure changed again in the Obama administration. And the big difference between this NSC and past NSCs [is] not really with regard to that particular issue.” The bigger issue is Bannon. Having the president’s chief strategist designated to be on the Principals Committee is a departure from any past administration. Yes, Obama adviser David Axelrod regularly attended NSC meetings, as Spicer has said. But Axelrod noted he never sat in on a Principals Committee meeting. He tweeted: ”I sat on sidelines as observer on some issues 2 gain an understanding of decisions. Bannon’s new ground.” Axelrod expanded on that defense in an   on CNN. com: ”As a senior adviser to President Obama in 2009, I had the opportunity to witness the fateful deliberations of his National Security Council Principals committee over the strategy the U. S would pursue in the war with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was not a member of the committee. I did not speak or participate. I sat on the sidelines as a silent observer with [former White House press secretary Robert] Gibbs because we would be called upon to publicly discuss the president’s decision on that critical matter and the process by which he arrived at it. ”We knew our presence chagrined some of the principals but, acting on the president’s instructions, we were there to gain a thorough understanding of what would be one of the most important judgments he would make as   . Our access also came with limits. We were barred from some of the most sensitive meetings on the   policy review so as not to inhibit discussions. Beyond that, Gibbs and I did not attend regular meetings of the NSC Principals committee or their deputies nor were we invited to weekly meetings on terrorist threats. . .. ”In elevating Bannon to sit with the Secretaries of Defense and State and other key national security figures on the NSC principals committee, President Trump has blazed new ground. Bannon will exercise authority no political adviser has had before. He will be a full participant, not an observer, in national security deliberations. ”Under the president’s announced structure, Bannon has eclipsed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence on the National Security Council. Indeed, Bannon already has emerged as the president’s most trusted adviser on global affairs, an area in which Trump has little expertise. It was Bannon who guided the drafting of Trump’s controversial immigration order. According to reports, the Secretary of Defense and director of Homeland Security were not consulted the State Department was caught unawares. . .. ”Ten days in, this much is clear: Steve Bannon is playing a role in national security and foreign policy for which there is no precedent. And for better or worse, he already is making an impact.” Rothkopf notes that Bannon, the former head of   nationalistic website Breitbart, ”has been given a very substantial   portfolio despite very little experience in that area and a permanency on the NSC. ”And I think if you give somebody with no experience and a political agenda, and a dubious one at that, a permanency, it casts the   participation of the chairman of joint chiefs and director of national intelligence in a very different light, because it’s saying, ’We are not prioritizing professional expertise we’re prioritizing political agenda.’ ” NPR’s Maya Fitzpatrick contributed to this post."
696,"It was an executive order in 1942 that created the system forcing Americans of Japanese descent to live in internment camps. Days after President Trump used an executive order to dramatically shift U. S. immigration policy, Fred Korematsu Day is attracting special attention  —   including as the subject of a Google Doodle. Korematsu fought a discriminatory federal program all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court  —   and lost. Years later, he was awarded America’s highest civilian honor. As NPR has reported: ”Korematsu was born in Oakland, Calif. but his U. S. citizenship didn’t keep him from being arrested for refusing to be relocated to an internment camp in 1942. He challenged his arrest in court, and two years later the case made its way to the Supreme Court. ”Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, the decree that forced the relocation of people of Japanese descent to internment camps. The court ruled in favor of the government and against Korematsu in what is now widely considered one of its worst decisions. The majority of justices claimed the detentions were not based on racial discrimination but rather on suspicions that   were acting as spies.” In 1983, the U. S. District Court in San Francisco formally vacated Korematsu’s conviction. At the time, he told Judge Marilyn Patel that instead of a legal pardon, he wanted to be assured the U. S. government would never again take such an action. ”If anyone should do any pardoning,” he said, ”I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the   people.” Over the weekend, the civil rights hero’s daughter, Karen, who leads the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, told member station KQED that she didn’t know of her father’s stand until she learned about it in high school. ”He simply said it happened a long time ago and what he thought he did was right and the government was wrong, and I could just see this hurt go over his face,” she told KQED. She added, ”Why should he go to a prison camp when there were no charges, there was no day in court, there was no access to an attorney?” A welder whose family ran a flower nursery in California before they were forced to leave and live in a Utah camp, Korematsu died in 2005. Since then, several states have enacted laws to celebrate his birthday, Jan. 30. California was the first state to adopt the Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution. Signed by  . Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 2010 law recognizes ”the importance of preserving civil liberties, even in times of real or perceived crisis.” When he awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, President Clinton praised him for being someone whose stand for civil rights helped the lives of millions of Americans, comparing him to names on landmark civil rights cases such as Brown v. Board of Education. But as The Atlantic has noted, the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision ”belongs to what legal scholars describe as the   of American constitutional law  —   a small group of Supreme Court rulings universally assailed as wrong, immoral, and unconstitutional. Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu form the  ’s core legal scholars sometimes include other decisions as well.”"
697,"Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is among the tech firms that are critical of the Trump administration’s executive order barring Muslim immigrants from certain countries. This weekend, Google   Sergey Brin took part in protests at the San Francisco International Airport. Today, the Google Doodle  —   the picture that appears on the home page of the search engine  —   provided a subtle reminder of what happens when the U. S. targets a group of citizens because of their national origins. The Doodle is an illustration of Fred Korematsu, the civil rights activist and survivor of the internment camps where the U. S. government put   during World War II. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order that incarcerated more than 115, 000 people of Japanese descent. The order was based on fears that in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the heritage of these Americans meant they might be spies for the enemy. Korematsu, the son of Japanese immigrants but born and raised in Oakland, Calif. was 23 when the order came down. He went into hiding but was eventually arrested for refusing to report for relocation and sent to an internment camp with his family in Utah. His conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States. Decades later in 1976, President Gerald Ford ended the executive order and apologized for the internment saying in part that ”  were and are loyal Americans.” And in 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned as the court reconsidered the motivations behind the order. Five years later, President Ronald Reagan signed The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, citing ”racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a lack of political leadership” as the real reason for the internment. Today would have been Korematsu’s 98th birthday. (He died in 2005.) It is officially recognized as Fred Korematsu Day in California, Hawaii, Virginia and Florida. But Google’s choice to make him the focus of the Google Doodle doesn’t seem like a total coincidence. The Trump administration says that the executive order banning entry from certain Muslim countries isn’t targeted at all Muslims, but the order also says that refugee claims by religious minorities from those countries should be given priority for entry. And Trump suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that he wants to give priority to persecuted Christians. At least someone at Google must think there are parallels between what happened to the Japanese during World War II and the questions that Muslim Americans are facing today about their loyalty to the U. S. And they aren’t alone in seeing the parallels. The actor George Takei has started a Care2 petition asking Americans to stand up for Muslims. Takei, who is gay and   is best known for his role as Sulu in Star Trek. He was also held, along with his family, in one of the internment camps for  . Google CEO Sundar Pichai was among several tech executives who have denounced Trump’s immigration ban. In response, Pichai has created a $2 million fund to help refugees, calling it the company’s ”largest campaign ever.” Google Doodles have occasionally taken heat from conservatives for being liberal leaning. Past Doodles have included historical civil rights leaders such as Cesar Chavez, the founder of the National Farm Workers Association, and Yuri Kochiyama, who was friends with Malcolm X and showed support for controversial figures such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro."
698,"Updated at 1:30 p. m. ET, Police in Quebec City have arrested a suspect following a shooting at a mosque there that left six people dead and wounded eight others Sunday night. After initially saying they had two suspects in custody, police said Monday that they determined one of the men was instead a witness. According to Canadian authorities, a gunman opened fire inside the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre around 8 p. m. ET, as about 40 people were gathered for evening prayers. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Province Premier Philippe Couillard have described the shooting as an act of terrorism. On Monday, Trudeau delivered a formal address to the House of Commons. ”These people were just that  —   people, ordinary Canadians. They were brothers, uncles, fathers and friends,” he said. ”These were people of faith and of community, and in the blink of an eye, they were robbed of their lives in an act of brutal violence.” He added: ”We will not close our minds. We will open our hearts. . .. let us strive to be the best version of ourselves in these dark hours.” In a statement late Sunday, Trudeau said he felt ”tremendous shock, sadness and anger” upon learning of the shooting. ”We condemn this terrorist attack on Muslims in a centre of worship and refuge. . .. It is   to see such senseless violence. Diversity is our strength, and religious tolerance is a value that we, as Canadians, hold dear. ”  are an important part of our national fabric, and these senseless acts have no place in our communities, cities and country. Canadian law enforcement agencies will protect the rights of all Canadians, and will make every effort to apprehend the perpetrators of this act and all acts of intolerance.” Police have not released details about the suspect in custody, or what motivated the attack. ”Why is this happening here? This is barbaric,” the mosque’s president, Mohamed Yangui said to reporters, according to the AP. Yangui was not inside the mosque when the shooting occurred but said he received frantic calls from many who were inside at the time of the gunfire. Mohamed Labidi, the mosque’s vice president, told the wire service that a university professor and a businessman were among the victims. They were shot in the back, he said. Reuters reports that ”incidents of Islamophobia have increased in Quebec in recent years.” Here’s more from the news service: ”The   or niqab, became a big issue in the 2015 Canadian federal election, especially in Quebec, where the vast majority of the population supported a ban on it at citizenship ceremonies. ”In 2013, police investigated after a mosque in the Saguenay region of the province was splattered with what was believed to be pig blood. In the neighboring province of Ontario, a mosque was set on fire in 2015, a day after an attack by gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris.” Last June, during the holy month of Ramadan, as the CBC reported, someone also left a pig’s head at Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, where Sunday night’s attack took place. ”Tonight, Canadians grieve for those killed in a cowardly attack on a mosque in Quebec City,” Trudeau said. ”My thoughts are with victims  their families.”"
699,"Refugee advocates and resettlement groups spent a chaotic weekend struggling to adapt on the fly, with families in the air and no official guidance on President Trump’s executive order that bans refugees from around the world. ”There’s no way to get guidance, nothing is coming down from the top. It was chaos at the airports,” says Melanie Nezer, the vice president of policy and advocacy of HIAS, a global Jewish nonprofit that protects and resettles refugees. Her group tried to intervene in individual cases over the weekend. By Sunday, advocates said they had received State Department assurances that some refugees already in the pipeline will be admitted through this Friday, extending the deadline by one week for those with travel documents  —   ”refugees in transit,” says Nezer. The extended deadline hasn’t been announced officially yet, adding to the uncertainty of a process that seems to change by the hour. The extended deadline could allow entry to around 800 refugees, ”but not refugees from the seven countries,” says Nezer, referring to a presidential order that blocks citizens of seven   countries from entering the U. S. for 90 days: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. More than 50 percent of Muslim refugees admitted to the U. S. last year came from Syria and Somalia. An email circulating among official resettlement agencies and obtained by NPR says those arriving this week ”will be allowed entry to the U. S.” But the State Department has not confirmed a change publicly. The shifting application of Friday’s presidential executive order underlines the ongoing confusion and comes after a weekend of panic for refugee families who had waited years to clear security checks for resettlement in the United States  —   only to be detained or deported upon arrival. ”We have two cases next week now we are hopeful,” Nezer says. Refugee agency officials say they are sending legal teams to the airports in case of detentions. Chris George, who heads IRIS, a refugee resettlement office in New Haven, Conn. told NPR in an email that he was alerted by Church World Service, one of IRIS’s partners, to expect arrivals this week from Afghanistan and Colombia. One refugee whose future is at stake is    Sardar Hussain, an Afghan orphan who has waited for years for resettlement. The Taliban killed his entire family when he was 13. The Lutheran Community Services in Spokane, Wash. finally accepted him in a program for unaccompanied minor refugees. ”I am very worried,” Heike Lake, with the Lutheran group, said late Friday. She feared Hussain would be barred from a Monday flight to the U. S. But Lake was alerted late Sunday that the State Department’s extension for refugees in the pipeline would apply to Hussain, who is now expected to arrive in Spokane on Monday and will become a resident in a foster home. The State Department’s deadline extension could give a reprieve to some 800 refugees who will be resettled in the United States, refugee advocates say. Then the program will be frozen for 120 days. After a weekend of nationwide protests, criticism from   groups and some backlash within the Republican Party, President Trump defended his order, saying the U. S. will show compassion to those fleeing oppression. But he insisted that he is ”protecting our own citizens and border.” He argued that his policy is not a Muslim ban, ”as the media is falsely reporting,” but ”about terror and keeping our country safe.” ”The Muslim ban is in effect,” counters HIAS President and CEO Mark Hetfield, reached by phone on Sunday at a   rally in Washington, D. C. He believes the executive order ”killed the refugee program” and says, ”We are making a lot of noise. We are going to try to litigate it.” On Saturday, a federal court for the Eastern District of New York issued an emergency stay for travelers with valid green cards and visas, but the order did not come in time for some refugees, Hetfield says. Hetfield tried but failed to intervene on behalf of a Syrian mother traveling with two young children. She had been granted approval to join her husband in Connecticut after a   separation. ”She went through all the vetting,” Hetfield says, and boarded a   flight before the order was signed on Friday. But she was prevented from taking a transit flight in Kiev after the order became official. ”So now, she’s stuck with no legal recourse,” Hetfield says. ”It’s incredibly cruel. I don’t recognize this country.” A   program to resettle religious minorities from Iran is also on hold, Hetfield says. ”It’s not   the majority are Christians,” he said, with around 2, 000 people resettled every year for the past two decades. But Iran is one of seven countries from where visas are now blocked. But the official resettlement tally shows the number of Christian refugees is roughly equal to Muslims. The president carved out an exception for religious minorities in his executive order. ”They’ve been horribly treated,” Trump said in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network on Friday. ”If you were a Muslim, you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.” But the ”Christian exception” still has to be approved by the secretary of state and Department of Homeland Security on a ”case by case” basis, Hetfield said. The impact of the executive order has already been profound on individual lives  —   from the Iraqis who worked for the U. S. military and intelligence services to a Sudanese doctor at the Cleveland Clinic who was barred from   to the United States on Friday. A Syrian clarinetist, a legal immigrant touring with cellist   Ma, does not know if he will be able to return to his Brooklyn apartment at the end of the tour."
700,"Surprise and a desire for retaliation are some of the reactions to President Trump’s temporary ban on travelers from seven   countries. The ban, abruptly imposed Friday, led the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a   body that’s based in Saudi Arabia, to call on the U. S. to ”maintain its moral obligation to provide leadership and hope at a time of great uncertainty and unrest in the world.” Expressing its ”grave concern” about the policy, the group said that refugees ”have been adversely and unjustly affected”  —   and it added that the policy also plays into the hands of extremist groups that have accused the U. S. of waging war on Muslims. The ban on people traveling from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia is slated to last for 90 days. In addition, new refugee admissions are suspended for 120 days and Syrian refugees are banned indefinitely. Here’s a rundown of reactions from countries that now find themselves on an undesirable U. S. list: Iraq, ”Iraqis seem shocked by the ban” imposed by one of its allies, NPR’s Alice Fordham reports on today’s Morning Edition. Parliament has approved a plan for a reciprocal ban on Americans, which would need cabinet approval before taking effect, Alice says. She adds that Iraq’s former ambassador to the U. S. Lukman Faily, says he’s been told he can’t travel to the U. S. The ban shows ”swagger and an arrogance,” influential Shiite cleric Muqtada   says, noting that Americans are allowed to freely enter many countries  —   including those on its banned list. How the order goes over in Iraq is especially important because that country’s government has been a key ally to the U. S. in the war on ISIS. Iraq is also home to about 6, 000 U. S. troops who are aiding domestic forces on the front line against ISIS. Iran,   IRNA news agency complained of ”U. S. terrorism double standards,” noting that Saudi Arabia is not on Trump’s list. As NPR’s Greg Myre pointed out, the radicalized Muslims who carried out deadly attacks in the U. S. beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, came from these countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. None of those countries are on Trump’s list. Tehran will ”take reciprocal measures” against U. S. nationals who want to travel to Iran, First   Eshaq Jahangiri promised Monday. The Foreign Ministry calls the ban ”insulting,” while also saying any retaliation will be ”proportionate” and will be made ”while respecting the American people and differentiating between them and the hostile policies of the U. S. Government.” Syria, The country’s government so far hasn’t released an official response to Friday’s order. However,   SANA media highlighted international criticism of Trump’s immigration ban and the U. S. president’s low approval ratings in a new Gallup poll. SANA cited calls from the international community and American protesters for Trump to reconsider the ban. A month ago, Syrian President Bashar Assad had praised Trump’s approach to terrorism and said that the new U. S. president would be a ”natural ally.” As NPR’s Deb Amos noted, ”More than 50 percent of Muslim refugees admitted to the U. S. last year come from Syria and Somalia.” Yemen, Attempts to ”classify Yemen or its citizens as a possible source of terrorism are illegal and illegitimate,” the government says. The Foreign Ministry said that while it is ”aware that such action is the sovereign right for the United States, however, identifying specific countries as potential sources of terrorists . .. needs more assessment and revision.” Yemen also characterized a deadly U. S. raid that was carried out Sunday as ”state terrorism committed by the United States under the pretext of fighting terrorism.” That raid targeting   in the Arabian Peninsula resulted in the death of a U. S. service member as well as 14 militants, officials say. But the Pentagon is looking into reports that it also killed women and children  —   including the    granddaughter of Nasser    —   a former Yemeni minister of agriculture whose son, killed by the U. S. in 2011, was an   proselytizer. Sudan, America’s envoy in Khartoum was summoned by Sudan’s Foreign Ministry to hear the country’s protests against Trump’s decision, which came at a time of increasing cooperation between the U. S. and Sudan. Sudan’s government has been working to be taken off the U. S. list of state sponsors of terrorism  —   just weeks ago, President Obama eased economic sanctions against the country that had stood for 20 years. ”The Sudanese citizens living in the United States are known for their good reputation, respect for American laws, and their lack of involvement in radical and criminal acts,” the government says. Somalia  The government so far doesn’t appear to have issued a formal response, but Somali native Mo Farah, a decorated Olympian and British citizen who lives in Portland, Ore. criticized the ban, which he said cast doubt on whether he can return to his family after training in Ethiopia. Farah said via Facebook: ”It’s deeply troubling that I will have to tell my children that Daddy might not be able to come home  —   to explain why the President has introduced a policy that comes from a place of ignorance and prejudice.” Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees live in Kenya. NPR’s Eyder Peralta, citing the U. N.’s refugee agency, reports that some 26, 000 Somalis in Kenya are undergoing the official process of trying to gain permission to settle in the U. S. Roughly half have already been interviewed by U. S. immigration officials. After Trump’s election in November, Somalia congratulated the new president and said it hopes to strengthen relations, saying Somalia’s government and people ”enjoy strong bilateral ties with the USA built on mutual respect, trust and partnership.” Libya, We’re not seeing an official response from the struggling nation. The ban came weeks before a conference on U. S.  relations is scheduled to be held in Washington, D. C."
701,"Saira Rafiee boarded a plane in Tehran this weekend on her way to New York. She had been visiting family in Iran and needed to get back to the U. S. in time for classes at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where she is a Ph. D. student in political science. But, as a result of President Trump’s executive order restricting the travel of citizens from seven   countries, including Iran, Rafiee says she was detained in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and, after nearly 18 hours, sent back to Tehran. Rafiee did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment, but she posted publicly on Facebook: ”. ..I have no clue whether I would ever be able to go back to the school I like so much, or to see my dear friends there. But my story isn’t as painful and terrifying as many other stories I have heard these days. I know an Iranian student in the US, who was planning to go back to Iran to see her sister who has cancer probably for the last time, but had to cancel her trip because of this order. A dear friend of mine, a Columbia Ph. D. student, went to Canada on Friday to be with his fiancée for the weekend, and is not able to go back to his studies and work, back to his scholarly life. I know many students who are outside the US, doing fieldwork for their dissertation, and have no clue whether they can finish their studies after studying for many years. ..” Allan Wernick, a law professor who runs an immigration resource center at CUNY, calls the situation a ”crisis,” noting that CUNY has more than 100 students from the affected countries who are here on student visas. ”I refer to CUNY as the most   university in the country,” he says, with as many as 40 to 50 percent of the university’s half a million students immigrants or the children of immigrants. Throughout the weekend, similar stories emerged from other U. S. universities. Mohammed Abdi, an anthropology Ph. D. student at Yale, holds a U. S. Green Card and was in Dubai awaiting a visa to continue his field research in Kabul, Afghanistan. But, as a result of the executive order, he’s worried he cannot return to the U. S. Nor can he stay in Dubai for more than 15 days. And, because of his previous work as a human rights activist, he says he can’t safely return to his home country of Iran. ”It’s very ambiguous,” Abdi told NPR Ed via Skype. ”I am essentially stateless.” Undergraduates have also been affected by the new restrictions, including Niki Mossafer Rahmati, an MIT engineering student and member of the sorority, Sigma Kappa. She was leaving her parents in Iran, headed back to the U. S. for the start of the semester, when she was detained in Qatar. Like Rafiee, Rahmati was ultimately returned to Iran and described the experience on Facebook: ”. ..My inbox is flooded with messages and emails of love and support. I am truly speechless, grateful and proud to [be a] part of the MIT community. I have never been subjected to any form of religious or racial discrimination at MIT. Our community is extremely diverse, inclusive, supportive and accepting of individuals and their backgrounds. But I cannot believe all this love is coming from the same country that banned me from entering its borders just a couple of hours ago. ..” The number of students detained at airports in the United States was not immediately known, but Narges Bayani, a graduate student at New York University, was released on Sunday after being held for several hours at John F. Kennedy International Airport. ”I am in awe and absolute admiration of the solidarity of the American people in response to such inhumane and discriminatory regulations. It feels like a sweet personal victory over hate,” she posted on Facebook. Universities and academic organizations largely condemned the travel ban and vowed to assist their students in returning to the U. S. David Elwell, director of MIT’s International Students Office, told MIT’s student newspaper that his office was ”deeply disturbed” by the new policy. Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, said in a prepared statement: ”American institutions of higher learning are united in their distress on behalf of our international students and faculty, and in their reliance on our communities’ most fundamental values of accessibility and open dialogue. Our educational mission and the welfare of our community members are directly at stake. National security is of the utmost importance, but we are steadfast in asserting that this goal can be achieved while maintaining respect for core academic  —   and American  —   values.” Mitch Daniels, the former Republican governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, said the executive order is ”a bad idea, poorly implemented” and he called on Trump to ”promptly revoke and rethink it.” Alongside their educational mission and the welfare of students and faculty, many U. S. institutions of higher learning have significant revenue at stake if the United States becomes less welcoming to international students. According to the Institute of International Education, more than a million international students attend U. S. institutions, and because of their status, they do not receive most federal or state financial aid. This includes an estimated 17, 000 students from the countries currently covered by the travel ban: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen."
702,"Humans have had to face death and mortality since since the beginning of time, but our experience of the dying process has changed dramatically in recent history. Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiology at Duke University Medical Center, tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that death used to be sudden, unexpected and relatively swift  —   the result of a violent cause, or perhaps an infection. But, he says, modern medicines and medical technologies have lead to a ”dramatic extension” of life  —   and a more prolonged dying processes. ”We’ve now . .. introduced a phase of our life, which can be considered as ’dying,’ in which patients have terminal diseases in which they are in and out of the hospital, they are dependent in nursing homes,” Warraich says. ”That is something that is a very, very recent development in our history as a species.” Prolonging life might sound like a good thing, but Warraich notes that medical technologies often force patients, their loved ones and their doctors to make difficult, painful decisions. In his new book, Modern Death, he writes about a patient with   dementia who screamed ”kill me” as a feeding tube was inserted into his nose. ”This is probably one of the encounters that I had in residency that I have been unable to shake from my memory,” Warraich says. ”I think if you ask any physician, any nurse, any paramedic, they’ll have many such stories to tell you.” On the importance of having a healthcare proxy, living will and advanced directive  One of the biggest problems that we face in not only modern society, but in societies of olden times as well, is that people have always been very afraid to talk about death. In many cultures it is considered bad luck to talk about death and it is thought to be a bad omen. I think to some extent that extends to this very day. But . .. I think having a living will, having an advanced directive, or perhaps most importantly, having a designated healthcare proxy, someone who can help transmit your decisions to the team when you’re not able to do so, is perhaps the most important thing that we can do for ourselves as patients and as human beings. On giving CPR and knowing when to stop giving CPR, One of the things about CPR, Terry, is that almost everyone in medicine knows how to start CPR, when to start CPR, really what to do in CPR under even complex situations, but the one thing that almost no one really teaches us, and there are no guidelines for, is when to stop CPR. I think in some ways that is one of the biggest challenges that we in medicine face all the time. . .. I was actually working in the hospital last night and it was about 3 in the morning and I was called by one of my other colleagues who was another cardiology fellow, he asked me, ”Haider, I need your help. I have a patient that we are doing CPR on,” and he wanted some help from me. So I walked over to the intensive care unit, and the patient was in her 60s. . .. There was an entire team in the room doing chest compressions on this woman, and they had been doing it for an hour and a half at that point, much, much, much longer than most CPRs last. . .. At the same time while this CPR was ongoing, the patient’s family member, her daughter, was outside the room, and she was crying. . .. Even though we could give her all the information . .. that wasn’t perhaps what she was looking for, because what we were asking her to think about or to do was one of the hardest things anyone has to ever bear, which was, ”Do you want us to stop CPR?” And that’s the type of thing that I don’t think any of us can ever prepare for, especially when it’s our parent that’s involved. On why he wrote a book about dying, I really wanted to find answers to some very, very basic questions, like what are the implications of the sort of life extension that we have achieved? What is the role of religion, not only a patient’s religion but a physician’s religion when it comes to dealing with the end of life? How is social media affecting how people experience the end of life? . .. So many times I’ve found myself in the room where there are people who were so much more experienced in life than I was, yet knew so little about death and dying. And so I wanted to write a book so that people could go into those really, really difficult places and feel like they’re armed with information, that this isn’t a completely foreign territory for them and that in some way could help them navigate and deal with the sort of difficult situations that lay ahead for them. On the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act, It is very unfortunate that health is so politicized in this country, because it doesn’t have to be. Health and wellness aren’t red or blue, and they shouldn’t be, but unfortunately that is where we are. I hope that when policies are being enacted in DC, patient’s voices, those who have benefited from the ACA, those who have gained insurance, those voices are not lost in the midst of all of this political activity. On immigrating to the U. S. from Pakistan, I came to the United States in 2010 and [until now] have only lived in an America in which Barack Obama was the president. I think in some ways Trump’s victory has really shaken me, because of how invested I was in the idea that America is a special place, it’s a truly multicultural society. And I’m still trying to understand, I think like so many others, just exactly what happened. Especially as a writer and as a physician I’ve tried to separate myself from my identity as a Muslim. I’d rather be known as a    who happens to be Pakistani, rather than a young Pakistani Muslim immigrant who happens to be a doctor and a writer, but I don’t know. Given how things are changing, I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to set that narrative for myself. That’s a scary thought  —   to live an identity that is so politicized even when you wish for it to not be."
703,"In elementary school, you learn there are three branches of the federal government. But if you had looked on the new Donald Trump White House website before Monday morning, you would have only seen two: the executive and legislative. From Jan. 20 until about 11 a. m. Monday, perhaps one of the key differences between Barack Obama’s White House website and President Trump’s was the exclusion of a Web page for the judicial branch. The judiciary did not appear on a general menu leading viewers to main pages, such as the pages for the executive and legislative branches. But after Monday’s update, the page almost exactly matches that of the page under Obama’s administration. This addition comes after many people commented about the nonexistent page on social media this past weekend. Websites like the National Archives and the Internet Archive allow viewers to look back at the White House sites from previous administrations. Should someone want to see exactly how it looked under presidents Clinton, Bush or Obama, they can access the ”frozen in time” sites. Other changes under President Trump include climate change and health care being bumped from the ”Top Issues” list. And LGBT rights was taken off the site. And a Spanish version of the site is yet to come. As Politico reported, the Trump White House will be keeping a design and shell similar to the website under Obama  ” ”with a larger reboot planned a bit later in 2017.” Cecilia Mazanec is the NPR digital news intern."
704,"A muted statue of the Virgin Mary received the revelers, a few hundred of New York City’s fortunate elite, as they navigated the recesses of the dark, cool caverns underneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side. An orchestra struck up the first chords of the ”Blue Danube.” The ladies were careful not to lean against the slanted, peeling walls and the men minded their coattails. Amidst the stacks of wine crates stamped ANTHONY OECHS  CO. couples began to waltz. A bottle of fine champagne was passed around as a waiter produced a tray of crystal glasses. Overhead,   Packards and Hudsons motored along at a roaring 20 mph. It was July 11, 1934, and as The Pittsburgh Gazette eagerly explained, ”the dry era” was finally over. It was a celebration of new beginnings. When the Anthony Oechs wine distributors moved to the Brooklyn Bridge’s wine cellar, dormant for almost two decades  —   the vaults would once again do what they had been built to do when they were established in 1876, seven years before the bridge was even opened for travel. The wine cellars had originally been constructed as a sort of compromise. As chief bridge engineer, Washington Roebling (and his father John A. Roebling before him) developed plans for a roadway connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, the question loomed over what to do with two establishments that were in the path of construction. On the Brooklyn shore of the East River, Rackey’s Wine Company was doing steady business, and on the Manhattan side, Luyties  Co. sold its liquor to thirsty New Yorkers. Roebling saw an opportunity to offset some of the bridge’s massive $15 million construction costs. It was an ingeniously perfect fit. The design of the bridge would allow for two wine cellars, one on each shore, along with several other vaulted chambers, to be incorporated into construction. The chambers would be rented out to local businesses, which used them mostly for storage, to help pay off the city’s debt. Roebling’s plan worked, both architecturally and financially. According to The New York Times, as the bridge was erected in the 1870s, the wine vaults were built ”beneath the ramps that lead up to the anchorages, within the arched granite and limestone approaches that span the intervening streets.” Over the course of the next 40 years, several different liquor vendors would utilize the cellars below the bridge. City records indicate, for example, that in 1901, the ”Luyties Brothers paid $5, 000 for a vault on the Manhattan side of the bridge,” located at 204 Williams St. while in Brooklyn, ”A. Smith  Company” forked over $500 a year to rent a wine cellar from 1901 until 1909. Storing wine under the bridge made perfect sense. The caverns below the   granite entrances were dark and consistently cool, ideal places to house even the most delicate vintage Bordeaux, Burgundy or Champagne. And as the vaults became home to wines from across the globe, the dingy walls of the cellars were enhanced to reflect that heritage. The winding maze of caverns was transformed into a painted ”labyrinth” with the names of French streets —    Les Deux Oefs, Avenue Des Chateux Haut Brion —   stenciled overhead. Over time, the cellar walls were festooned with illustrations of provincial Europe designs of sinewy leaves and purple grapes trailed along the stucco in subdued hues. Later, the waltzing guests of 1934 would take a turn surrounded by cellar walls which displayed   quotations, such as this one, attributed to either Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, or Johann Heinrich Voss, a German poet: Who loveth not wine, women and song, He remaineth a fool his whole life long. No one remembers exactly when the statue of the Virgin Mary made its way to the small alcove in the Manhattan cellars. Legend has it that a vendor may have transported the stone figure, plucked straight from the Champagne cellars of Pol Rogers in Epernay, France. Those who saw the Madonna statue watching over the bridge’s caverns likened the ethereal scene to Italy’s Grotto Azzurra, or the Blue Grotto of Capri. The statue mysteriously disappeared sometime around 1942, but the sobriquet lingered. By the late 1910s, as America debated the vices of liquor, the wine was moved out and the cellars were converted into newspaper storage. But the end of Prohibition in 1933 enticed new wine distributors. The storied celebration on July 11, 1934 was held in honor of Anthony Oechs  Co. ’s move into the bridge’s   caverns. Champagne once again flowed through the Manhattan vaults. For just a few years, the era of the Blue Grotto would be reborn. After World War II, for logistical reasons, the city of New York would take over permanent management of the cellars. But the rare few who have been allowed to visit the historic cellars in the past half century say they can still sense the spirits that once occupied the extraordinary space. If you squint hard enough, they claim you can make out a final homage to the cellars’ past imprinted in the 1930s on the crumbling wall: ”Legend of Oechs Cellars: These cellars were built in 1876, about seven years prior to the official opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. From their inception, they housed the choicest wines in New York City.”"
705,"Screening for lung cancer using   CT scans can save lives, but at a cost: Tests frequently produce   false alarms and prompt unnecessary procedures. A study from the Veterans Health Administration lays out the considerable effort required by both patients and doctors to undertake screening. ”I have heard people say ’what’s the big deal, it’s just a CT,’ ” says Dr. Linda Kinsinger, who ran the study at the VA. ”But I think what we tried to show is it’s a lot more than just a CT.” Federal officials and other medical groups recommend   CT scans to look for lung cancer among people at risk, generally those over the age of 55 who have smoked at least the equivalent of two packs a day for 15 years. The tests typically cost $300, and they aren’t always covered by insurance. Screening does identify cancers, but in the vast majority of cases the test produces false alarms. In the VA study, which was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, 4, 246 patients were eligible for screening. About half of them declined to take the test, even though it was offered at no cost. Of those who took the test, about 55 percent of them were told that they had lung nodules, which often involved   appointments and further scans. But very few of those nodules were actually real problems. In the end, the screeners identified 31 cases of lung cancer, about 20 of which were in the early, most treatable stage. The study involved eight of the 150 or so VA hospitals, and was designed to assess the overall benefits and potential harms of setting up a screening program in a large medical institution. So is it a good idea? ”I think it’s a close call,” Kinsinger says. There was a benefit to the 20 or so patients out of this large initial population who had their cancer detected while it was likely to be treatable. ”But that has to be weighed against the amount of effort on the part of both patients and staff, and the anxiety, the worry, that a false alarm will cause among patients,” she says. ”I think a lot of people have a much rosier view of screening in general than the facts bear out,” says Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of JAMA Internal Medicine and a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. ”Very few people are actually helped by screening, and a lot of time there are a number of harms.” Another study published in the same issue found that many people getting CT screens are actually at low risk for lung cancer. Dr. Jinhai Huo and colleagues at the MD Anderson Cancer Center compared screening rates before and after 2011, the year of a key study that supported the idea of   CT screening for lung cancer. ”Once a [radiology] center has the ability to do this screening, they like to use their technology to do as many people as possible,” Redberg says, ”and it seems that   people who are really unlikely to get any benefit and are much more likely to get harmed are getting screened in higher numbers than in the   people who are supposed to be screened.” Dr. Jorge Gomez, a spokesman for the American Lung Association and an oncologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, says that while screening   people doesn’t make sense on a population basis, it sometimes makes sense for individual patients. And as for the experience at the VA, Gomez says medical teams that have learned to interpret the results of scans can generally weed out   results without resorting to biopsies or other invasive   tests. ”There is a concern for unnecessary procedures at institutions where they don’t have the expertise in reading these scans,” he says. And he acknowledges not everybody has the luxury of going to the     institutions that do this best."
706,"One consequence of Republican gains in the 2016 elections is playing out at the state level where organized labor appears likely to face big setbacks in the coming months. Within days of convening this month, Kentucky lawmakers passed ”  ” legislation that prohibit labor unions from forcing   members to pay fees to the union. It’s the 27th state with such laws. State legislatures in Missouri and New Hampshire are also actively debating similar bills that could become law by February. If all three states succeed in enacting ”  ” bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a ”  ” law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor’s falling clout. Just 10. 7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, down from 20. 1 percent in 1983, when the agency began tracking the data. Over time, the legislation is also likely to further reduce the   clout of Democrats, who rely on union money and volunteers during election years. ’Personal Freedom’ Last fall, Republicans held onto the New Hampshire statehouse and their candidate, Chris Sununu, was elected governor. After that, GOP lawmakers quickly sprang into action. They passed a ”  ” bill in the state Senate this month with just one vote to spare, despite boisterous opposition from union members. The legislation now heads to the House, where Republicans hold a   majority. ”This is the Live Free or Die State. So we are about personal freedom, we are about personal liberty,” said state Sen. Andy Sanborn, a Republican. ”What makes a stronger statement than reaffirming the fact that you are not being compelled to have to pay into a union if you don’t want to pay into it?” In Missouri, enactment of the policy became inevitable after Republican Eric Greitens captured the governorship last year. The political newcomer made signing ”  ” a major priority. ”We miss jobs every year and we miss businesses every year because of not being  ” said state Rep. Holly Rehder, the Republican who sponsored the bill in the Missouri House. It’s an argument echoed in New Hampshire, where business executives have said they plan to give the state another look if it passes ”  .” ”This law would provide a solid foundation for New Hampshire to begin building a reputation as a state that welcomes companies, along with the jobs, economic stability and growth that come with them,” said Tom Sullivan, an executive at firearms maker Sturm, Ruger and Co. during a recent hearing. ’Free riders’ Still, just   of New Hampshire’s approximately 62, 000 union members work in the private sector with the other   belonging to   unions (think teachers, government employees, public safety workers). With 9. 4 percent of the workforce belonging to a labor union, New Hampshire is in the middle of the pack for union membership among U. S. states. Opponents argue the laws create what’s called a ” ” problem where   members reap the benefits of collective bargaining, such as higher wages and better benefits, without paying for it. ”It’s just like you and I going out one night for a couple of beers. I choose the bar, we go out. We both have a couple of drinks,” said Bobby Jones, which AFSCME Local 3657, a government worker union, ”And then when the bill comes out, I pull out my wallet, and you don’t reach for yours.” While Republicans and Democrats spar over the economic impact of the bill on wages and employment levels, its most visible impact may be during election season. Unions spent millions to successfully elect former governor Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, to the U. S. Senate even as they fell short in the gubernatorial race. ”Some people do view it as Republican payback against the role of unions in elections,” said Dean Spiliotes, a political scientist at Southern New Hampshire University. ”If you are reducing the level of funding through cutting their dues, that’s going to have political impacts.” With reporting from Jason Rosenbaum of St. Louis Public Radio."
707,"What becomes of a town when its heyday has passed? What convinces young people to stay when good jobs vanish? Those are questions many towns across America have been trying to answer for years. And they were on my mind when I headed to Independence, Kan. with a dwindling population that’s now below 9, 000. It’s in the southeastern corner of the state, not far from the Oklahoma border. Independence has much to boast about. It’s where Mickey Mantle played his first season of professional baseball, in 1949. It’s the hometown of one of the first monkeys to be sent into space: Miss Able, in 1959. At its peak in the early 20th century, with oil and gas money fueling prosperity in Independence, it was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the U. S. Now, if you’re from Independence, you still wear that name with pride. Just about everyone we talk to tells us it’s a great place to raise children. People are especially proud of their annual Neewollah festival. It’s Halloween spelled backward. Dating back to 1919, it’s held every October and is said to be the oldest and largest festival in the state. They’re proud to be the hometown of playwright and novelist William Inge, who wrote Bus Stop Come Back, Little Sheba and Picnic set in small Midwestern towns much like Independence. Their hometown author is celebrated in the annual William Inge Theatre Festival, which has attracted marquee names like Steven Sondheim and Neil Simon as honorees. Big city folks plunked down in rural Kansas. ”And then they marvel at cows, as you bring them back into town!” says Kym Kays, laughing. I find Kays and her early morning women’s walking group chatting over cups of coffee at Ane Mae’s coffee shop. They tell me that in a town like this, you tread carefully when talking politics. ”We do express our opinions, but then we kind of back away politely,” Sarah Wilson begins. ”We are Kansas polite! We are a Kansas polite community!” adds Kays. ”Good ol’ Midwest,” Sheri Hesse chimes in. ”It’s kind of like,’Yes, I feel this way, but I understand how you feel.’ Because we’re a small town, and we all have to get along,” Wilson concludes. A couple of blocks away (most things in Independence are just a couple of blocks away) we stop in at the storefront office of the weekly Montgomery County Chronicle. It’s a tiny operation. Editor Andy Taylor reports just about all of the stories himself and shoots photos. At 5 a. m. every Thursday, he’s the guy who picks up the papers from the print shop and delivers them. If you get the Chronicle, chances are Taylor has touched your paper. He’s a fifth generation Kansas newspaperman. ”There’s ink in the blood, that’s for sure,” he says. ”And I still love going in the press room at night. Just getting that smell in your nose is wonderful.” To get a sense of what Independence once was and is now, Taylor and his wife, Amy, lead us on a walking tour of the town. The main business street in town, North Pennsylvania Avenue, is lined with   brick buildings dating back to the early 20th century. Some buildings bear the family names that built this town’s prosperity. They’re carved in stone at the top: Pugh, Burns, Reynolds. ”Growing up in this part of the country, this town was full of businesses,” Taylor says. Now, the street is a shadow of what it once was. ”For rent” signs are taped to storefront after storefront. Taylor points out what has disappeared. ”We used to have a J. C. Penney department store over here. That’s now gone,” he says. ”We had a furniture store, Wesco furniture  —   it’s gone. We had RadioShack, it occupied two storefronts  —   it’s gone. A Hallmark store  —   it’s gone. Sporting goods store  —   it’s gone. We had a clothing store, department store  —   it’s gone.” But the biggest body blow came in October of 2015. ”We’re the first town in Kansas in well over 25 years to lose a hospital,” Taylor says. Mercy Hospital was confronting a shrinking patient base. ”There weren’t enough fannies in the hospital beds,” as Taylor puts it. It had a hard time hanging on to doctors. Hospital officials said another key factor in the closure was Kansas’ decision not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Taylor recalls the meeting where he heard the news that Mercy Hospital would be shutting down. ”There were 18 mouths in that meeting, and they all dropped to the floor. ’You’re closing down the hospital?’ ” ”It was a complete shock,” Amy Taylor adds. ”It’s sad. That’s where our daughter was born.” ”Not just that,” Taylor says, ”but it was a great, great company. And ugh, it still kills me.” Right before the hospital closed its doors, the hospital staff asked Andy Taylor to take their picture one last time. ”I literally cried when I looked through my viewfinder,” he says, ”because I knew most of those people. And I knew they were people who would be gone.” The repercussions of the hospital closing are huge. ”What happens at 3 in the morning?” Taylor asks. ”What if you’re a local company or industry and your worker at the midnight shift breaks his fingers or gets them mangled. Or you’re in a car wreck. What do you do? Wow. Your answer is, you better hope your ambulance has a lot of gas in it.” Mercy Hospital  —   as well as the oil pipeline company, Arco, which shut down its headquarters here in the 1990s  —   were major pillars supporting the community. Philanthropy flowed through them. They sponsored events. Pumped money into schools and churches. Walking past the old   Arco building, Taylor says: ”Their payroll was huge in this community. The nicer houses that were built and the banks that loaned the money  —   it was all interrelated. Anything that worked for the good of Independence came from places like this. ”Now, we’ve just relegated ourselves to becoming a satellite town for some other community,” he continues. ”That means migration out. I never thought I’d see the day when Independence, Kan. would see people having to go elsewhere to get their basic services.” Now that many of those   professional positions have vanished, Taylor says, ”We’ve evolved downwardly, I guess. Backwards.” According to Taylor, nothing has come in to replace those jobs. ”Once all that old money dies off and leaves town, that really hurts,” Taylor explains. ”There’s that old theory that when grandma and grandpa die, the funeral is at 2 o’clock, the family is at the bank at 3 o’clock, and they’re out of town with that money at 4 o’clock. And I’ve seen that happen many times.” That’s a problem facing so many rural towns where opportunities are slim: brain drain. The best and brightest leave and don’t look back. For Independence to thrive, I figure it has to find a way to hang on to kids like   Gabe Schenk, age 12. I meet him at the Valley Victors   Club’s annual soup supper: 32 crockpots, all in a row. Gabe promises me that his crockpot holds the best homemade taco soup, and it is indeed delicious. The secret to cooking, Gabe tells me? You have to talk to your food. ”I had a very long philosophical talk to the chili,” he says,  . ”What is the meaning of a chili’s life?” And did the chili answer? ”He’s the strong silent type.” Gabe says his goal is get get straight A’s in school. He’s memorizing the periodic table, and when prompted, eagerly rattles off the elements: gallium, germanium, arsenic, selenium. . .. Gabe tells me his dream is to be a storm chaser or meteorologist. When he was younger, a tornado came through and ripped the roof off his house. He recalls that the sky that morning was a really cool green color. ”And I thought it was kinda like scary, but then amazing at the same time,” he says. ”If I’m going to study the big storms, this is the place to be!”"
708,"Last fall, President Obama, on his final trip to Asia, stopped in Laos for the annual ASEAN summit of Southeast Asian leaders. While there, he pledged millions to help clean up a legacy of U. S. involvement in Laos: unexploded bombs. They were from the 1960s and 1970s  —   bombs the U. S. dropped in during its campaign to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Vietnam was the most visible part of that war. Over half a million U. S. forces fought there at one point over 50, 000 were killed. Cambodia got coverage  —   and protests  —   during the   U. S. bombing campaign there. But Laos, sandwiched between Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, and with a population no greater than Los Angeles, received relatively scant attention. Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, paints a vivid portrait of America’s     war in Laos in his new book, A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA. As the title suggests, the war in Laos got relatively little attention, in part, because it was handed over to a newly formed CIA to run. It started off small, with a few CIA officers training and arming allies from the Hmong hill tribe and ethnic minority to act as a guerilla force. By the end, some 14 years later, the Hmong were fighting pitched battles against the Communist insurgents and their North Vietnamese allies. To help them, the U. S. dropped more bombs in Laos than it had during all of World War II. At the heart of Kurlantzick’s deftly paced book are conflicted CIA operatives and the Hmong  —   led by the charismatic Gen. Vang Pao  —   who did the bulk of the fighting on behalf of the U. S. But what the book does best is examine the CIA’s transformation from an   organization to a   one. As Kurlantzick explained in a phone interview, Laos in the 1960s became ”a great place for the CIA to have a war. Not necessarily a good place for anyone else involved. Because what ultimately transpired was that in Laos, the CIA went from a spying organization,   agency, to one capable of managing and conducting and overseeing a quite substantial conflict. In other words, an organization with war capacities.” What was the CIA like before it took on the war in Laos?  The CIA had only been around for about 15 years, and even though it had done some things that had received significant notice, it was still a very small organization. The war in Laos was an enormous boon for the CIA in that it raised its bureaucratic profile and boosted its budget. It remains the largest covert operation in U. S. history. So by the time the war was over, the CIA had established itself as a really significant player in the Washington establishment. Why did that establishment decide to hand over the war in Laos to the CIA? It was in a climate in which the U. S. public was sort of tired of   war. After the Korean War, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations embraced covert war as a major part of U. S. foreign policy. They both very much saw covert war as a means to advance aims without having to pay the price in public opinion. And soon that war morphed, didn’t it?  At the beginning, there were some good ideas by the Americans  —   they wanted to make it a relatively small operation, almost a guerilla operation to kind of fight for Laos’ sovereignty. As the war went on, the desire of the Laotians  —   mostly ethnic Hmong who did the fighting  —   and the U. S. diverged. The U. S. aim as the war went on basically became: use Laos as a charnel house, where most of the reason for the fight was to occupy North Vietnamese Army and to kill as many North Vietnamese as possible  —   the theory being that then, they could not be involved in the fight in Vietnam. The conflict in Laos ended in defeat in 1975. The Communists won. They remain in power decades later. How was this viewed inside the CIA? I think the war was  —   and continues to be  —   viewed as a success in that they held off, as much as was possible, Laotian Communist and North Vietnamese advances for a significant period of time. It also allowed the CIA to develop paramilitary capabilities. And the war gave the CIA a much more significant place at the U. S. foreign   table. So the CIA ended up with a bigger role. In the post   world, that role has expanded even further  —   for example, with its drone program. Is there a difference between when the military handles a campaign and when the CIA does? Overall, the use of the uniformed military, for all of their significant flaws, can allow for greater oversight by Congress and the public, for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike special forces or the CIA, they are not required to take pledges of silence on their activities. So their activities are more clearly documented. Also there’s usually a clearer chain of command in the military and a more clear code of ethics. Finally, the military is usually more accountable in its budgeting and its oversight to Congress. Is there an upside to having a militarized CIA? Let me begin by saying that I think the current administration  —   despite their fights over intelligence and analysis  —   appears to be very much in favor of expanding paramilitaries, both from the CIA and the special forces. The upside for the executive branch is that they are using forces that they don’t need to tell Congress and the American people about. They are not using conventional war, so less Americans would be. .. . ..in harm’s way? Yes. But there’s a downside to that. The less you put your own people in harm’s way, the more you’re able to make decisions that can be revolutionary because you don’t have skin in the game. This interview has been edited and condensed. Nishant Dahiya is NPR’s Asia editor. Follow him on Twitter @nprnishant."
709,"The leader of the Philippine National Police said Monday that the agency’s   units would be shut down and the deadly crackdown on people who use and sell drugs would be suspended. Instead, the crackdown will temporarily shift to inside the police force itself. ”We will cleanse our ranks . .. then maybe after that, we can resume our war on drugs,” police Chief Ronald Dela Rosa said, according to the BBC. Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office last summer, more than 7, 000 suspected drug users and dealers have died in extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. Earlier this month, investigators revealed that a Korean businessman had been kidnapped by   officers and strangled to death at the national police headquarters, The Philippine Star newspaper reports. The officers ”later extorted ransom money from his family under the pretense that he was alive,” according to The New York Times. The businessman’s killing prompted protests in Manila. Phelim Kine of Human Rights Watch wrote that it was an ”ominous indicator of the breakdown of rule of law” under Duterte, and that ”Philippine police have good reason to believe that they can literally get away with murder.” Dela Rosa announced that a   force would be created to catch, and potentially kill, corrupt officers, the Los Angeles Times reports. ”You policemen involved in syndicates, let’s see what happens now. Fight back so you’ll end up dead,” Dela Rosa said. ”You will be killed by this   task force.” ”We have to focus our effort toward internal cleansing and by the time we have cleansed the national police, the president will determine that and he will instruct us to go back to our war on drugs,” the newspaper quoted Dela Rosa as saying. Duterte campaigned on the promise of death to drug dealers, saying he would dump their bodies into Manila Bay and allegedly encouraging citizens to shoot drug dealers. ”Forget the laws on human rights,” he told supporters in a speech before election day. Once he was sworn in, promises hardened into policy. ”Do your duty, and in the process, you kill 1, 000 persons, I will protect you,” Duterte told police on July 1, the day after he was sworn in, Michael Sullivan reported for NPR. In September, an admitted former assassin testified that Duterte had ”personally ordering extrajudicial killings  —   and, in one case, pulling the trigger,” while he was mayor of Davao City, as The   has reported. The United Nations has condemned Duterte’s ”apparent endorsement of extrajudicial killing, which is illegal and a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms.” The Obama administration largely steered clear of the issue, even after Duterte preemptively, and profanely, scolded   Obama for even considering bringing up the issue in an upcoming meeting. That meeting was subsequently canceled. As we have reported, Duterte said he hopes to get along with President Trump, and has appointed real estate magnate Jose E. B. Antonio as a special trade envoy to the U. S. It’s worth noting that Antonio is the man building Trump Tower Manila."
710,"Four years after Medicare officials agreed in a landmark court settlement that seniors can’t be denied coverage for physical therapy and other skilled care simply because their condition isn’t improving, patients are still being turned away. As a result, federal officials and Medicare advocates have renewed their federal court battle, acknowledging that they cannot agree on a way to fix the problem. Earlier this month, each submitted ideas to the judge, who will decide  —   possibly within the next few months  —   what measures should be taken. Several organizations report that the government’s initial education campaign following the settlement has failed. Many seniors have only been able to get coverage once their condition worsened. But once it improved, treatment would stop  —   until the people got worse and were eligible again for coverage. Every year thousands of Medicare patients receive physical therapy and other treatment to recover from a fall or medical procedure, as well as to help cope with disabilities or chronic conditions including multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases, stroke and spinal cord or brain injuries. Although the settlement removes the necessity to show an improving health condition, it doesn’t affect other criteria and limitations on Medicare coverage. ”We still regularly get calls from people who are told they are being denied coverage,” said Peter Schmidt at the National Parkinson Foundation, based in Miami. Denials sometimes occur because physical therapy providers use a billing code that still requires the patient to show improvement. Although Parkinson’s is a degenerative brain disease, Schmidt said physical therapy and exercise can help slow its progress.  The agreement, approved in 2013, settled a   lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare  Medicaid Services filed by Center for Medicare Advocacy and Vermont Legal Aid on behalf of five Medicare beneficiaries, including Glenda Jimmo, and six nationwide patient organizations. Coverage doesn’t depend on the ”potential for improvement from the therapy but rather on the beneficiary’s need for skilled care,” the Jimmo settlement said. In August, U. S. District Court Chief Judge Christina Reiss in Vermont ordered the government to work with the beneficiaries’ attorneys to strengthen its education campaign about the policy aimed at companies that process bill, claims reviewers, providers, appeals judges, people who staff the   help line and others. (Beneficiaries, however, weren’t included.) After working during the fall, both sides acknowledged this month they could not reach a compromise on the best path for getting the message out. ”There was a   kind of mythical policy that Medicare contractors put into place that said Medicare only pays for services if the patient could progress,” said Roshunda   director of regulatory affairs for the American Physical Therapy Association. ”It takes extensive effort to erase that.” Medicare’s proposals include such educational efforts and a special webpage with ”frequently asked questions” spelling out the proper procedures for handling claims. The government would also issue a clear statement confirming that Medicare covers physical, speech and occupational therapy along with skilled care at home, and in other settings, even if the patient has ”reached a plateau”  —   a term seniors still hear  —   and isn’t improving. Attorneys for the seniors want to monitor how Medicare officials implement these new measures and have offered to write the policy statement disavowing what’s known as the ”improvement standard.” They also want the government to repeat its 2013 conference call with providers, contractors and others involved in the process in order to correct mistakes, according to papers filed with the court Jan. 13. ”The major problem for us is that they do not want the plaintiff’s counsel to have any say or involvement in what they do,” said Gill DeFord, litigation director at the Center for Medicare Advocacy in Connecticut. ”We think that’s exactly the reason the educational campaign was so riddled with inaccuracies in the first place.”  But in its filing, the government said, ”The Plaintiffs’ plan seeks to address perceived deficiencies that were specifically not guaranteed under the [settlement] Agreement.” It added accepting the advocates’ plan ”would also grant their counsel undue control in developing CMS educational materials and an outsize role in CMS’s corrective action efforts.” A Medicare spokesman declined to comment under agency protocol because the case is still pending. The settlement affects care provided by a trained professional in a patient’s home, nursing home or the provider’s private office that is medically necessary to maintain the patient’s condition and prevent deterioration. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can follow Susan Jaffe on Twitter: @susanjaffe."
711,"More than 1. 3 million people have signed an official U. K. petition to prevent President Trump from making a state visit to the U. K.  —   and the number continues to grow. ”Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his capacity as head of US Government,” the petition states, ”but he should not be invited to make an official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen.” The U. K. Parliament will consider this petition for a debate, because it has surpassed the threshold of 100, 000 signatures. British Prime Minster Theresa May, while she was in Washington, D. C. last week, actually already extended an invitation to Trump on the queen’s behalf, and he has accepted. Today, according to the BBC, 10 Downing St. reiterated that the visit is still on: ”The USA is one of this country’s closest allies, and we look forward to hosting the president later this year.” It added that the visit is ”substantially in the national interest,” according to The Guardian. The petition gained steam after Trump issued an executive order Friday that freezes admission into the U. S. for all refugees and temporarily blocks entry to citizens and dual nationals from seven   countries. From London, NPR’s Frank Langfitt said Trump’s travel ban has proved embarrassing to May. Here’s more: ”On Friday, she became the first foreign leader to meet the new president at the White House. After news of the travel ban broke, though, May was slow to respond. Leading critics to say she’s been too eager to cozy up to Trump. A protest against the travel ban is planned today outside Downing Street.” Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Trump ”should not be welcomed to Britain while he abuses our shared values with his shameful Muslim ban and attacks on refugees’ and women’s rights.” He added that May would be ”failing the British people if she does not postpone the state visit.” The petition’s authors explained their rationale like this: ”Donald Trump’s well documented misogyny and vulgarity disqualifies him from being received by Her Majesty the Queen or the Prince of Wales.” Last year, Parliament held a similar debate in response to a petition calling for Trump to be banned from the U. K. after he proposed ”a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” while on the campaign trail, as the Guardian reported. ”MPs described him as a ’fool’ a ’buffoon’ and a ’wazzock’ in the lengthy parliamentary debate in January last year”  —   but decided not to block him."
712,"Barack Obama spent much of his tenure scaling back the   ”war on terror” he inherited from George W. Bush. In a few short days, President Trump has again set the U. S. on a more visible and confrontational course in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Trump has temporarily frozen immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries, igniting protests outside the White House and at airports around the country. He’s ordered a comprehensive new plan be placed on his desk, within 30 days, on how to swiftly defeat the Islamic State. And Sunday, the U. S. military carried out a rare ground mission inside Yemen, where an estimated 14   members were killed, according to the Pentagon  —   though other reports also cited civilian deaths. One Navy SEAL was killed and three were injured, the first military casualties during Trump’s administration. White House officials are eager to tout what they describe as a more aggressive approach. Trump has ”hit the ground running, had a flurry of activity, to do exactly what he said he was going to do,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told ABC News’ This Week. ”We’re going to protect our country and our people.” Obama oversaw a nation at war every day of his   presidency  —   something that had never happened before. However, he tried to deploy a small U. S. military footprint, and the limited air campaigns in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere emphasized restraint and patience. While Trump’s policies are still taking shape, he is stressing his counterterrorism efforts even as they invite criticism. His aides say the moves are necessary because Obama wasn’t doing enough. Trump’s critics, including some Republicans, say he may be overreacting and warn about the damage to America’s image. Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump’s immigration freeze ”may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.” A new plan for ISIS, Trump said during the presidential campaign that he had a secret plan to defeat ISIS and that he would ask the Pentagon for a new one. In a presidential memo Saturday evening, Trump took the second route. ”The United States must take decisive action to defeat ISIS,” he wrote. He called for a new, comprehensive plan that would be presented to him by Defense Secretary James Mattis within a month. It’s not clear whether this will lead to additional U. S. forces on the ground. About 6, 000 Americans are assisting local fighters in Iraq and Syria. The Americans are advisers, trainers, special operators and part of the air operation, but are not   fighters. Deployments of U. S. ground troops would accelerate the campaign against ISIS. But Obama rejected this approach after the large ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade. The Americans currently in Iraq and Syria have sought to work ”with, by and through” local forces rather than take the lead themselves. Trump’s memo also asked for recommended changes to the rules of engagement ”that exceed the requirements of international law regarding the use of force against ISIS.” Translation: the U. S. has often called off planned airstrikes due to the possibility of civilian casualties. Trump’s memo points to the possibility of fewer restrictions and a more aggressive bombing campaign against ISIS fighters who often try to shield themselves in civilian areas. Clearing the way for such military action in Syria and Iraq could yield more battlefield victories and speed the advance of allied forces fighting ISIS. But it could also put more American troops in danger and increase the risk to civilians. A raid in Yemen  The raid by the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 in central Yemen was a rare instance where U. S. forces were inserted for a ground operation in the nation ravaged by civil war. The U. S. has mostly conducted drone strikes and assisted Saudi Arabia with its much larger bombing campaign. The operation targeted a compound in Bayda Province belonging to   in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, considered  ’s most dangerous affiliate. The action did not go smoothly. An   Osprey aircraft carrying the special operations forces had a hard landing and was then intentionally destroyed by the Americans to keep it out of hostile hands. The White House and the military described it as a success and cited intelligence collected about possible future attacks. NPR’s Alice Fordham cited Yemeni officials and citizens saying civilians were among those killed in the raid. They say the dead included the    daughter of Anwar   the fiery American cleric and   supporter killed in Yemen in a 2011 U. S. drone strike. ”The U. S. A. is committing crimes, you know, especially under this new administration,” Dr. Nasser   the father of Anwar and grandfather of the girl, told NPR. The American forces ”attacked a village at midnight with women and children sleeping,” he said. ”These actions really make things difficult in the world.” The U. S. military said they take such allegations seriously, but had not opened an investigation at this stage. Immigration freeze, In Washington, Spicer linked the Yemen operation and the immigration freeze, describing them as part of the combined efforts addressing the security threat. ”That’s why this [immigration] order is so important,” he told ABC. If troops ”are going to go out there and put their lives on the line, [the government must] do our part, to make sure we’re not going to have an open door, to allow people to march right into our country.” But critics took a different view on the possible consequences. ”There is a propaganda gift in the executive order for those who would do damage to the United States. ISIS wants nothing more than to be able to say to Muslims around the world that American doesn’t want them,” David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, told NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. ”I’m afraid this executive order plays into their hands.” Miliband said the U. S. has been highly successful in preventing extremists from entering the country, and the latest step wasn’t necessary. ”We argue that the executive order is founded on a myth  —   which is that there’s no security vetting. There is security vetting. It’s an average of 12 to 18 months,” Miliband said. ”It’s an American success story.” Greg Myre is a national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1."
713,"It’s been a busy week for President Trump’s pen. Since taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, Trump has signed more than a dozen executive orders and memorandums in an effort to   his policy agenda and begin to deliver on some of the promises he made during the campaign. But why is the president’s directive to build a wall considered an ”executive order,” whereas greenlighting the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines are ”memorandums”? And how is all of that different from issuing an ”executive action”? The authority to issue executive orders and memorandums doesn’t appear in the Constitution, and that’s partly why the definitions are a little hazy, according to the Congressional Research Service. Nevertheless, the authority to issue both is considered an inherent aspect of presidential power. An order is a call for the executive branch to take a specific action or to change an existing practice, explains Phillip J. Cooper, a professor of public administration in the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. If the president has the authority to issue that directive, whether from the Constitution or statute, then it becomes legally binding. However, Cooper says, ”if there’s a clear piece of legislation that says, ’No you can’t do this,’ a president can’t pick up a pen and get around it.” In essence, a president can’t sign an executive order that violates existing law. Once a president signs an executive order, it’s sent to the Federal Register for an identifying number, and then published. That’s a key step that isn’t legally required with executive memorandums. ”There are no legal processes required for issuing a memorandum,” Cooper says. ”A president doesn’t have to do anything, doesn’t even have to publish it if he or she doesn’t want to. With an executive order, presidents must publish.” The Obama administration started publishing public memorandums on the White House website, and the Trump administration has followed suit. But, Cooper says, that is something they choose to do, and what’s available on the website now may not include all of the new administration’s memorandums. Executive orders and memorandums are often conflated. ”In the last few administrations, particularly since the Clinton years, presidents started using the two interchangeably,” says Cooper. In a January 2000 memo to   Bill Clinton, the Justice Department wrote, ”It is our opinion that there is no substantive difference in the legal effectiveness of an executive order and a presidential directive that is not styled as an executive order.” While presidents have treated executive memorandums as just as binding as executive orders, Cooper says, ”there really is not a clear body of case law or statutes on that.” As for ”executive actions,” Cooper says the phrase is very generic. He explains that executive actions are ”merely a category” of different policy tools that presidents often use  —   including executive orders and memorandums  —   that has no separate legal meaning itself. Regardless of the word appearing after ”executive,” if his first week in office is any indication, it seems President Trump’s pen won’t be getting a rest any time soon."
714,"President Trump signed another executive order Monday morning, fulfilling another campaign pledge, this one to eliminate two federal regulations for every new regulation enacted. Trump signed the order during an Oval Office photo op, saying, ”We’re cutting regulations massively for small business and large business,” adding, ”This will be the biggest such act our country has ever seen.” The order stipulates: ”Unless prohibited by law, whenever an executive department or agency (agency) publicly proposes for notice and comment or otherwise promulgates a new regulation, it shall identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed.” Trump said earlier Monday that he wants to eliminate ”a little more than 75 percent” of the regulations now on the books. ”We don’t need 97 different rules to take care of one element,” he said. The directive exempts regulations relating to the military, national security and foreign affairs. Business groups applauded Trump’s order. The National Federation of Independent Business calls it ”a good first step on the long road toward eliminating    regulations.” Environmental groups however were dismayed. Center for Biological Diversity director Kieran Suckling called the new policy ”as dumb as it gets.” In a statement, Suckling said, ”So you’ll protect my drinking water but only in exchange for allowing oil drilling in national parks and more lead in my paint?” Rolling back regulations has long been a goal of Republican and Democratic administrations, but it’s not easy, as we’ve reported. There are some 80, 000 pages in the Federal Register, where all federal rules are published. But in order to repeal a regulation, a federal agency has to go through the same notice and comment rule making process used to formulate new regulations. And that generally takes at least a year. There is a workaround for newly enacted regulations, the Congressional Review Act. It gives lawmakers the opportunity to repeal regulations approved in the last 60 days of the congressional session. But that, too, is a   process, and given the Senate’s need to act on Trump’s nominations, it’s likely that only a relatively few regulations will be repealed in this manner. One is likely to come up this week. House leaders say they will attempt to repeal the stream protection rule, an Obama administration regulation that forbids coal companies from dumping rocks and other debris created by mountain top removal mining into nearby streams. Republicans and the coal industry say the regulation threatens jobs. The Natural Resources Defense Council says   removal mining, in which ground is blasted to access coal seams below, has been responsible for the destruction of 2, 000 miles of streams in Appalachia."
715,"This is a guest post from WNYC’s Note to Self podcast, which explores the effects of technology on our lives. Its   Privacy Paradox Project starts on Feb. 6 and you can sign up below or on the WNYC website. You know how you should behave online. You should have strong passwords. You should think carefully before you post. And you should read the privacy policy before you click ”Agree.” But reading the privacy policy of every website you visit would take you about 25 days a year, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers. No wonder we don’t bother. And yet, in a Pew Research poll, almost   of Americans said the right to control who can access what information about them is ”very important.” If we care so much about protecting our personal information and feel uncomfortable about giving it away, why do we keep doing it? Researchers call this conundrum the ”privacy paradox.” And we at Note to Self are hoping to help you solve it. We’re launching a   experiment at privacyparadox. org, with challenges and   to help you gain control over your digital information, and set some boundaries about how you want to live online. On the site, you can learn more about the project, including a quiz to find your privacy personality. Or, you can just sign up right here to join  —   for five days, you’ll get a newsletter with action steps, tips and the podcast. When we surveyed 2, 000 of our listeners, people said their biggest concern was the safety of their bank account details and Social Security numbers. But they also told stories of more personal privacy lost. One man’s   hacked his social media accounts and delivered what she claimed was evidence of adultery to his commanding officer. Another woman was haunted by fertility ads online after researching her upcoming ovarian surgery. Even listeners with no specific tale to tell said they feel unsettled knowing their every click and ”like” is tracked, quantified  —   and sold. Tech companies make money off of our online behavior  —   what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as our ”digital exhaust.” Zuboff, author of the upcoming Master or Slave?: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, calls this economic model ”surveillance capitalism,” and she says Google was one of its pioneers. ”The fastest way to make money,” she says, ”was to take our data, to translate it into predictions about us, and to sell it to somebody else.” This tracking is getting more and more sophisticated. Advertisers have moved way past cookies. Now, companies are using digital ”fingerprinting,” using your computer’s address, your browser, and dozens of other data points to pinpoint who you are. Other companies analyze the punctuation, words and tone you use in emails to profile your personality. Facebook breaks its users down into more than 50, 000 different categories, such as ”ethnic affinity” or ”pretending to text in awkward situations,” so advertisers can pinpoint their marketing. There are upsides to all this data collection, for individuals, and maybe for us all. You might get the perfect coupon, right when you need it. You may never run out of detergent, because your Amazon Echo knows when you’re low. Researchers are using big data to tackle climate change, cancer and more. So, we’re not telling you to go incognito. This is not about tinfoil hats and tossing your phone. We love the Internet and all its shiny things. But that doesn’t mean we can’t set some limits. In the   interactive project, we’ll help you understand where your personal information goes online, weigh the   and then make more thoughtful digital decisions. Tackling digital privacy can feel overwhelming. So let’s do it together."
716,"Mika Peck, a conservation ecologist at England’s University of Sussex, was frustrated. He’d been researching and publishing papers for years on the   of the Ecuadoran   spider monkey, and not much was happening to change the primate’s extremely threatened status. Not much, that is, until he started connecting the monkeys to gourmet chocolate. Both monkeys and cacao flourish in the Chocóan rain forests of northwestern Ecuador (el Chocó)  part of a rain forest network that runs along the Pacific Coast, from Panama to Peru. El Chocó is home to about   of the   spider monkey population, but that population is dwindling. The environmental group Rainforest Trust estimates that there are only about 250   spider monkeys left on the planet, making them among the most endangered primates ever recorded. That’s because locals in this remote region, trying to earn a living over the past few decades, cut down the trees for lumber that the spider monkeys relied on for shelter and food. And subsistence farmers routinely cut wide swaths through the forest to plant cacao. The monkeys, who live most of their lives in the high canopy of the rain forest, became more vulnerable to predators, including humans, who hunt these   for their meat. Most of the people living in and around the Washu region of el Chocó subsist on cacao farming. ”Their main product is chocolate,” Peck says. ”You can’t believe how hard they work and how much they get for it. That’s the biggest reason they clear the rain forest.” What they got for it, at least back in 2005, when Peck and his colleagues launched a primate research network in the region, was actually very little. Although the cacao they grew was the   arriba variety, a unique   bean grown only in Ecuador, it was mixed with cacao of poorer quality and eventually turned into what we might politely call industrial chocolate. (We’re talking the stuff of cheap Halloween and Easter candy.) Peck realized he needed to convince the farmers to stop cutting down the trees to save what was left of the spider monkeys. ”The deal was, ’Don’t chop down the forest and we’ll give you a better price and ecologically minded buyers for your chocolate,’” Peck recalls. After some serious   research, Peck found Samuel von Rutte, a Swiss native who moved to Ecuador decades ago to become a cacao farmer. Von Rutte runs a cacao farm in Quevedo, in central Ecuador, and is renowned for his expertise in drying and fermenting cacao. After evaluating the Washu chocolate, he realized it could be developed into   product. And if better farming practices were adopted, the chocolate could be marketed to more environmentally minded buyers. Von Rutte led training sessions for the family cacao farmers in the Washu region and bought some of the first beans, Peck says. As Von Rutte was helping cacao farmers get better prices for their beans, Peck and his colleagues were working to increase interest in conservation, training local parabiologists (field researchers without advanced degrees trained to collect data) and running education programs. For both farmers and monkeys, it’s starting to pay off. A small group of farmers working with Peck’s Proyecto Washu conservation team produced about five tons of cacao last year, says Peck’s colleague, Nathaly Sylvana Urbina Bermudez, a native of Colombia. The farmers used to get about $1 per kilo, but now they are guaranteed $3. 50 per kilo for the next three years, thanks to a deal between the conservation group and the French   chocolatier Bouga CacaO. Bouga takes the   chocolate and turns it into fine chocolate products. NPR was able to get some of the 75 percent organic chocolate negro (dark organic chocolate) produced by Peck’s conservation group. It sells for about $3 a bar and its packaging features an artist’s rendering of the   spider monkey. The chocolate has a clean, mildly floral bite, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. A couple of squares would make a good   treat. It’s not yet easy to buy, but the team is working on that, Peck says. Meanwhile, the change in the Washu region is real. Whereas the farmers used to talk only of the poor price they received, they now swap success stories. ”They’re kind of becoming experts in cacao. They have conversations about their quality. . .. They used to do it just to live,” says Urbina, who has lived and worked in the region for the past two years. ”Now they can teach and they are experimenting,” she adds. And the monkeys? Peck and his colleagues established a conservation lab in an area called the Tesoro Escondido Spider Monkey Reserve. As of this past June, the reserve had purchased 1, 100 hectares of forest to preserve. Thanks to data from animal cams they have set up around the area and drones monitoring the farms, the scientists are optimistic about the monkeys’ future. ”The chocolate is high quality,” Peck says. ”And its sale would support the conservation work of the Washu Project, once they have established a more solid commercial link for sales.” The team may even venture into emerging markets for its chocolate. ”There is not a   component as yet, but that is something we would like to trial,” says Peck.   cacao is a radically different operation. It can yield less cacao than from open fields, so it can be a tough sell to farmers. But it is more resilient to drastic weather conditions  —   the shade retains moisture and reduces weeds. And it leaves more trees standing for monkeys, birds and other animals, according to a 2012 study in Conservation Letters, a journal of the Society for Conservation Biology. Perhaps most important to farmers,   cacao may also fetch a higher price. There are other benefits to raising awareness about the connection between human and monkey habitats. As the rain forest sustains the primates, the primates also sustain the forest, Peck says. Spider monkeys in particular are important   in lowland forests like the Chocó. A study published this summer in the International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation looked at two different rain forest areas and found evidence suggesting that an area with more primates has richer and denser saplings. ”Maintaining intact wildlife populations, with special emphasis on primates due to their vulnerability and   movements, appears to be necessary to maintain plant diversity in these forests,” the study says. Saving the monkeys, preserving the rain forest, and securing a good price for     chocolate? That seems like a recipe for a sweet victory."
717,"Utopian communities don’t fare much better in fiction than they do in real life. As the plot usually unfolds, a brave new world loses its luster fast when the failings of its founder are exposed, or when the community itself begins to morph into a cult. Think of Lauren Groff’s Arcadia or Carolyn Parkhurst’s Harmony, two recent novels that have imagined alternative communities and their inevitable  . How could it be otherwise in fiction? As the Talking Heads told us, ”Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” A novel about heaven, about a successful utopia without sin or tension, would be pretty dull, indeed. Fortunately for us readers, the experimental ideal community that Kevin Wilson brings to life in his second novel, Perfect Little World, has the delicious makings of a mess from its very inception. Wilson broke out with his 2011 debut novel, The Family Fang, about two married,   artists who deploy their children as props in their performance pieces. That novel was ingenious  —   a whirlwind of screwball comedy, art and sad realizations about the limitations of family. Wilson is still thinking hard about the idea of family in Perfect Little World. This is in some ways a calmer, less quirky novel, but what Perfect Little World loses in eccentricity, it gains in emotional depth. Wilson’s story focuses on Isabel ”Izzy” Poole, a smart,   high school senior in Tennessee who falls in love with her depressed art teacher and becomes pregnant. Izzy’s mom is dead, her alcoholic dad is just barely scraping by, and her   is too entangled with his own demons to be of any use. Izzy, who’s a quietly compelling character, has decided to keep her baby. She comes to the attention of something called The Infinite Family Project. Cooked up by a child psychologist named Dr. Grind and funded by a billionaire who cherishes happy memories of being raised in a caring orphanage, the project aims to place 10 infants and their parents in a     commune for 10 years. The children will be raised by all the adults, and for a long stretch, they won’t know who their biological parents are. The aim is to see if both adults and children are happier and healthier when the pressures of child rearing are widely distributed. Young as she is, Izzy knows this mega blended family is probably doomed, but single motherhood isn’t looking like a walk in the park either. Here’s her rationale for taking a chance on the project: [Izzy] thought, for the millionth time, of her future as it lay before her without the aid of this project, working two jobs to make ends meet, her son in the cheapest day care she could find, so tired at the end of the day that her baby felt like an unbreakable curse, failing each and every day until the bottom fell out of the world. Wilson richly imagines the mundane details of life in the futuristic compound, as well as the bumpy personalities of the other parents, all of whom, except Izzy, are coupled. A year in, a research assistant to Dr. Grind declares: ”The kids are going to be great the parents are the unstable element.” That’s partly because the adults have trouble figuring out what they are to one another: ”Brothers and sisters?” ”Second cousins?” One night, as Izzy and some of the other parents are sitting around drinking whiskey smashes, another mom suggests that they’re all ”like the cast of Gilligan’s Island.” One of the fathers points out: ”There was a lot of sexual tension on that show.” Uh huh. The snake has been let into this   Eden, which is soon rocked by illicit   the likes of which Ginger, the Professor and Mary Ann dared not even dream of. Wilson is such an inventive and witty writer, that it was only after I’d finished Perfect Little World and was no longer caught up in the story, that I realized how many ideas he raises here, how many kinds of family arrangements he scrutinizes, among them biological, chosen, nuclear, communal, broken and bandaged. The utopian Infinite Family Project may be flawed from the   but Wilson’s ”perfect little world” of a novel pretty much lives up to its title."
718,"Cancer researchers are testing whether a generic drug that has been used for more than 40 years to treat parasitic infections may also help fight cancer. The tests of mebendazole are part of a growing effort to take a fresh look at old medicines to see if they can be repurposed for new uses. I first learned about mebendazole several years back when my son came home from camp with a gross but common infection: pinworms. My pediatrician prescribed two doses of mebendazole, and two weeks later the infection was gone.   a couple of years, and I was surprised to find on clinicaltrials. gov, the federal database of medical trials, that mebendazole was being investigated as a potential cancer drug. Curious, I contacted Gregory Riggins, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University who is testing the safety of mebendazole as a potential cancer treatment. He invited me to his lab in Baltimore. Riggins took me inside and showed me cages of cancer research mice. A few years back, he said, his idea to test mebendazole started here. Some of the lab animals got infected with pinworms, the same parasite my son had. The veterinarian at Johns Hopkins treated the whole colony of mice with an animal version of mebendazole. The drug staved off the parasite, but it also did something surprising. Before the mice were treated for pinworms, Riggins and his team had implanted cancer cells into the animals’ brains. But after the mice got the pinworm drug, the cancers never developed. ”Our medulloblastoma stopped growing,” Riggins says. He found out that other researchers were conducting animal studies to see if the drug had effects on lung cancer and melanoma. So he got funding to do two Phase 1 studies to test whether mebendazole is safe to use in brain cancer patients, one in children and another in adults. So far the drug appears to be safe and well tolerated by patients, Riggins says. That would be expected, given that it has been used for decades around the world to treat pinworms. ”Based on the preclinical studies it looks like it has promise,” says Tracy Batchelor, director of the division of   at Massachusetts General Hospital, who is not involved in the research. ”The next step is to look for a benefit in a Phase 2 trial.” That would test whether mebendazole has any effect on cancer in people. Riggins hopes to conduct that sort of trial in adult brain cancer patients. At a time when it can cost a billion dollars to develop a new drug, the idea of repurposing existing drugs is appealing, according to Bruce Bloom. He’s the president and chief science officer of Cures Within Reach, which has helped to fund Riggins’ research. Bloom points to research on metformin, a diabetes drug that’s being looked at as a potential treatment for a dozen different kinds of cancer and also tuberculosis. A common blood pressure drug, propranolol, is also being studied. ”It’s not likely that mebendazole or any other single repurposed drug is ever going to cure cancer,” Bloom says. But he envisions the possibility that combinations of repurposed drugs might help the body to manage cancer. Any use of mebendazole as a cancer drug would be years away, if it proves to work at all. Most drugs that emerge from Phase 1 trials never deliver the   benefits. And in an odd twist to a complicated story, the cost of mebendazole in the U. S. has skyrocketed in recent years. Though it remains very affordable in most countries, the wholesale cost of a 100 mg tablet in the U. S. has risen from $4. 50 in 2011 to $369 in 2016, according to Truven Health Analytics. The dynamics that led to the price hike were in play before interest rose in the drug as a potential cancer treatment, analysts say. In 2013, Amedra Pharmaceuticals bought marketing rights to mebendazole from Teva Pharmaceuticals. It already owned rights to another key generic antiparasitic drug, albendazole. ”At that point, anyone who has had a high school or undergraduate economics course would be able to explain the price hike,” says Joey Mattingly, an assistant professor in the department of pharmacy practice and science at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy who studies generic drug pricing. That leaves people with pinworm infections with the choice of two expensive prescription medications or cheaper    options. ”Pinworms are exceedingly common,” says Rachel Orscheln, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Washington University and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The CDC estimates 40 million people are infected in the U. S. annually. Orscheln says the people most likely to be infected are children and people who are living in group settings such as nursing homes. ”There are certain cases where we do need to prescribe this medication,” says Orscheln. But at the higher price, she says, ”I’m very disinclined to prescribe [it].” She says    drugs such as   or pyrantel, can work just as well in children, so ”I’m very likely to steer people in that direction.”"
719,"When Christopher Gallant was featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, the testimonial came from none other than Elton John, who said, ”When I hear his voice, I just lose it.” The two even performed Gallant’s song ”Weight In Gold” together back in September. Gallant performed a   version of that hit when he came to the Tiny Desk earlier this month, and preceded it with another of his   songs, ”Skipping Stones.” Written with Jhené Aiko, that tune radiates sultry intensity and passion here, the talented Dani Ivory (who’s performed as a touring member of Imagine Dragons) sits in for Aiko. Ology, Gallant’s 2016 debut, is up for a Grammy next month  —   for Best Urban Contemporary Album  —   and another of its   highlights opens this   set. On the record, ”Bourbon” is produced with a funky,     drum track, but here, a steady drum beat grounds the hypnotic song just as well, if not better. Best of all, ”Bourbon” gets a welcome bonus at the Tiny Desk: a guest rap by Saba, a charismatic rising star and frequent Chance The Rapper collaborator. Ology is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) ”Bourbon” (feat. Saba) ”Skipping Stones” (feat. Dani Ivory) ”Weight In Gold” Gallant (vocals) Wes Switzer (bass) Dani Ivory (keys, vocals) Dylan Jones (guitar) A. J. Novak (percussion) featuring guest rapper Saba in ”Bourbon.” Producers: Suraya Mohamed, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Colin Marshall, Kara Frame Production Assistant: A Noah Harrison Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
720,"In a post published last week, Adam Frank argued for the importance of public facts, and of science as a method for ascertaining them. He emphasized the role of agreement in establishing public facts, and verifiable evidence as the crucial ingredient that makes agreement possible. Today, I want to consider two additional aspects of science as a method for ascertaining public facts  —   that is, the facts that we should all accept together. The first is that scientific conclusions can change. And the second is that scientific methods can change. Far from undercutting the value of public facts, understanding how and why these changes occur reveals why science is our best bet for getting the facts right. First, the body of scientific knowledge is continually evolving. Scientists don’t simply add more facts to our scientific repository they question new evidence as it comes in, and they repeatedly reexamine prior conclusions. That means that the body of scientific knowledge isn’t just growing, it’s also changing. At first glance, this change can be unsettling. How can we trust science, if scientific conclusions are continually subject to change? The key is that scientific conclusions don’t change on a whim. They change in response to new evidence, new analyses and new arguments  —   the sorts of things we can publicly agree (or disagree) about, that we can evaluate together. And scientific conclusions are almost always based on induction, not deduction. That is, science involves drawing inferences from premises to conclusion, where the premises can affect the probability of the conclusions but don’t establish them with certainty. When you put these pieces together, the alternative to an evolving body of scientific knowledge is a  . To embrace a static body of scientific knowledge is to reject the potential relevance of new information. It’s a commitment to the idea that a conclusion based on all the evidence available is no better than a conclusion based on the subset of evidence we happened to obtain first. If a changing body of scientific knowledge is unsettling, this alternative is untenable. A second feature of science is that scientific methods are continually evolving. Many of us learned ”the” scientific method in grade school, a    procedure for doing science. But this   approach to science is oversimplified and misleading. Scientists employ a variety of methods, and these methods are refined as we learn more. New technologies, like telescopes or brain imaging devices, allow us to ask new questions in new ways. But equally important, strategies for analyzing data and drawing conclusions change as well. Statistical methods improve, as do experimental designs. The randomized controlled trial is a scientific innovation a way to draw better conclusions about cause and effect. A   experiment is a scientific innovation a way to prevent subtle psychological processes from influencing the results. What drives this methodological innovation? And what makes the outcome a set of methods we should trust? In an undergraduate course that I’m teaching this semester, we introduce students to an unconventional definition of science. The course, Letters  Sciences 22: Sense and Sensibility and Science, comes from an interdisciplinary collaboration between a philosopher (John Campbell) a social psychologist (Robert MacCoun) a    physicist (Saul Perlmutter) and a cognitive scientist (me). On the first day of class, Prof. Perlmutter defines science as a collection of heuristic tricks that are constantly being invented to   our mental weaknesses and play to our strengths. On this view, science isn’t a recipe, it’s a warning. The warning is this: We are fallible. But recognizing our fallibility, we can do better. Once we learn that placebo effects can occur, we design drug trials to compare drugs against placebos. Once we learn that repeated statistical significance testing can inflate the probability of a false positive, we build in corrective measures. And we shouldn’t wait for these lessons to fortuitously come along we should vigorously seek them out. A common theme in the course, concludes Perlmutter, is that science is about actively hunting for where we are wrong, for where we are fooling ourselves. Scientific methods thus evolve alongside scientific conclusions, and the engine that drives this change is remarkably simple. In an essay published earlier this month at Edge. org, I argue that science is powerful because it involves the systematic evaluation of alternatives. To determine which evidence is worth pursuing, we consider which alternatives are plausible, and we seek out evidence that will discriminate between them. As we encounter new evidence or new arguments, we evaluate the possibility that alternative conclusions are now better supported, and alternative methods better guides to the truth. Scientific thinking isn’t just a tool for working scientists it’s an approach to getting the facts right by entertaining all the ways we might get the facts wrong. Only when viable alternatives have been eliminated can we be pretty confident we’ve got something right. So let me end with a plea. The plea isn’t for people to accept any particular scientific consensus, or any particular public fact. It’s a plea for people to embrace the value of considering alternative possibilities, and evaluating those possibilities against the best evidence and arguments at our disposal. And it’s a plea for us to do so together, with the kinds of evidence we can verify and share, and the kinds of arguments we can subject to public scrutiny. And if you’re not convinced, please consider the alternatives. Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo"
721,"Writer Laurie Frankel has written a novel about a family with five boys in which the youngest feels he’s something entirely different  —   a girl. It’s called This Is How It Always Is, and it’s a story that’s close to Frankel’s heart because she’s living it: Her own child was born a boy and now identifies as a girl. That’s where the similarities end. Frankel tells NPR’s Rachel Martin, ”The nice thing about my life is that it’s pretty boring, which is really how you want your life to be  —   but not how you want your novel to be. So in fact, this really is . .. very, very made up.” On how she reacted when her child first expressed an interest in being a girl, She wanted to wear a dress  —   and she was a he at the time  —   and we said OK. It didn’t inspire panic. It didn’t seem to be anything to be worried about or alarmed about. It seemed like pretend. . .. She was 6, she had just turned 6, and it seemed like she was just playing and having fun. And she was just playing and having fun and trying things on. It’s just that it stuck. On striking a balance between letting kids express themselves and protecting them, I think that putting all of your faith in the   powers of your small children is probably not the best way forward for anyone. In the book what happens is that they feel their way through, and I think that that’s what all of us do in parenting in general. You make a judgement call and you take your best guess and you take a shot and you hope for the best. And if it works that’s wonderful and if it doesn’t then you modify. That’s what parenting is, is figuring out that balance between letting your kids be who they are and protecting them from the world they have to live in. . .. Sometimes I feel like letting my kid out of the house every morning is the hardest thing I do all day. And, again, I think that’s the hallmark of parenting: No one out there in the world is ever going to love my kid or get my kid as much as I will, and yet I gotta let her go every day anyway. On what she hopes readers will get out of her book, I think it is a topic that scares people and I think that in part that’s because they haven’t met anyone  —   or they don’t know that they’ve met anyone  —   who is impacted by these issues. There are a lot of transgender people and there are even more people who are gender nonconforming, and these little kids are just kids. They are the least scary people you can imagine. So one of the things that I hope is that people who read this book will read it and forget about the transgender issues and just be in the embrace of this family and realize that this family is like all families: They love and they keep secrets from one another and they protect one another and they struggle with how to do that and they have these challenges. And it’s hard, but it isn’t scary and it isn’t abnormal at all. Oh how her daughter feels about the book, She loves it. She thinks that all books should be written about her. She cannot actually imagine why I would ever consider writing a book about anything else. And she’s a big reader, but it is a book for adults. It is not appropriate for her. But I am certainly mindful of the fact, and was while I was writing it, that she will read it someday. And I hope that she will love it, of course, but I also know that she will see that it’s  —   that it really is not about her. It’s really very fictionalized. And I hope very much that the plot and heartbreak and drama and near misses that happen in this novel, I hope that they will never happen to her."
722,"On June 27, 2015, David Byrne  —   never one who shies away from a grand gesture  —   paired 10 color guards with   musicians, including the Beastie Boys’   Devonté Hynes,   and St. Vincent, on the stage of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a show he called ”Contemporary Color,” which is now a promising documentary of the same name. If you’re not familiar with color guard, you’re not alone: Byrne told the New York Times he estimated it was ”completely unknown to 98 percent of New Yorkers.” For the uninitiated, color guard is a form of beautifully melodramatic     choreography. (Virginia’s McLean High School has a helpful introduction in the form of its   recruitment video.) While a Times review of the ”Contemporary Color” live show was mixed, the documentary’s ability to examine the interior lives of the performers, the history of color guard and the jubilation backstage promises an entirely more revealing, and resonant, portrait. The movie, which won the Documentary Cinematography Prize at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, is clearly aiming for the heart’s bullseye: an intended palliative for this difficult modern moment. ”We need an antidote, and here it is,” as Byrne put it in a statement released in conjunction with the trailer. ”The world is better than we think it is.”"
723,"Updated at 4:15 p. m. ET, Homeland Security officials are defending the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration and refugees, along with its implementation. At a news conference Tuesday, DHS Secretary John Kelly said the order creates a ”temporary pause” as officials ”assess the strengths and the weaknesses of our current system.” He was adamant in saying that the order ”is not  —   I repeat  —   not a ban on Muslims.” The controversial executive order suspends   admissions for 120 days and blocks travelers from seven   countries  —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   for 90 days. Syrian refugees are banned indefinitely. The Trump administration immediately faced legal challenges from advocacy groups that say the order is discriminatory toward Muslims, an accusation that Kelly denied. At least one U. S. state, Washington, has filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency stay of the order. The executive order, issued Friday, has also garnered criticism for its chaotic and seemingly uneven initial implementation. ”I think it’s fair to acknowledge that communications  —   publicly and interagency  —   haven’t been the best in the initial rollout of this process,” said Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of U. S. Customs and Border Protection. However, the officials largely defended the order’s implementation, saying they immediately took action to implement provisions. One area of confusion has been the status of green card holders, or lawful permanent residents, from the seven countries. McAleenan says they developed a waiver process ”over a matter of hours Friday night to Saturday afternoon”: ”Under the executive order, Section 3, there’s a provision for granting waivers when it’s in the national interest. So lawful permanent residents are technically covered in the executive order as immigrant visa holders. We worked quickly with counsel to devise a waiver process. ”The secretary has given guidance that returning residents, their status as an LPR in the U. S. is dispositive, that it’s in the national interest to welcome them home. So once we got that guidance, we were able to delegate the authority to grant a waiver out to the field and were able to clarify with the carriers that these folks were allowed to board.” In the first 72 hours of the order, McAleenan says, 1, 060 lawful permanent residents obtained such waivers, in addition to 75 waivers for ”immigrant visa and nonimmigrant visa holders.” He adds that 721 travelers with visas from the seven specified countries were not allowed to board. Now, he says, green card holders and special immigrant visa holders are able to board flights and ”will be processed for a waiver upon arrival.” Other travelers from the seven countries won’t be able to get on U. S.  flights and will be ”referred to the Department of State for further process.” The executive order allows for refugees to be considered for waivers if they were already in transit and if denying entry would cause ”undue hardship,” McAleenan says. He adds that ”872 refugees will be arriving this week and we’ll be processing them for waivers through the end of the week.” Another source of confusion has been the status of dual nationals. McAleenan says those travelers will be ”assessed at our border based on the passport they present, not any dual national status.” For example, he says, a citizen of both the U. K. and one of the listed countries can present a U. K. passport and not be subject to the order. Kelly denied reports that DHS was caught off guard by the order, stating he had been expecting it for the past year and a half to two years because of Trump’s comments during his campaign. He says he learned ”probably Thursday” that the order would be signed the following day and notes that ”certainly, if you really, you know  —   if you really want to know what was in the executive order, just read the newspaper the day before and you’d find out.” ”People on my staff were generally involved,” Kelly adds. Trump has called for ”extreme vetting,” and Kelly sketched out some of the measures he says officials are considering: ”When someone comes in and asks for consideration to get a visa, it might be certainly an accounting of what websites they visit. It might be telephone contact information so that we can see who they’re talking to.   ”But again, all of this is under development. But those are the kind of things we’re looking at  —   social media. We have to be convinced that people that come here, there’s a reasonable expectation that we don’t know who they are and what they’re coming here for and what their backgrounds are.” As for when the travel freezes will be lifted, Kelly states: ”I would be less than honest if I told you that some of those countries that are currently on the list may not be taken off the list anytime soon.”"
724,"President Trump has issued an executive order temporarily banning travel from seven   countries. The move, which has raised a series of legal questions, sparked protests around the country as people who had previously been approved to come to the United States were being detained at airports. Here is the order in full, annotated by NPR journalists."
725,"Officials in a number of states have spoken out against President Trump’s recent executive actions on immigration. On Monday, Washington state became the first to file a lawsuit against the administration, seeking a restraining order to stop enforcement of the ban. ”If successful it would have the effect of invalidating the president’s unlawful action nationwide,” Attorney General Bob Ferguson said of the lawsuit, according to member station KNKX. Citing the most recent U. S. Census Bureau data (from 2015) the suit says Washington is currently home to more than 7, 200 noncitizen immigrants from Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen  —   the seven nations listed in Trump’s immigration ban. In its court filings, the attorney general’s office included statements Trump made as a candidate dating back as far as December of 2015. That’s when his campaign issued a statement titled, ”Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration,” which called for ”a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Trump’s immigration ban, the lawsuit says, ”is separating Washington families, harming thousands of Washington residents, damaging Washington’s economy, hurting   companies, and undermining Washington’s sovereign interest in remaining a welcoming place for immigrants and refugees.” Over the weekend, Ferguson was among more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general who signed a statement in which they pledged to fight what they called an ”unconstitutional order.” Other states are likely to take action against the ban, either on their own or by joining Washington’s suit. In Massachusetts, for instance, Attorney General Maura Healey’s office says she is planning to challenge the order in New York, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman’s office is filing to join a federal lawsuit against President Trump that was originally filed by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation. The Washington suit names as defendants President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and Acting Secretary of State Tom Shannon, along with the federal government. The Washington lawsuit also includes several media reports and interview transcripts about Trump’s ban, including his interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network that was promoted under the headline, ”Brody File Exclusive: President Trump Says Persecuted Christians Will Be Given Priority As Refugees.” Filed in federal court in Seattle, the Washington documents include an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, saying irreparable harm will result from Trump’s executive action that bans travel from the seven   countries and suspends the U. S. refugee admissions program. Announcing his lawsuit against the immigration ban, Ferguson said, ”We are a country based on the rule of law and in a courtroom it is not the loudest voice that prevails, it’s the Constitution.” When it imposed the immigration ban, the Trump administration cited concerns about potential terrorism threats it has also noted that only a portion of the world’s   countries are on the banned list. But as NPR’s Greg Myre reported, the executive order ”doesn’t include any countries from which radicalized Muslims have actually killed Americans in the U. S. since Sept. 11, 2001.” Trump’s action on Friday set off a weekend of protests, legal challenges and confusion as travelers and border security personnel tried to adjust to a new set of rules. And on Monday, after the acting attorney general refused to defend the order, she was fired."
726,"Here’s a test as to whether the Trump administration’s travel ban on refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries is truly driven by security concerns or reflects a prejudice. As I see it, the Trump ban on travel and immigration to the U. S. which is permanent for Syrians, should exempt children 10 years of age or younger. Nearly half of Syrian refugees already resettled in the U. S. are children under 14. In 2015, Republicans argued that Syrian refugees pose a security risk and hence they opposed President Obama’s efforts to allow a few thousand of them into the U. S. They argued that we should learn from Europe that terrorists hide among these immigrants. In response, Democrats argued that any such limitations would violate our shared ideals as Americans, and that prolonged vetting can ensure that these refugees will not endanger us. To leapfrog this debate, I suggested that the United States should invite 25, 000 Syrian families to each send one of their children under the age of 10 to the United States. Here, they would stay in foster homes until the end of the war. Their parents could reclaim them at any time and would be asked to leave instructions about whether their children should be claimed by relatives or adopted if the parents perished in the war. I took it for granted that nobody could claim that young kids pose a security risk. I pointed out that there is a precedent for this sort of action. During Operation Peter Pan, also known as Operation Pedro Pan, a large number of unaccompanied Cuban minors were brought to the United States between 1960 and 1962. The program was created by the Catholic Welfare Bureau. Initially, the children were required to have a visa to enter the United States. However, on Jan. 3, 1961, the State Department announced that Cuban minors no longer needed such visas. Several major American corporations helped finance the accommodation of these children. One of those children was Mel Martinez, who grew up to become a U. S. senator and the first Latino chairman of the Republican Party. As one who escaped Nazi Germany as a Jewish child, I also pointed to the Kindertransport program, which allowed Jewish children to leave Germany if other nations would take them. Britain agreed to shelter about 1, 000 of these children from 1938 to 1940, on the assumption that the children would leave the country once the war was finished. In 2016, I wrote to 10 law firms in Washington, D. C. and asked them if they would, as part of their pro bono program, turn this idea into a draft bill. Covington  Burling responded, and their attorney did the job. He also sent the draft bill to several members of Congress, and I wrote to others. In the last hours of the 114th Congress, Rep. Mike Honda, a Democrat from California, introduced The Save the Children Act of 2016. It would have granted temporary visas to 25, 000 Syrian children between the ages of 3 and 10. These visas would expire six months after our government determines that hostilities have ceased and a durable peace process has begun. The grace period will allow time for the families of the children to   their households in Syria before the children return. The State Department would determine when the war is over, and the Department of Health and Human Services would ensure that the foster homes are safe for children. Bills, of course, die when a Congress expires. Rep. Honda lost his seat in last November’s elections. I hence visited with the staff of some senators and met with a House member to see if they would introduce the bill into the current Congress. In the few days that have followed, no action has been taken so far. The main issue, I was told, was who will pay for the costs involved. I recently wrote to nine major charities to ask if they would foot the bill. I had done this once before, when I served as a senior adviser to the Carter administration, and sought to raise funds for taking care of the 125, 000 Marielitos who suddenly arrived in Florida from Cuba in 1980. At that time, the charities were more than willing. Indeed, Catholic Charities took care of most of these immigrants. The new ban on travel suggests that waiting for Congress to act may be the wrong way to proceed. I see no reason, if the Trump administration is sincere that its concern is security, that it would not make an exception for Syrian children. Otherwise, one cannot but conclude that it is acting mainly on ideological or political grounds. Indeed, given the harsh rhetoric and flood of harsh measures, making an exemption for children would help the new Trump team to show that somewhere, under all this bluster and swagger, there is a functioning heart. Amitai Etzioni is a university professor at The George Washington University, where he is director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. He is the author of many books, including The Active Society."
727,"Updated at 1:50 p. m. ET. Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee boycotted planned votes on Tuesday morning to advance the nominations of two Trump Cabinet nominees. The committee was to begin voting at 10 a. m. on the nominations of Georgia Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Treasury   Steven Mnuchin. Committee rules require that at least one member of each party be present for a vote to proceed. If and when the committee does vote, their confirmations would still need the approval of the full Senate. In a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, White House spokesman Sean Spicer called the Democrats’ actions ”outrageous.”  ”It’s unfortunate Senate Democrats remain so out of touch with the message that the American people sent this past November,” Spicer told reporters. ”The people want change President Trump is delivering that change.” Price has been under a cloud of controversy for weeks over questions about whether he properly disclosed stock trading of a biomedical company, which says the congressman was able to purchase with a discount, according to the Wall Street Journal. As for Mnuchin, he faces more questions about his role in the foreclosure crisis as the head of OneWest Bank. As NPR’s Yuki Noguchi reported when Mnuchin testified before the committee earlier this month, he was grilled by Democrats ”for his role as CEO of a company that took over IndyMac Bank, now known as OneWest, which failed because of its bad home loans and later pushed through many controversial foreclosures, ultimately yielding massive profits for Mnuchin.” The Columbus Dispatch reported over the weekend that Mnuchin ”flatly denied in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee that OneWest used ’ ’ on mortgage documents. But records show the bank utilized the questionable practice in Ohio.” Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown said, ”We are not going to this committee today because we want the committee to regroup, get the information, have these two nominees come back in front of the committee, clarify what they lied about  —   I would hope they would apologize for that  —   and then give us the information that we all need for our states.” Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch,   opened the committee meeting by saying he was ”really disappointed” by the Democrats’ decision to boycott. ”These two nominees are going to go through regardless,” Hatch said. ”Let’s not treat people like this. I think some of this is because they just don’t like the president.” Other Senate committees moved ahead on votes to approve Trump’s nominees to lead the departments of Energy, Interior and Education, as well as Attorney   Jeff Sessions. Hatch said he couldn’t remember Republicans treating nominees from Democratic presidents this way. In response to that and other such assertions from the GOP, many Democrats are raising the fact that Republicans refused to hold hearings last year on President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. President Trump is set to announce his pick to fill that seat Tuesday night. Democrats are under increasing pressure from their party’s voters to obstruct the Trump administration however they can. At a demonstration led by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last night in front of the Supreme Court to protest President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees, some demonstrators said they wanted Democrats in Congress to block every Trump nominee, though they have limited power to do so. In a statement on the delay, Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said, ”Until questions are answered, Democrats believe the committee should not move forward with either nomination.”"
728,"President Trump has made his pick to fill the ninth seat on the Supreme Court. So now what? Trump’s pick of Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia sets in motion a confirmation process that is expected to drag out for at least two to three months, if not longer. Republicans say the duration of what is expected to be a bitter partisan fight will depend entirely on how obstructionist Democrats choose to be. Democrats say the timing depends on how reasonable, or ”mainstream,” Trump’s pick is. Gorsuch has sterling legal credentials, but Democrats are already picking apart some of his more controversial decisions and promising a fight. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has said he expects the new justice to be sworn in sometime in April. But that’s if everything goes smoothly. Two questions will determine the pace of the process: Will Senate Democrats seek to block the confirmation, and if so, what is Plan B for Senate Republicans? ”The Senate should respect the result of the election and treat this newly elected president’s nominee in the same way that nominees of newly elected presidents have been treated,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the floor Monday, already gearing up for the battle. ”And that is with careful consideration, followed by an    vote.” McConnell pointed to two examples under Democratic presidents. ”We had two nominations in the first term of President Clinton  —   [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg and [Stephen] Breyer,” said McConnell. ”Both got    votes. There was no filibuster. We had two nominations in the first term of President Obama  —   [Sonia] Sotomayor and [Elena] Kagan. No filibuster.    vote.   president.” Here are five basic steps to get a Supreme Court justice confirmed, Regardless of how rapidly Republicans want to wrap up the process, there are a few steps that must occur at a minimum before any Supreme Court nomination is confirmed. These are the steps Grassley estimates will take at least a couple of months. 1. Referral to the Judiciary Committee, After Trump names his choice, the nomination is referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee has 20 members. There are 11 Republicans and nine Democrats. Because it takes a bare majority of committee members to approve a Supreme Court nominee for a full Senate vote, Democrats lack the votes to block Trump’s nominee at the committee level. 2.   research, Before the confirmation hearing, both Republican and Democratic committee members will conduct research into the nominee’s background. The nominee must fill out an extensive questionnaire, which is crafted by the top Republican and Democrat on the Judiciary Committee  —   Grassley and ranking member Dianne Feinstein of California. Senators will pore over the nominee’s past speeches, public statements, press clippings, writings and, if the nominee is a judge, judicial opinions. Also during this time, the nominee starts making the rounds on Capitol Hill to pay courtesy visits to senators. 3. Confirmation hearing, This hearing can take several days  —   with at least a couple of days for the Judiciary Committee members to directly question the nominee, and additional days to question outside witnesses. After the proceedings, senators may submit further questions in writing for the nominee to respond to. 4. Committee vote, The committee votes on whether to approve the nominee and then ”reports” its ”recommendation” to the full Senate. 5. Full Senate vote, The full Senate vote is where things could get dicey for Republicans. Democrats can force Republicans to gather 60 votes in the Senate before the nominee is confirmed. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate. That means Democrats can effectively block  —   or ”filibuster”  —   the confirmation if fewer than eight Democrats support Trump’s pick for the high court. Next steps for Democrats, There is deep resentment among Senate Democrats about last year’s refusal by Senate Republicans to hold any confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland when President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court. The seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death has remained unfilled for 11 months. Senate Democrat Jeff Merkley of Oregon has already vowed to filibuster any Trump pick that isn’t Merrick Garland. He told Politico that Republicans are now trying to fill ”a stolen seat.” Other Senate Democrats have been less explicit about whether they would block the confirmation at this point. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly said he will oppose any nominee who is not ”mainstream.” Other Democrats are echoing that sentiment. ”I just think it should be somebody like Merrick Garland to show, for the first time in the Trump administration, a willingness to be bipartisan for somebody that lost the popular vote,” said Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio on Monday. But there were signs after Trump made his pick that Democrats do not think Gorsuch is in the mold of Garland. And Democrats are signaling that Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel from seven   countries and suspending refugee admission will figure into confirmation hearing. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement, in part, shortly after Trump made his pick public: ”In light of the unconstitutional actions of our new President in just his first week, the Senate owes the American people a thorough and unsparing examination of this nomination. I had hoped that President Trump would work in a bipartisan way to pick a mainstream nominee like Merrick Garland and bring the country together. Instead, he outsourced this process to   interest groups. This is no way to treat a   branch of government, or to protect the independence of our Federal judiciary.” Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another member of the Judiciary Committee, said before the pick, ”A Supreme Court nominee, if willing to respond, should indicate that they regard this executive order as unlawful and unconstitutional.” But Blumenthal added that there was no single issue that will entirely determine his position. Could Republicans go ”nuclear”? President Trump said last week that he thinks Senate Republicans should strip from Democrats the power to block Supreme Court nominees. But McConnell isn’t embracing the advice at the moment. In fact, McConnell has been asked many times about whether he will change the filibuster rules this year  —   invoking the   nuclear option  —   so that it would take only a bare majority of senators to confirm a Supreme Court nominee, rather than the required 60. In response to this question, McConnell has simply expressed his confidence that Trump’s nominee will be confirmed. When former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the nuclear option in 2013  —   and changed the Senate rules so it would take only a bare majority of senators to confirm all nominees except Supreme Court picks  —   Republicans were furious. They called Reid’s move foolhardy, pointing out that one day Democrats would suffer the consequences of the rules change when they end up in the Senate minority with a Republican in the White House. That day has arrived. And now Republicans potentially have the power to further change the rules so the minority can’t even block a Supreme Court nominee. However, it takes 51 votes in the Senate to employ the nuclear option. And Republicans may not have the votes. Already one Republican  —   Susan Collins of Maine  —   says don’t count on her vote. ”I am not a proponent of changing the rules of the Senate,” said Collins on Monday evening. ”I hope that common sense will prevail and that we will have a normal process for considering this nominee.” Vice President Pence could supply the 51st vote for Republicans to invoke the nuclear option. But without Collins on board, Republicans can lose only one more vote."
729,"President Trump is set to announce his pick for the U. S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, fulfilling a promise he made to social conservatives on the campaign trail to name someone like the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon whose seat has been vacant for almost a year. The White House moved up the announcement by two days, a step that observers saw as an attempt to change the subject away from the president’s controversial immigration order. The order has provoked widespread criticism in the U. S. and among allies abroad, not to mention among leading Republicans in Congress. Whoever the president selects, the confirmation hearings are likely to set up a   attack from Democrats on some of Trump’s immigration policies. The leading contenders for the nomination are said to be three federal appeals court judges: all very conservative, all relatively young, all millionaires and all nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush. The two who seem to be at the head of the line are Neil Gorsuch, a      judge on the appeals court based in Denver, and Thomas Hardiman, a popular    judge on the appeals court based in Philadelphia. Hardiman is said to be   by Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s sister, a judge on the same Philadelphia court. Gorsuch and Hardiman seem in some ways to be the flip sides of each other: Gorsuch is a scholarly Ivy Leaguer and Hardiman is a longtime litigator with lots of experience trying cases, who is said to have a ”practical approach.” The diplomatic Ivy Leaguer, Gorsuch, a Colorado native, is proof that you can acquire a personality that is diametrically different from your parents. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was a highly controversial,    head of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Reagan administration, and known for being quite the bomb thrower. But lawyers and judges alike describe her son as unfailingly polite, diplomatic, a good listener and a good colleague  —   to the point of being obsequious. Gorsuch is a reliable conservative on social issues. His   votes are in decisions siding with challenges to regulations requiring employers to provide birth control coverage for women under the Affordable Care Act. He earned his undergraduate degree at Columbia University, where he   a newspaper aimed at rebutting what he considered the dominant liberal and ”politically correct” philosophy on campus. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he also earned a doctorate in legal philosophy at Oxford University, where he studied as a Truman Scholar. In private practice in Washington, D. C. Gorsuch represented mostly corporate clients, and in 2005 he became principal associate attorney general in the Bush administration Justice Department. A year later, Gorsuch was nominated to the 10th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has earned a reputation as a cerebral conservative with a flair for vivid and clear writing that is similar to  —   though not as sharp in tone as  —   Justice Scalia’s. He is known as a critic of a   Supreme Court legal precedent that requires courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous language in broad statutes. In that sense, he is more conservative than Scalia, who supported that precedent. The ”down to earth,”   Amendment nominee  In contrast to Judge Gorsuch, Judge Hardiman is not an Ivy Leaguer, but as one of his friends put it, he went to the ”Catholic Ivy Leagues”  —   Notre Dame University for his undergraduate degree and Georgetown for his law degree, where he helped put himself through school driving a cab. He was initially nominated by President George W. Bush to the federal district court in Pittsburgh and was later elevated to the Philadelphia appeals court. His conservatism has demonstrated itself most prominently in gun cases, where he has ruled often in favor of the right to bear arms. For instance, he dissented from a decision that upheld New Jersey’s restrictive law on who may receive a permit to carry a gun. The Supreme Court left that decision in place by refusing to review it. It did review  —   and uphold  —   a decision Hardiman wrote declaring that jails were justified in conducting strip searches of individuals arrested but not yet convicted of any charge, even a minor traffic charge. Hardiman is one of those people who is   by associates of all political stripes. He is described as ”down to earth” and smart he is, as a friend put it, ”a closet scholar.” He ”knows the Hobbes and Lockean philosophy behind the Federalist Papers.” Friends and associates describe him as ”a devout Catholic,” one who ”knows Thomas Aquinas.” Several people noted that because of his many years as a trial lawyer and trial judge, he has more experience trying cases than most of the other Supreme Court justices. The nominee who would cause an uproar  The third contender for the vacant Supreme Court seat is Alabama’s William H. Pryor Jr. who sits on the federal appeals court based in Atlanta. He was the   favorite going in, in part because he is a protege of Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general. But Pryor’s record is by far the most controversial. Among other things, he called Roe v. Wade the ”worst abomination” in American jurisprudence. As Alabama state attorney general, Pryor urged the Supreme Court to uphold state laws that criminalized private consensual homosexual conduct. While Judges Hardiman and Gorsuch were both confirmed without dissent, Pryor was blocked by Democrats and was only confirmed in a later deal. So a Pryor nomination would undoubtedly spark a major donnybrook. Democrats, of course, are in the minority in the Senate, which must confirm the president’s nominee. Many Democratic senators view the Supreme Court nomination as one that was stolen from them when Republicans, in a   move, refused for almost a year to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the seat left vacant when Justice Scalia passed away. Already, some Democrats are promising to filibuster any nominee. The filibuster is still in place for Supreme Court nominees, meaning it would take 60 votes to confirm. But Republicans could change that rule pretty much any time they want. Some Democrats may want to save that card for the next battle  —   when, if there is a vacancy, President Trump would likely be replacing, not a conservative like Scalia, but a more liberal justice, thus changing the balance on the Supreme Court for decades."
730,"From the Black Lives Matter movement to environmentalists trying to stop new oil pipelines to the recent Women’s March against President Trump, the past year has been filled with large, often spontaneous protests. Now the reaction to those protests is appearing in a number of   statehouses across the country, where lawmakers are introducing proposals to increase penalties for those who block roadways while protesting. A bill in Iowa was inspired by a protest against Donald Trump shortly after the November election. More than 100 demonstrators blocked traffic on Interstate 80, just outside Iowa City, Iowa, stopping traffic on the busy trucking route for almost a  . ”You’re not just stopping traffic,” said Republican state Sen. Jake Chapman about his bill, which would apply to people blocking highways with speeds posted above 55 mph. Violators could get a felony and spend five years in prison, plus a fine of up to $7, 500, ”You’re impeding law enforcement ability to get to call where there could be serious   situations,” said Chapman, who also works for an ambulance service. National pattern, Opponents of the bill call it an attack on free speech. ”Republicans have taken over state legislatures across the country and they appear interested in punishing people with different views than theirs,” said Democratic state Sen. Joe Bolckom of Iowa City. In North Dakota, where protests have gone on for months over construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, a lawmaker has introduced a bill that would allow motorists to run over and kill any protester obstructing a highway as long as the driver did not do it intentionally. Bills that would increase penalties on unauthorized protests have also been introduced in Michigan and Washington. Last week in Minnesota, a House committee approved legislation that would increase penalties and charge demonstrators the cost of policing protests. After the fatal shooting by police of Philando Castile, Black Lives Matter protests blocked busy interstates in the Twin Cities. Republican state Rep. Nick Zerwas cited the cost of responding to protests for taxpayers as justification for the bill.  ”These individuals have broken the law,” Zerwas said at the hearing. ”It is against state statute to be on the freeway.” The hearing became heated when John Thompson, a friend of Castile, testified, telling lawmakers the protesters were trying to focus attention on the issue of police killings. ”You know what they were doing? They were asking for all you guys to come out and say what is it we can do to help you,” Thompson said. ”Not one of you came out!” Free speech concerns,  As protests continue to ramp up nationwide, Rita Bettis, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, says elected officials should be protecting free speech rights. She says bills like the one in her state do the opposite.  ”In our country where the government’s power flows from the people, peaceful protest is a source of democratic strength, not a weakness, and it deserves to be protected and cherished,” Bettis says. ”Not attacked.” Advocates like Bettis say if a few states can reduce a demonstrator’s ability to block traffic, it could have a chilling effect on Americans’ right to protest. Tim Nelson of Minnesota Public Radio News and Amy Sisk of Inside Energy contributed reporting to this story. "
731,"A key Senate committee voted Tuesday to approve the nomination of Betsy DeVos, a school choice activist and billionaire Republican donor, to be secretary of education, despite the fierce objections of Senate Democrats, teachers unions and others. There’s much speculation as to exactly how she might carry out President Trump’s stated priority of increasing school choice. A significant clue comes from the American Federation for Children, the advocacy organization DeVos chaired until she was nominated. AFC supports both publicly funded charter schools and even more so, ”private school choice”  —   publicly sponsored programs that give families money to spend on tuition at private schools. Last fall, AFC issued a report ranking the existing private school choice programs. There are 50 of them, located in 25 states and Washington, D. C. by AFC’s count. AFC included only those programs that explicitly allow students to attend religious schools. DeVos, whose family has long supported causes associated with the Christian religious right, has publicly called education reform a way to ”advance God’s kingdom.” The program that AFC ranked No. 1 in that report was Florida’s tax credit scholarships. So it’s a good one to take a closer look at if you want a model of how choice programs might work in a   Education Department. It unites three broad concepts that DeVos is friendly toward: 1) Privatization 2) religious education and 3) a   approach to accountability for private schools. Most people are familiar with voucher programs, where state dollars go to pay for tuition at private schools. These programs have faced constitutional challenges in Florida and elsewhere, among other reasons, because they direct public money to religiously based organizations. In a scholarship tax credit program, however, the money bypasses state coffers altogether. Corporations or individuals can offset state tax liability by donating to a private, nonprofit scholarship organization. The money from this fund is in turn awarded to families to pay for tuition at private schools. The   structure is especially significant when considering what could happen under DeVos in the Trump administration, because it could be a way to promote school choice on a federal level without writing big checks. ”There isn’t that much money that is fungible from the federal education budget,” points out Samuel Abrams, an expert in education policy at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Florida program, created by the Legislature in 2001, has been popular. In the   school year, 92, 000 students received scholarships, a 17 percent increase from the year before. The state’s scholarship organization, Step Up for Students, announced that the recipients were overwhelmingly   and Hispanic, with incomes just above the poverty line. Over 70 percent of the scholarships are directed at religious, primarily Christian, schools. AFC awarded high marks to Florida’s program for its broad eligibility, reaching families with incomes of up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level for the generosity of the tax break to donors, a    match with a cap that increases automatically each year and for the large size of scholarships, nearly $6, 000. However, not everyone is a fan. The Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers union, sued to challenge the program in cooperation with the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and other groups. The suit was dismissed in the lower courts, which said the union and the other parties did not have standing to challenge it. This month, the Florida Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Mark Pudlow, a spokesman for the union, argues that the fund violates Florida students’ constitutional right to a ”uniform education.” That’s because schools that receive scholarship funds ”don’t have to follow the state curriculum, don’t have to participate in testing, don’t have to hire certified teachers. They don’t have to follow the same rules.” The AFC awarded Florida’s program 26 out of a possible 28 points for accountability. The private schools are required to administer a standardized test of some kind, though not necessarily the state test."
732,"An archaeologist has launched a citizen science project that invites anyone with an Internet connection to help look for evidence of archaeological site looting. The platform, called GlobalXplorer, presents users with satellite images of Earth’s surface. ”Looting is one of the most common ways archaeological sites around the world are destroyed,” explains the archaeologist behind the project, Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. ”By marking satellites where you think you see looting, you’re helping to protect sites and save our common cultural heritage.” Parcak is a space archaeologist, meaning she specializes in what satellite images can tell us about past civilizations. The GlobalXplorer project is funded with the $1 million TED Prize that Parcak won last year. She explained early plans for the project to NPR’s Ari Shapiro last year. People who log on to the site are shown square satellite images of the Earth’s surface  —   the current area they are crowdsourcing is in Peru  —   and are asked to decide whether there is or is not evidence of looting pits on the ground. Looters find an area of interest and then dig numerous large holes or even bulldoze whole areas, the website explains. In so doing, looters in search of valuable artifacts destroy the context that helps archaeologists understand past cultures. A training video explains how to tell   looting pits from other holes in the ground: ”Although it may seem like an easy distinction between a large deep hole in the ground and bush, you can actually sometimes be hard to tell them apart,” the training video warns. Parcak also reminds people who join the project that it’s good to be skeptical. ”It’s just as valuable to mark a tile as negative for looting as it is to identify potential looting because it helps us narrow the search,” she explains. The project is set up such that dozens of people will typically look at each image, mitigating the effects of each layperson’s impressions. Peruvian archaeologist Luís Jaime Castillo is coordinating with the Peruvian government about potential findings from the project, should it turn up actionable evidence of archaeological looting in the country, according to National Geographic, which is supporting the project, ”Most people don’t get to make scientific contributions or discoveries in their everyday lives,” Parcak told National Geographic. ”But we’re all born explorers, curious and intrinsically interested in other humans.”"
733,"If you get malaria somewhere in the tropics and end up in a British hospital, the treatment is pretty simple. Or at least it used to be. The recommended treatment in the U. K. for ”uncomplicated” malaria (that’s a case where you’re pretty sick but not on death’s door) is an   drug combination called  . The patient takes a few pills over the course of three or four days, the drugs kill the malaria parasites and everybody feels better. That’s why, over the last decade and a half, artemisinin has become the   drug to beat back the most common malaria infections both in British hospitals and across much of the developing world. Recently, however, malaria parasites have started to adapt so the drugs won’t knock them out. Resistance to   medications has been slowly developing in Southeast Asia. And now these malaria wonder drugs look like they may be starting to lose their mojo in Africa, too. Late in 2015, health officials in Britain for the first time came across a cluster of malaria cases that refused to succumb to  . The patients were travelers who had returned from three different African countries  —   Angola, Liberia and Uganda. After being treated with   each patient appeared to be cured. Then the parasitic infections came racing back. ”It was very surprising,” says Dr. Colin Sutherland, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. ”We might not get too concerned about the occasional treatment failure. But when four cases come along at once, it does make us think we’ve got something important that we need to investigate. Interestingly at about the same time Swedish colleagues reported a similar finding in Sweden.” In an article published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Sutherland and his colleagues document the four cases. Part of what is useful to researchers about these U. K. cases is that the patients were in Britain when their malaria cases rebounded. None of them had left the country after initially being treated. So when the malaria parasites   in their systems, the doctors were able to quickly realize that the   drugs had failed. The patients were subsequently treated with different drugs. ”Because our patients were living in a country where we don’t have malaria, we knew it had to be the same parasites that weren’t adequately treated the first time around,” says Sutherland. That’s not the case in Africa, where people live with malaria on a    basis. So if they get sick again, he says, ”it’s difficult to determine if maybe they just got another mosquito bite.” There’s been concern about the potential development of artemisinin resistance in Africa  but very little concrete evidence that it’s happening there. These cases in the U. K. show that strains of malaria are emerging in Africa that can’t be cured with the most common drugs to treat the disease. But Sutherland urges caution: ”It would be unwise for us to sit here in Europe and say, oh, we’ve got four cases so Africa’s got a problem. But the public health impact in Africa could be enormous. It’s a clear message that we need to now put in place the right kind of studies in Africa [to track resistance].” Malaria remains one of the most troublesome diseases in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization there were more than 200 million cases in 2015 and roughly 430, 000 deaths from the disease. The good news is that efforts against malaria, including   bed nets and   treatments, have cut the rates of malaria transmission particularly in Africa significantly over the last 15 years with the total number of cases in the world dropping by a third and malaria deaths being cut in half."
734,"Tuesday is the last day of open enrollment for health coverage for 2017 under the Affordable Care Act. And while Republicans in Congress are working to repeal the law, it’s not at all clear what might replace it. During the campaign, President Trump suggested a nationwide insurance market that would allow insurance plans to be sold across state lines. The idea has been kicking around for years, and some states have tried it, including Rhode Island, where it didn’t work too well. All Things Considered’s Audie Cornish talked to Christopher Koller who was the Rhode Island’s insurance commissioner when this option was offered. On the roadblocks of allowing    health insurance options, It’s very hard to have interstate insurance. It means that a state has to accept the rules of another regulator. That means if a Rhode Island insurer was licensed in Massachusetts, we have to say that whatever they do in Massachusetts is good for us here in Rhode Island. It also requires significant work to coordinate rules and regulations. Insurance regulators are reluctant to take on this task. Let’s say Rhode Island didn’t allow limited benefit health plans. . .. If we were to allow insurance to come in from a state that allowed those plans, and they sold them in Rhode Island, you’d have insurers offering policies that were against the laws and policies set forth by Rhode Island legislature. . .. And if insurers are going to sell across state lines, you’ll see more variation among states which makes it harder to coordinate and for insurers to operate across state lines. On how health insurance compares to other lines of insurance, It’s not [comparable]. There’s a big difference between a hospital and an auto body guy repairing your car. We have a lot more auto body guys than we have hospitals. We don’t compel auto body makers to take care of our car if we can’t pay for it, but we compel hospitals to treat people if they can’t afford to pay for it. We look at health care very differently from auto insurance. On why    health insurance can’t compete with local, In Rhode Island we have one hospital system that has 80 percent of births in the state. [Insurers] need that in [their] network to be competitive. And I can tell you that if a national insurer walked into that hospital, and said, ’Will you contract with us?’ the hospital would have no reason to give the insurer any discount compared to local established health plans have already. That national insurer can’t offer a competitive product."
735,"It’s perhaps the unlikeliest symphony orchestra in the world  —   an   ensemble from a strict Muslim society where it’s often dangerous for young women to step outside of their homes unescorted. It’s called Zohra  —   the name of a music goddess in Persian literature, according to its founder. And they were performing at an unlikely venue  —   a hall attached to Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, a   ruin in western Berlin commemorating the horrors of World War II. It’s just steps from where Berliners experienced their first   terror attack six weeks ago. But to Ahmad Naser Sarmast, 54, of Kabul, the Afghan musicologist who founded the orchestra, the venue for their    European concert made sense. Sarmast is on a mission to restore his country’s rich music tradition decimated by decades of war. He told Sunday’s largely German audience that the location resonated with him and his 30 female musicians, who range in age from 14 to 20. Sarmast  —   himself a survivor of a suicide bombing in Kabul in 2014  —   dedicated the concert to the 12 people who were killed in the German attack. He added that the orchestra members would try and ”wash away with the beauty of music the blood spilled on the streets of Berlin.” The orchestra’s European tour started at the World Economic Forum in Davos in   and ends Tuesday night in the eastern German hamlet of Weimar. An   orchestra was an idea that came from female students he taught. Sarmast said a couple of years ago he initially thought of maybe a    member ensemble, but that there was so much interest that it quickly evolved into the   orchestra. Sarmast bragged that many of its members, who are students at his Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul, are not only the first in their families, but sometimes the first in their province to play musical instruments. According to the ANIM Web site, Afghan children wanting to come to his school audition after they finish third grade and are tested on their musical aptitude. Half the spaces are dedicated to female students and homeless or orphaned children. The ”Zohra” members performing in Berlin dressed in traditional embroidered costumes and brightly colored headscarves  —   many of them in the green, red and black of the Afghan flag  —   played traditional South Asian instruments like the sitar and its ancestor, the Afghan rubab and the   tabla, as well as European inventions like the piano, violin and oboe. Negin Khpolwak, one of Zohra’s two female conductors, said she gets a tad nervous every time she steps into the spotlight but that the music quickly soothes her. ”I see the smile on the girls’ faces when they play and I don’t think about anything else,” Khpolwak explained in Dari. ”You want the concert to go off perfectly. My whole attention is on that.” The petite woman is 19 and belongs to Afghanistan’s   and   Pashtun ethnic group. She hails from the restive eastern province of Kunar and sacrificed a lot to get to where she is. Khpolwak said because her village had no schools and her family couldn’t afford to pay for her education, her father took her to live in a Kabul orphanage, where Sarmast’s school has recruited some of its students. ”But it wasn’t until this trip that I learned how valuable we are to Afghanistan and to our people,” she added. ”We can raise their voice through our music.” Their soothing mix of Afghan folk songs and Western classics like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony reflect Sarmast’s vision of reestablishing not only Afghanistan’s musical tradition but infusing classic and newer Western influences. ”I want to make music part of every (Afghan) school curriculum but that takes time,” he said. So does creating an Afghan faculty at his school, so for now he still relies on Western educators and foreign donations to help train his staff and students. The U. S. Embassy in Kabul is one of his program’s key donors. As to why Sarmast risks the ire of Afghan society by training and featuring female musicians in concert, he told me it’s not a choice. ”Afghanistan should move on the same path as every other nation goes,” he declared. ”And the girls and the women of Afghanistan should also enjoy the freedom that . .. other girls and women are enjoying outside of Afghanistan. ”We can’t build a democratic society in Afghanistan if we will be neglecting half of the population of this nation,” he added. And he thinks they’re doing a better job than their male counterparts. ”To me it seems right now that the Zohra orchestra probably will become the [first] national orchestra of Afghanistan, because they are much more disciplined” than his male students, he said. Given the unusual nature of the orchestra, security is a concern. Since Sarmast’s own   experience in the Kabul suicide attack, he is hypervigilant about looking for any potential threat to his young charges, including on social media and on Afghan broadcasts. ”We are working in an environment where we have millions of supporters, but we also have some very vocal . ..enemies who are very much   minded,” he explained. Khpolwak said threats won’t keep her from playing. Nor will it deter her fellow female conductor, Zarifa Adiba. The    declines to reveal her ethnicity, explaining: ”I’m Afghan and before being Afghan, I’m Muslim and before being Muslim, I’m human.” She was born in   Ghazni province, one of many regions where girls are more likely to marry young than attend school. But she had other ambitions. ”The thing that I loved was music from my childhood and my mother is a great supporter of me and she told me, what you love, go ahead and find out. I had kind of view about pop singing rock singing and I wanted to be a pop singer actually,” Adiba explained. She was a latecomer to ANIM, starting in the ninth grade. There she discovered music was more than singing and that girls could play musical instruments, too. She started with the flute: ”It was so beautiful,” she explained, but soon began exploring other instruments. ”All of them were cool . .. but the viola was . .. was so attractive me,” she said. ”There was just one boy and one girl playing the viola and I said I wanted to be the second girl playing viola.” Adiba said she’s loved playing in Europe this month but is eager to go home, especially after learning that an uncle, who had always disapproved of her playing, recently told her mother how proud he is of his niece. ”I’m happy that at least I changed my family,” she said, adding, her fellow musicians, too, ”are going to change their families and when their families are going to change, you can have a society which is changed.”"
736,"In Chicago, where the number of shootings last year soared, it’s often young people who become both perpetrators and victims. The Cook County Juvenile Justice Center holds about 200 to 300 young residents awaiting trial at the Temporary Detention Center. Among these residents are Leonard and Nigel, both 17 years old. Because of the rules of the juvenile court, Nigel and Leonard’s full names and specifics about their cases can’t be disclosed. The two, along with several other detainees, were part of a summit in the Chicago area where participants shared strategies about how to decrease violence. Last year in Chicago, there was a huge jump in the number of murders and injuries by gunshot more than 760 murders and more than 4, 000 people injured by gunshot were recorded. Leonard said the violence isn’t always about gangs fighting over drugs or turf. ”Some people do it just to make a name for [themselves] to try to get some fame or something,” Leonard said. ”Some people do it because they actually lost people. .. or they are forced into it.” Some are forced because they are trying to avenge a friend’s death, he said. Most of the young people at the detention center are male. The most common offenses are violation of probation, aggravated battery and unlawful use of a weapon. Nigel said while revenge is often a motive behind some of the violence, peer pressure can also be a factor. ”I get mad at the fact that there’s a lot of kids out here that are so incredibly smart and they look at the other person with all the money and girls that don’t go to school and want to be just like ’em when you could be way more than that,” he said. Leonard and Nigel said they’ve learned at the detention center how to resolve differences or difficulties they may have in the street. Nigel said he wants to be a welder or a juvenile justice activist. Through counseling and other programs, he said he was able to find himself at the center when he couldn’t in his neighborhood. ”What prevents that is you don’t got nobody trying to show you,” he said. ”You never had anybody to tell you. Its people in here that actually care about us, and they tell us and teach us about how we can do better and there’s more to life. Most people out there, all they know is the corner, all they know is the block.” There’s often a collision of issues for   youth in long neglected areas: homelessness, mental illness, high levels of poverty. What’s missing in the neighborhood, Leonard and Nigel said, are mentors and role models who can steer young people the right way. Other detainees called for limits on guns, more neutral zones in neighborhoods, more after school programs. But Leonard said for young people trying to stay out of the streets, more recreational opportunities and sports programming are crucial. ”We got one recreation center, but the gym only go from 6 to 8,” he said. ”And if it’s on a school day, they’ll open it up from 2 to 8. So what’s left, the streets?” Leonard Dixon, who spearheaded the summit and is the supervisor of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, said he agrees. ”One of the things that I think communities have to understand: recreation is for kids what work is for adults,” Dixon said. ”That’s how they learn how to get along.” Nigel added that actual work is also needed. In some of the city’s impoverished areas, the unemployment levels rival those set during the Great Depression. It’s important for young teenagers to have jobs, Nigel said. ”They can’t even get a good job, you know what I’m saying, to provide for them,” he said. ”OK, they get a job over the summer, and after the summer, now what you gon’ do?” Equally important is making sure the funding for jobs and   programs stays intact, the young detainees said. Officials with the juvenile justice system will continue to make a coordinated effort to stem violence in Chicago, they say. They will pay close attention to the voices of the young people who are surrounded by violence every day."
737,"In the coming year, scientists are hoping to reintroduce the Socorro dove to Socorro Island, a place where the bird has died out. Socorro, the ancestral home of the dove, is part of an island group off the west coast of Mexico nicknamed the Mexican Galapagos. In the 1920s, the California Academy of Sciences noticed island birds and animals were disappearing fast. So the academy sent an expedition to Socorro with instructions to bring back live doves. Juan Martinez, a scientist with Mexico’s Institute of Ecology, hiked the same terrain as the researchers a century ago. He said he plans to slowly reintroduce the doves to the wild. ”We’re going to camp in that area, where you see the green and the red,” Martinez said. ”In that area is a heavier forest and is where they found the Socorro doves. That’s why all this exercise is helping us find the locations. The best place to bring them back is a similar place where they found them.” The original expedition brought back 17 doves and sent them to zoos and aviaries across the United States and Europe. The plan was to breed them in captivity. But although they survived at the zoos, they died off on the island. ”Here on Socorro you have introduced sheep, introduced cats and introduced mice,” Martinez said. Cats and mice preyed on the birds and their eggs. But the biggest problem, Martinez said as he pointed to the hillside, was the sheep. ”That’s probably the highest point where they completely removed vegetation,” Martinez said. The sheep chewed and trampled their way through the forest, destroying the Socorro dove’s home. ”And at the end, all of that material goes to the sea and it is tons and tons of soil that were lost by the impact of sheep,” Martinez said. Martinez, along with his team, has spent the past several years aggressively removing sheep and replanting native trees. There’s also ongoing work to rid the island of cats and mice. But even with all that work, Martinez said reintroductions are full of uncertainty. Michelle Reynolds, a biologist for the U. S. Geological Survey and a reintroduction specialist, said to expect surprises when returning the doves to Socorro. She said she knows of Hawaiian ducks that were moved from one island to another, only to take off over the open ocean and never be seen again. ”There could be a new threat, one that didn’t exist when the species used to live there,” Reynolds said. For example, she said, avian diseases, such as West Nile, are more prevalent now. It’s also unknown how captivity might have changed the birds. The doves might have lost traits needed to live in the wild. ”You might lose some aggression you might lose vigilance,” Reynolds said. ”There’s lots of characteristics that can change over many, many generations in captivity.” Martinez said this might seem like a lot of work for one small species on a tiny island. But other birds on this island are teetering on extinction, he said. He and other scientists believe the effort to return the doves to Socorro will also help the other endangered species. ”It’s not restoration by restoring or reintroducing one species,” Martinez said. ”At the end what you want is to restore the ecological interactions that interplay on the island. And once you do that, the island will go back to its original course.” This reintroduction is a process scientists a century ago might never have imagined. Martinez might not even see the end of it. It could be decades before the doves can flourish on their own. It’s a long, difficult and costly effort. But Martinez said he believes it’s ultimately worth giving the doves  —   and the island  —   another chance."
738,"At the northern border of Somalia and Ethiopia, a group of teenage boys forced two girls  —   aged 14 and 16  —   into a car, drove them to another location, stripped them and raped them. The incident occurred on December 6. This weekend, a community court charged the perpetrators with thousands of dollars in fines, as well as up to 200 lashes and 10 years in jail. That’s an unexpected outcome in a country where the perpetrators of rape often pay a small fine and walk free. The case didn’t get much attention until   when a video that the boys filmed of the gang rape surfaced online. People all over Somalia responded on social media with messages of outrage as well as sympathy for the victims. A Somali activist group’s GoFundMe campaign raised over 10, 000 pounds ($12, 000) to help one of the victim’s family  —   who fled town for fear of being ostracized  —   establish itself in a new city. And women’s rights groups called for an unusual step: legal action. They urged authorities in the   region of Puntland in Somalia, where the assault occurred, to enforce a new law passed there in September 2016, that for the first time criminalizes all sexual offenses and calls for jail sentences of up to 10 years for rape. Traditionally, many Somali communities settle rape cases though a system of justice called heer. Clan elders would generally arbitrate such cases. As a settlement, the perpetrators often compensated the victim’s family with camels or other livestock. The government is still figuring out how to implement its new Sexual Offenses Act, says Puntland’s minister of women and family affairs Anisa Mumin, who recently visited the victims’ families. She says both law enforcement officers as well as judges must be trained to handle sexual violence cases with sensitivity. And the government hasn’t even begun setting up forensic labs to collect and analyze DNA evidence in rape cases. As a makeshift measure, the community established a special court to handle this rape case, based on Sharia law  —   with five Muslim religious leaders serving as the judges. Puntland government authorities attended the trial as observers and sanctioned the trial. A local women’s rights group called the Galkayo Center helped advocate for the two teenage girls. The verdict, delivered Sunday, resulted in a $4, 620 fine, 200 lashes and 10 years in jail time for one perpetrator. Each of the other four convicted teens received slightly lesser sentences  —   with fines of up to $3, 500, as well as lashes and five to eight years in jail. The court chose lashings as part of the punishment  explains Puntland’s minister of justice Salah Habib Jama Mohamed, because it wanted to shame the perpetrators ”as they shamed the girls.” It’s a first step toward harsher sentencing in cases of domestic violence and rape, Mumin says  —   though ideally, future cases will go through the government’s formal court system. ”It’s quite encouraging,” she says. She hopes this case will embolden the government’s efforts to quickly, fully implement its new law. Getting the law passed was itself a long, complicated process, says Puntland’s minister of justice Salah Habib Jama Mohamed. ”This is a law that is harmonized between the Islamic Sharia, the cultural norms as well as the international laws,” Mohamed says. Lawmakers consulted more than 250 clan elders and religious leaders throughout the region, he says, to gain their support and approval. ”Puntland is a communal society,” he adds. ”So if the elders are behind the new law and the scholars are behind it, the community will accept it.” But it’s not so easy to change cultural norms, says Aparna Polavarapu, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, who specializes in international human rights law in   Africa. And resolving rape cases in a formal court system isn’t necessarily a perfect solution. ”It’s very difficult for people to go before the formal court,” Polavarapu says, especially in rural parts of Africa where the nearest government office may be miles away. And, she adds, ”the judgment is not always seen as legitimate by the clan.” That’s why involving community leaders in the lawmaking process is a good start, Polavarapu says. Outreach and awareness campaigns can also help. ”I’ve seen local magistrates in South Africa, for example, go out and talk to community leaders.” In Puntland, one big challenge is the stigma attached to rape survivors. ”I believe [that’s why] there’s still people who prefer to deal with it in the traditional way,” says Nikolai Botev of the United Nations Population Fund. Traditionally, rape cases would be settled privately, he notes: ”The clan eldership would know what has happened, not necessarily everybody else. But once it is reported to the authorities, the case becomes public.” The U. N. is supporting the local government’s efforts to change the public discourse around rape. ”In an ideal world  —   and we are still far away from that ideal in Somalia  —   communities would support these girls,” Botev says. For now, the Puntland government is helping the families of both girls find a new community where they can permanently resettle. ”In Somalia, but also all over the world, even the U. S.  —   when a woman is raped, she is stigmatized,” says Mumin. ”Changing that will take a long time.”"
739,"An executive order protecting gays and lesbians who work for federal contractors ”will remain intact” at President Trump’s direction, the White House says. The move could allay concerns that Trump might end recently adopted protections against an   workplace. The White House announced the move in a relatively short statement early Tuesday, saying that the president ”is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community.” The announcement comes after reports that the White House was considering a new executive order that would undo former President Barack Obama’s 2014 executive order that gave new protections to gay and transgender people. When it was signed, the order applied to 28 million workers  —   roughly a fifth of America’s workforce. In today’s statement, the White House says, ”The President is proud to have been the first ever GOP nominee to mention the LGBTQ community in his nomination acceptance speech, pledging then to protect the community from violence and oppression.” Trump’s decision largely conforms with his election campaign, in which he didn’t often seek to highlight either gay rights or restrictions. The new president’s plan for his first 100 days didn’t mention taking actions to strip LGBTQ rights or protections, but Trump did list as his first priority the canceling of ”every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.” While the persistence of the executive order suggests Trump agrees with Obama’s action, civil rights activists have worried that the president might appoint a U. S. Supreme Court justice who has ruled against gay rights. At 8 p. m. ET Tuesday, Trump is scheduled to name his pick to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. After Trump’s election, activists on both sides of the issue wondered how his administration might treat legal claims of ”religious liberty,” a phrase that has been invoked by those who oppose LGBTQ discrimination protections and, in many cases, gay marriage  —   and who say that adjusting to new federal laws requires them to compromise their beliefs."
740,"Media mogul Oprah Winfrey has a new gig  —   starting this fall, she’ll appear as a special contributor on CBS’ 60 Minutes. ”There is only one Oprah Winfrey,” the news magazine’s executive producer Jeff Fager said, according to CBS News. ”She is a remarkable and talented woman with a level of integrity that sets her apart and makes her a perfect fit for ’60 Minutes.’ ” Winfrey’s collaboration coincides with the storied program’s 50th season. The network did not provide details about how long she would contribute to the show, or the types of issues she will cover. Winfrey called 60 Minutes the ”bastion of journalistic storytelling.” She added: ”At a time when people are so divided, my intention is to bring relevant insight and perspective, to look at what separates us, and help facilitate real conversations between people from different backgrounds.” Winfrey’s groundbreaking talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, went off the air in 2011. For decades, it was the highest rated talk show in America. ”She has said all the time that she doesn’t miss the    of the show, but what she does miss is storytelling and connecting with people, women in particular,” her longtime friend Gayle King said on CBS This Morning. ”And being able to meet and talk to them and interact with them. That’s what she misses. So to me, this is a perfect marriage.” Winfrey has had plenty to keep her busy since her show went off the air, between her production company, Harpo Productions, and the cable network she founded, OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. She is also on the Weight Watchers board of directors and has numerous philanthropy projects."
741,"Recent high school graduates in Tennessee are already allowed to attend community college at no cost. Now Gov. Bill Haslam is looking to expand the   program to provide free community college educations to adults, as well. Haslam, a Republican who has been in office since 2011, made his pitch at Monday night’s State of the State address. Afterward, he tweeted, ”Let’s be the Tennessee we can be.” The pitch was   by members of both parties, as the governor pushes toward his goal of helping Tennessee have 55 percent of its 6. 6 million citizens hold a postsecondary degree or certificate by the year 2025. The state currently needs 871, 000 postsecondary degrees or certificates to reach that goal, Haslam’s office says. And it would help if free access to community college is given to adults  —   including the 900, 000 Tennesseans who have taken some college classes but didn’t get a degree. ”Since the fall of 2015, Tennessee has provided free community college for new high school graduates,” Nashville Public Radio reports. ”Money for the program, known as Tennessee Promise, has come from a variety of sources, including federal Pell Grants and the state lottery.” Haslam’s initiative seems to have bipartisan support, with the NPR member station reporting that Democratic Leader Craig Fitzhugh responded by saying: ”Actually I had hoped that we would do that earlier. But I’m glad to see him doing that now.” A billionaire whose father started the Pilot chain of gas stations and truck stops, Haslam was the president of his family’s business before starting his political career as the mayor of Knoxville. Tennessee’s efforts to make it easier to get a degree led former President Barack Obama to choose the state as the site for a speech about making community colleges   in early 2015. The idea of providing free community college education has spread in recent years. Around the U. S. the institutions vary widely, with yearly costs that range from $1, 420 in California to $7, 530 in Vermont, as NPR’s Ed blog reported last summer. Along with Oregon and Minnesota, Tennessee is one of three states with free community college programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Kentucky approved a similar program last year other states are considering their own plans. Haslam’s education plan earned a standing ovation at Monday night’s address, but as Nashville Public Radio notes, many protesters were also at the Capitol, holding signs and chanting to register their anger over President Trump’s immigration policies and to inform legislators that they would be watching their actions."
742,"Before they get to work on reforming the U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and the White House might want to take a closer look at the last time they tried it  —   a $16 billion fix called the Veterans Choice and Accountability Act of 2014, designed to get veterans medical care more quickly. NPR and local member stations have been following that money, including the $10 billion for vets to get care outside the VA system. The Choice Act also channeled about $2. 5 billion for hiring more doctors, nurses and other medical staff at VA medical centers. The goal of the hiring money was to address a simple math problem. The number of veterans coming to the VA has shot up in recent years, and the number of medical staff has not kept pace. The idea was that more caregivers would cut wait times. But an investigation by NPR and local member stations found that: the VA has about the same number of new hires as the VA would have been projected to hire without the additional $2. 5 billion the new hires weren’t sent to VA hospitals with the longest wait times and the VA medical centers that got new hires were not more likely to see improved wait times. San Diego’s   dilemma, San Diego’s experience is typical. The Southern California city is home to one of the largest concentrations of    veterans, and when the Veterans Choice Act passed, the San Diego VA had some of the country’s worst wait times for mental health care in particular. The act was meant to help former soldiers like Charlie Grijalva, who was diagnosed with PTSD when he was still in the Army. Back in 2014, Grijalva lived with his wife, Gloria, in Imperial Valley  —   about two hours from the VA hospital in San Diego. After spending 18 months deployed in Afghanistan, and a year in Iraq, he started having suicidal thoughts. The VA tried to help him. Early in 2014, the doctors there seemed to get his prescription right. By summer, his psychiatrist had left the VA, but Grijalva was transferred to a nurse practitioner. He missed an appointment in September 2014, according to records provided by the VA, but the new provider agreed to refill his prescription over the phone. Because San Diego’s wait times were so long, under the new Choice program, Grijalva qualified to see a private doctor outside the VA system. He had an initial consultation with the private psychiatrist near his home, but he didn’t live to begin treatment. In December 2014, his medication ran out. Grijalva had a young family and a new baby on the way. His wife said he insisted on giving his kids a magical Christmas. ”He said, you know, ’I want to do what I did as a kid,’” Gloria Grijalva said. ”Play some Christmas music. Have the kids decorate the tree, drink hot chocolate. . .. Even though he was feeling the way he was, he wanted to have that kind of Christmas for his kids.” It wasn’t to be. A few days before Christmas, his wife found him. He had hanged himself a few hours after he texted her, ”I love you.” ”He has told me when he was at his lowest that [he] ’didn’t want my kids to see me like this I don’t want to put my kids through this,’ ” she said. His VA records show Grijalva went to one last appointment at the VA in San Diego, scheduled in December. His medication arrived just before his death. Around the time of his death, the VA was just beginning to implement the Veterans Choice Act. San Diego seemed like a prime candidate to get extra staff. But the NPR and local member station analysis of the VA’s own data show that San Diego got far fewer new staff members than it requested, and also fewer than many other VA centers that didn’t have such bad wait times. No logical staffing pattern, The VA data show no logical pattern for distributing the 12, 000 doctors, nurses and other medical staff hired under the Choice Act. David Shulkin became head of the Veterans Health Administration after that law passed, but has been overseeing the reform since 2015. Last fall, he told NPR that the Choice hires were based on a survey of VA medical centers. ”Our goal is to get [the medical centers] the health professionals that they need. So that’s the Choice money. We wanted everybody to go out and execute on it, and to use that money as quickly as possible because we have a sense of crisis,” said Shulkin, who has been nominated to become secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. His confirmation hearing is expected this week. He also said the VA focused on places where the staff was most needed.   medical centers were ”prioritized” among the VA’s 168 hospitals. But the VA data show that prioritized medical centers didn’t always get more resources than others. Los Angeles was prioritized and got only about 108 new hires from the Choice money. Dallas, a similarly large center, got almost three times as many (298) even though Dallas was not ”prioritized” and didn’t have particularly bad wait times. Albuquerque, N. M. and Cincinnati have about the same volume of appointments. But Albuquerque had among the worst wait times in the country for mental health, while Cincinnati was among the best. The VA’s data show both received the same number of psychiatrists from the Choice money. Wait times across the board have not come down, though the VA says that’s because of a continuing surge in demand from patients. And Shulkin stressed that wait times are not the most important measure of health care. He says efficiency is up and the number of veterans waiting for urgent care has shrunk from tens of thousands to a mere dozen or two. Still, it was the long wait times  —   and the harm they did to veterans  —   that drove Congress to pass the Choice Act. Slow hiring in a tough market, Doctors and nurses are scarce nationwide. In the economic centers where many vets live, medical professionals often find better offers at private hospitals. And in rural or remote areas, there often are very few doctors or nurses available to work at either VA or private hospitals. Shulkin knows that his hiring process is cumbersome. ”The complexity of hiring puts us at a disadvantage with the private sector. We are very fortunate that people wait and turn down private sector jobs because this is where they want to work and this is the mission . .. but frankly we have to be competitive,” he told NPR last fall. Shulkin came to the VA from the private sector, he said, to get the department in step with best practices. He has succeeded in getting some salaries up to   levels. But the roughly $2. 5 billion from the Choice Act resulted in a net gain of only a few thousand doctors and nurses, across a system that serves about 9 million veterans. That’s partly because the VA’s process is so slow that about 13 percent of candidates drop out during the   lag time after they are hired. NPR and local member stations spoke with more than half a dozen current VA employees about this problem, but none agreed to be quoted. Almetta Pitts is a former VA employee who used to work at the VA in Seattle. Waiting to start that job nearly left her broke. ”It took about six months. And so I had to think about ways to just put my money together to be able to really be able to pursue this job,” she said. Pitts liked the VA. She interned at the VA in Seattle while pursuing her master’s in social work. Her mother, an Army vet, was already working there as a federal police officer. After a series of interviews, Pitts was notified she had been hired. ”I received my acceptance letter and it did inform me that I started that September and I was like ’Oh my gosh, I’m so excited,’ but . .. ’Wow, it’s like May.’ ” During the four months of waiting, Pitts moved back in with her mom to save money until the job started. She ended up working for the VA for 13 months and was laid off. At the time, Human Resources offered to help find another job at a VA out of state. She loved her work helping traumatized veterans, but Pitts decided she had to move on. Budget shuffling, Another reason the $2. 5 billion bump didn’t seem to raise the VA’s staffing levels may have more to do with Washington bureaucracy than health care. NPR found that the rate of increase in VA staff after the Choice money was not noticeably different than past years without it. The Choice hiring money from Congress mostly replaced, instead of augmented the VA’s normal hiring budget, which freed up less restricted money to take care of other needs. Shulkin defends how the money was spent. ”When you’re given a budget you face a number of new stresses on those resources. You have increases in pharmaceuticals, you have your wage increase, you have your leasing cost increases, you have IT increases. So without the Choice money, we would not have been able to have maintained the type of hiring that we were doing and expanded the type of hiring we were doing,” Shulkin told NPR in December. This sort of budgeting strategy is common in Washington, according to Phil Carter, of the Center for New American Security. ”It makes complete sense for a   bureaucracy to hire with that money first. I think VA hired staff with this money will all intention of improving access and quality. I think the VA leadership found it harder to do that,” he said. Carter says that the VA has a difficult time projecting what needs it will have across a system of 168 hospitals nationwide, and that the VA may just have been hiring at its maximum capacity in a tough market. ”But I don’t see malice here, just the basic inefficacy of American bureaucracy,” Carter said. But some Republicans in Congress do see something more malicious  —   a shell game to free up money from congressional restrictions. A spokesman for the House Committee on Veterans Affairs said: ”It was a money grab, with no plan on where to put people and VA used the funds to fill existing vacancies for the most part.” NPR’s Juan Elosua contributed to this story. This story is part of a project we’re calling ”Back at Base,” in which NPR  —   along with public radio stations around the country  —   is chronicling the lives of America’s troops where they live."
743,"Bob Dylan is about to release a triple album of classic songs. These are not his classics  —   Triplicate continues Bob Dylan’s passion for making new recordings of the Great American Songbook. From the list of 30 songs, so many recorded by Frank Sinatra, it’s easy to see Bob Dylan’s love of classic American music and his desire to be a DJ, curator and singer of the great American song from before and not long after World War II. The three discs is thematically titled and arranged: Disc 1: ’Til The Sun Goes Down features songs of life in its autumn days, of memory and time now past. Songs include, ”Stormy Weather,” Trade Winds” and ”September of My Years.” Disc 2: Devil Dolls features songs of fairly hot love and love gone cold, including ”As Time Goes By,” ”The Best is Yet To Come” and ”Here’s that Rainy Day.” Disc 3: Comin’ Home Late begins with a song Frank Sinatra made famous, ”Day in, Day Out,” about love and how the promise of love magnifies the beauty of life and ends with a song Billie Holiday made famous, questioning life’s meaning and finding it in the hopes of love. Triplicate will continue a running investment in classic American songs, following Dylan’s 2015 album Shadows In The Night and last year’s Fallen Angels, both made up of new versions of songs recorded by Sinatra. Personally, I’ll always find this a most curious and unpredictable role for Bob Dylan, its oddness magnified by our current political divide. Having lived through those divided days when his songs were our rallying cries, this unpredictable present tense is surreal for me. Earlier this month we heard Lucinda Williams and Charles Lloyd take up and remake an impassioned version of his ’60s song ”Masters of War.” Today we have Bob Dylan singing ”I Could Have Told You,” a song that came out when Dylan was 13 years old, first sung by Frank Sinatra in 1954. (You can hear that song at the audio player on this page.) Written by Carl Sigman and James van Heusen, it’s a tune about a fleeting love affair with a straying woman. The rendition is sweet, with a lovely pedal steel keeping it sad and filling the role that a string arranger and players would have picked up sixty years ago. Neither I nor anyone else could have told you Bob Dylan would put out a triple album of these tunes when he was 75. Triplicate is set for release in multiple formats including vinyl on March 31. See the album cover and complete track list below: Disc 1  —   ’ Til The Sun Goes Down, Side 1: 1. I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans2. September Of My Years3. I Could Have Told You4. Once Upon A Time5. Stormy Weather, Side 2: 1. This Nearly Was Mine2. That Old Feeling3. It Gets Lonely Early4. My One and Only Love5. Trade Winds, Disc 2  —   Devil Dolls, Side 1: 1. Braggin’2. As Time Goes By3. Imagination4. How Deep Is The Ocean5. P. S. I Love You, Side 2: 1. The Best Is Yet To Come2. But Beautiful3. Here’s That Rainy Day4. Where Is The One5. There’s A Flaw In My Flue, Disc 3  —   Comin’ Home Late, Side 1: 1. Day In, Day Out2. I Couldn’t Sleep A Wink Last Night3. Sentimental Journey4. Somewhere Along The Way5. When The World Was Young, Side 2: 1. These Foolish Things2. You Go To My Head3. Stardust4. It’s Funny To Everyone But Me5. Why Was I Born"
744,"Four days after its signing, President Donald Trump’s executive action that temporarily bans travel from citizens of seven countries continues to make waves. While at least one poll shows slightly more public support than opposition for the president’s policy, American and British musicians  —   including John Legend, Grimes, Queens of the Stone Age, and Nicki Minaj  —   have criticized the order. Electronic producer Four Tet, a. k. a. Kieran Hebden, took a more subtle approach. The influential DJ updated his     Spotify playlist with artists with roots in countries affected by the travel and immigration order, which encompasses Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Hebden’s list includes   oud player Rahim   who was tortured by Saddam Hussein’s regime before becoming an American citizen Iranian artists including singer Simin Ghanem, Iranian singer and songwriter Martik Kanian and guitarist Kourosh Yaghmaei and Somalian artist Hasan Adan Samatar who was given a lifetime achievement award from the Somali community in Minneapolis in 2010  —   among many others. ”It’s basically a place for me to share things I’m listening to, and is becoming a good personal archive of music I’ve enjoyed,” he told NPR Music. ”I think the rise of fascism is deeply disturbing.” The list also includes Omar Souleyman, a Syrian singer who collaborated with Hebden in Brooklyn several years ago. That collaboration ”not being allowed anymore got me thinking about it,” Hebden tweeted."
745,"So last year was pretty strange, right? I know you know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about  —   aliens. I’m talking about other civilizations on other worlds. What I’m really referring to are some of the remarkable   in SETI, humanity’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The last 18 months have made for a bumpy and exciting ride for those who are serious about the science of SETI. To help us understand what’s going, I spoke with two experts. Jill Tarter holds the Bernard Oliver Chair at the SETI Institute. She is a pioneer in the field, having led the development of its science with precision, acuity and creativity. And, of course, one can’t forget to mention that she was the inspiration for Jody Foster’s character in the movie Contact. I also spoke with Jason Wright an associate professor of astronomy at Penn State. Wright represents the tip of the spear of a new generation of researchers who count SETI among their interests. So to begin our ”Year in SETI” review, let’s start with an amazing object known as the WTF star. That’s short for ”Where’s The Flux.” Astronomers found the WTF star by accident in their search for exoplanets using the Kepler space telescope (it was actually found via a   citizen science project). Exoplanets are worlds orbiting distant stars. Until 20 years ago, no one knew if they even existed. An exoplanet will show itself in the Kepler data when it passes between its own sun and us. They make nice, regular dips in the star’s brightness once every orbit. But the WTF star was anything but regular. It dimmed and brightened in ways no one had ever seen before. It was crazy weird  —   and it just got weirder. Looking at old astronomical photographs, it appeared that the WTF star was also gradually losing brightness in a way that was unprecedented. By studying more recent observations, astronomers were apparently able to confirm the star’s slow fade. ”It’s really weird,” says Jason Wright. ”The fact that it has stayed weird despite a huge amount of attention by a lot of very smart astronomers has cemented this as an interesting puzzle worth solving.” Jill Tarter agrees: ”The WTF star is interesting. There’s obviously nothing that we can see that tells us the data is not credible or this isn’t a serious effort.” Now, most likely, all this crazy weirdness has a natural explanation  —   something like comets passing between the star and us (or something else). One of Wright’s contributions was to map out the different families of explanations for the WTF star. Among these possibilities were ” ” explanations, like huge machines orbiting the star. Work was even done to calculate the properties an orbiting artificial structure would be need to make the WTF star appear so abnormal. When the media caught wind of this, they  —   and the public  —   went bonkers. It made news everywhere. CNN headline’s was typical: ”Discovery of Strange Star Could Mean Alien Life.” Maybe a story with the term ”Alien Megastructures” even crossed your Facebook feed. Now, let’s be clear. It’s overwhelmingly probable that the WTF star is NOT (I repeat NOT) orbited by alien megastructures. Wright and others don’t believe they’re seeing alien megastructures. They were simply including it as one possibility in their big bag of possibilities. ”It is an explanation of last resort,” Tarter says. ”Past history has gotten us accustomed to having natural phenomena turn out to explain anomalies.” So, whatever causes its weirdness, the WTF star deserves attention. But there were two other SETI stories last year that didn’t deserve attention and they tell us something important, too. First was a   radio pulse caught by a Russian telescope. Then there was a study claiming to see a few hundred stars with weird light pulses. In both cases, other scientists were quick to point out how shaky the claims were. ”The Russian telescope was a wild signal just waiting to happen,” Tarter says. According to Tarter, the Russians looked at a particular star 39 times and only once got an event that seemed interesting from the SETI perspective. It was essentially a   event. ”One out of 39 is going to really down weigh the credibility,” Tarter says. The other paper claiming hundreds of stars with unusual, and perhaps   light pulses also fell flat with scientists like Tarter and Wright. ”That paper went through more than one journal and took a long time before it got published,” says Tarter, indicating her skepticism. But that didn’t stop some in the media from jumping on the stories. Many major news outlets carried them and, while most pointed out the skepticism of other scientists, the fact that it made the news at all tells us something interesting: The discovery of the WTF star’s weirdness, the two false alarms and most importantly, the public’s reaction to it all shows that we may be entering a new era when it comes to thinking about intelligent life in the universe. ”One of the things that really surprised me this year,” Tarter says, ”is how almost desperate the media is to have a detection. They’re so eager. It’s probably our fault, that is, the exoplanet community, because we keep saying Earth 2. 0 is right around the corner. We keep talking about habitable zones and all this sort of thing without telling the story that it’s going to be a very long time between here and there.” Tarter is right. Because of Kepler, we now know that each star in the sky has its own planets just like our sun. That is, in itself, a new and   discovery. What follows from this discovery is that we’ll be spending a lot of time from now on staring hard at all those planets and doing all the hard science needed to understand them  —   and their possibilities for life. That means there are bound to be surprises, and we’ll need to be prepared for them. One of those surprises might even, maybe, possibly, have something to do with other civilizations. So when you put it all together, it’s probably time for us to get past what Wright calls ”the giggle factor” when thinking about life  —   including intelligent life  —   on other worlds. And that brings us to another bit of SETI news. A year or so ago, the privately funded Breakthrough Initiative gave $100 million for doing serious, sober SETI science. That is really good news because the bottom line is things really are changing in our study of planets and life of all kinds. But it’s not going to be like the movies. ”I think people expect that the discovery of aliens is going go like it did in Contact, where the discovery of the signal and the confirmation of the signal happened in, like, a   period,” says Wright. So what Wright and Tarter are saying is: Please be patient. Real science is slow and steady. Doing it right will take our time, our dedication, our keenest skepticism and our sharpest intelligence. That’s what it will take to answer one of humanity’s oldest questions: Do other civilizations like our own exist on other worlds? Adam Frank is a   of the 13. 7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a   ”evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4"
746,"When Egyptologist Howard Carter opened King Tutankamun’s tomb in 1922, the first thing he saw was, ”Gold  —   everywhere the glint of gold,” according to his diaries. Unlike silver or iron, gold neither corrodes nor tarnishes. There are few more recognizable signs of wealth than to take everything you own and cover it with gold. Both France’s Palace of Versailles and President Donald Trump’s walls and furniture and doors are gilded with it. Guests at Trump’s penthouse might grab a candy out of a solid gold dish or sip their breakfast orange juice from a gilded cup. Whether jewelry, household items or architecture  —   humans have found a way to plate it with gold. Not even food has managed to escape our obsession with this precious metal. Though decorative gold ranges from 10 to 24 karats  —   a measurement that tells the purity of gold versus other metals in the substance  —   it must be 23 or 24 karats by law to be edible. In this nearly   pure form, gold is biologically inert and can pass through the body without being absorbed. Because gold is tasteless, odorless, devoid of nutritional value, impermanent (when used in edible form) and quite valuable, there’s no better marker of wealth and power than putting it in your mouth. A   book of royal household expenses cataloged a payment for ”four hundred and a half of eggs” that were boiled, painted and covered with gold leaf. In Melitta Weiss Adamson’s book, Food in Medieval Times, she writes of gilded piecrusts, fowl with   heads and feet, and even animals that were so thoroughly leafed they were as much statuary as main course. In Italy, gold was so frequently consumed at noble feasts that the city of Padua had to limit its use to one or two courses or else face a   gold shortage. ”It takes something ordinary and makes it extraordinary,” says Lynn Neuberg, director of the food and beverage product line at Easy Leaf, a company that makes metallic leaf  —   gold in particular. Though sales of edible gold leaf have been fairly steady since starting the line in 2004 (the company has been making decorative gold leaf for 60 years) Neuberg says there’s been a significant jump in the past year. ”I think it’s a matter of chefs and pastry chefs and bar chefs wanting to be more creative,” she explains. ”Everyone wants to call attention to the beautiful cocktail they’ve created or their beautiful soup or beautiful sushi they’re wrapping in gold.” And with gold, a little bit goes a long way. In general, the days of conspicuous consumption may be dying along with McMansions, but in America and abroad, the tradition of edible gold is still bright. Many restaurants, likely for publicity, have created a dish of newsworthy expense featuring gold. In 2012, a New York City food truck sold a $666 ”douche burger” that wrapped truffles, lobster, caviar and a beef patty inside six sheets of gold leaf. Margo’s Pizzeria on the Mediterranean island of Malta sells a pizza for nearly $2, 000 that has 100 grams of white truffle and, you guessed it, gold. Last year, even Pizza Hut had its own golden ticket  —   a Super Bowl promotion in which a limited number of   pizzas came crusted in gold leaf. New York City’s Serendipity 3 is home to multiple extravagant dishes featuring edible gold. A     sandwich, hamburger, and a   $25, 000 sundae have all won Guinness World Records for ”most expensive” dish in their categories. Their ”Golden Opulence” sundae (a steal at just $1, 000) is covered in $  to $  of edible gold, according to the restaurant’s creative chef, Joe Calderone. ”It’s over the top, but we also call it an edible work of art,” he says. He believes that the look of gold, rather than its value, is what makes it such a coveted ingredient. ”If gold leaf were a    it would still be beautiful and I would still use it.” While these dishes are all more ”publicity stunt” than ”fine dining,” there are some people working with edible gold who truly let its artistic qualities shine through. Alma chocolate in Portland, Ore. is best known for its original line of icons  —   such as the Virgin of Guadalupe or the Hindu deity Ganesha  —   rubbed with gold. It would be easy to mistake them for   folk art from Mexico instead of chocolate. Alma’s founder, Sarah Hart, had to learn both the art of making chocolate and gilding food when she first started crafting these edible icons. She says it’s a painstaking process: ”People don’t understand the labor intensity and the time to make them. To gild each one takes 10 to 15 minutes.” In some ways, the beauty of these chocolates has backfired. ”People often don’t even eat them,” Hart says. Recently she got a note from a customer who had purchased a chocolate for her mother five years ago. The woman’s mother had placed it on her home altar, where the daughter found it after her mother died. ”She took a picture and sent it to me,” Hart says. The chocolate  —   still gold but slightly less edible after five years  —   was pristine. Tove K. Danovich is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon."
747,"When I told folks in Kansas that I was going to be in the southeastern corner of the state, everybody said, you’ve got to go see Big Brutus. What’s Big Brutus? It is the world’s largest electric shovel. So we headed to West Mineral, Kan. You can see it on the horizon from miles away. At the very top, it’s 160 feet, or like a   building. Our guide is Betty Becker, 75. She’s the manager of Big Brutus and the mining museum  —   and she’s been working here since the place opened in 1985. Big Brutus weighs 11 million pounds  —   that’s 5, 500 tons. He’s painted bright orange and once had the job of scooping rock and dirt off the coal seam in a strip mine. Each bucket load could fill three railroad cars. ”It took 52 men about 11 months to assemble,” explains Betty. The cost, back in 1962: $6. 5 million. Big Brutus worked 24 hours a day for 11 years. When the Pittsburg  Midway coal mine shut down in 1974, Big Brutus dug his last pit in West Mineral. They backed Brutus out and parked the giant in the fields. It would have cost too much to dismantle, so they just left it right where it stood. We climb up a metal staircase until we’re five stories off the ground. The boom goes up another 100 feet or so. You used to be able to climb all the way up there, too. Some people even got married up there, but not anymore. We turn the corner and find the   compartment, where the shovel operator would sit  —   with a nice view of Kansas farmland from up high. It took huge amounts of power to run this electric shovel. ”They plugged it in just like you plug in an electric lamp or something.” explains Betty. Betty Becker’s father drove a coal truck at the mine, hauling coal from the pit to the cleaning plant. ”He passed away on the job,” she says. ”So he was at work, and we got a call to come to the hospital, and he was gone.” She pauses. ”So anyway, but that was . .. in 1966. That was a long time ago.” Betty tells me when the mine shut down in the ’70s, it was devastating for this community. ”West Mineral got quite a bit smaller because people had to go other places for, you know, work,” she says. ”And then we lost our school, and just how little towns are gone   they’re not as popular anymore. But Big Brutus will be here forever.” And after all this time, she’s grown awfully fond of the monster machine. ”Yeah, it’s like part of my family,” she says, laughing. ”A big part!”"
748,"Updated at 4:45 p. m. ET, U. S. officials say Iran   a ballistic missile on Sunday, the first known test since President Trump took office  —   which could provide an early assessment of how the new administration will interpret and enforce the terms of the international deal to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. In a statement to the media on Monday, Iran’s foreign minister insisted that Iran’s missile program is not part of the nuclear agreement, even as he declined to confirm or deny the missile test. NPR’s Peter Kenyon reported that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the missile program is purely defensive. Sen. Bob Corker,  . the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a statement calling the test a violation of a U. N. Security Council resolution passed as a side agreement to the 2015 nuclear deal. The statement did not provide any additional information on the reported test, instead linking to a Fox News article quoting unnamed U. S. officials. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Monday that he did not know the ”exact nature” of the test, including the type of missile used. Members of the Security Council met to discuss the missile launch on Tuesday afternoon, NPR’s Michele Kelemen reported. U. S. Ambassador to the U. N. Nikki Haley told reporters that the Trump administration had confirmed that Iran launched a   missile on Sunday, calling it ”completely unacceptable.” ”What I told the rest of the Security Council members is we are only as good as if we enforce what happens,” Haley said. The nuclear deal between Iran and six countries, including the U. S. was reached in July 2015 and required Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. The specific issue of ballistic missile tests came up during the nuclear negotiations. A U. N. Security Council resolution in 2010 had expressly prohibited Iran from ”any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches.” In the final days before the nuclear deal was reached, the biggest remaining obstacle was Iran’s desire to have U. N. weapons and missile sanctions rolled back, as The   reported.   of State John Kerry eventually agreed to a   side agreement to the nuclear accord. In place of an outright prohibition on missile tests, the agreement stated that Iran was ”called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.” A recently released status report on the nuclear deal and missile program from the International Crisis Group think tank described the missile language as ”” and concluded: ”Controversy and concerns over issues outside the nuclear accord, mainly Iran’s growing regional posture and   tests, have often overshadowed that the [nuclear accord’s] two key components  —   restricting and rigorously monitoring Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief  —   are working and delivering concrete results.” Acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner told The Associated Press on Monday that the U. S. was looking into whether Sunday’s reported missile test violated the side agreement, and that the U. S. would ”hold Iran accountable” if it did. The disagreement about what is and isn’t allowed under the agreement cuts both ways. After the nuclear deal lifted many sanctions on Iran last year, the U. S. government imposed new sanctions specifically targeting the country’s ballistic missile program, as we reported. ”Iran and the U. S. disagree over whether such penalties violate the nuclear accord,” NPR’s Camila Domonoske reported at the time. Iranian officials warned the U. S. that financial penalties would be viewed by Iran’s leader as a violation of the nuclear deal, but U. S. officials contended that    sanctions fell outside the accord. President Trump has attacked the nuclear deal. Addressing the   group AIPAC in March during the presidential campaign, he said, ”My No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Later, however, Trump advocated for renegotiating some parts of the deal or treating it as he would a bad business contract, ”policing that contract so tough that they don’t have a chance,” Peter Kenyon reported last fall."
749,"Breaking news is everywhere, 24 hours a day. And now, it’s made its way into an art gallery as well  —   in an exhibit called ”Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media.” In Los Angeles, a Getty Museum show examines artists’ reactions to mass media in decades past. The exhibit includes more than 200 photos and videos, from 17 different artists. They’re not photojournalists  —   these artists take the work of photojournalists, and turn it into something else. They appropriate images of terrorism, war, natural disasters. For two of the artists, the Vietnam War is a major theme They lifted deeply disturbing images from magazines, newspapers, TV screens, and collaged or manipulated them to reflect their horror at the war. (Caution: As you scroll down further, you’ll come to some of those disturbing images.) Martha Rosler clipped a Life magazine color photograph of a handsome 1960s living room, and on top of it, pasted a shot of a devastated, Vietnamese man carrying his   child. The sobering juxtaposition brings the war into the American living room. ”Often these images from Vietnam were appearing in the exact same issues as these interior scenes,” explains Arpad Kovacs, who curated the show. A reader could easily flip through the magazine and miss one or the other. But the artist intervenes. ”What it does is it makes America confront two different realities. . ..” says Kovacs. ”It’s very political, it’s very aggressive. But it’s meant to be. You know, a lot of these pictures initially circulated in underground magazines. These are pictures that are not on the fence. They really stake a claim and stand for something.” Rosler was a student of John Baldessari  —   the    artist is an iconic figure in the Los Angeles art world, with works in major American museums. He, too, manipulates photographs, adding text, and lettering. He once had students in his Conceptual Art class react to undated, uncaptioned news photos he pinned to a bulletin board. In one news picture, a uniformed man kneels, bending his face to the ground. He could be kissing the ground, or smelling the grass. ”You don’t know,” Baldessari says. Which is exactly the artist’s point  —   he wanted his students to ponder what was going on in the photo. Meaning is slippery, Baldessari says. There’s clear meaning, though, in the newspaper photographs Donald Blumberg uses in his art. During the Vietnam years, he had a photo show at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Police occupied the campus during an   student protest. A flying wedge of cops ran by, chasing the students. ”They were trapped in the stairwell of the campus and beaten with clubs,” Blumberg says. And for him, that was the last straw ”in thinking I was going to be a decorative, fine art photographer, doing beautiful photographs for people to look at.” He started clipping news photographs that captured the disaster in Vietnam. He enlarged, and then photographed page one of the New York Daily News  —   a photo of the massacre in the town of My Lai, with the headline, ”GI Shot Child, Walked Away.” Another headline reads ”Grenade Is Cut From Prisoner’s Face,” with the   of that face, and the lieutenant who dug out the live grenade with his pocket knife. Around each story, Blumberg shows a thick dark black frame  —   the black is in memoriam, like the black ribbon worn after a death in the family. ”I like to be as political as I can,” Blumberg says. ”One of the ways of being political is through my photography.” Every day we are bombarded by photographs  —   more images than we can possibly absorb. For Donald Blumberg and other photographers in this exhibition the magic of still photography is that it stops time. It gives viewers the chance to really look and think about what’s happening in our world. ”I think good art is always about something difficult. Art is more than a pretty picture,” Kovacs says. ”Good art is about sort of challenging the status quo and making a statement.” Through their photographs, these artists are bearing witness for future generations  —   those who weren’t there when the news actually broke."
750,"It’s the last day to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. And at   Health, a community health center near downtown Washington, D. C. people have been streaming in looking for help choosing an insurance plan. Katie Nicol is a senior manager who oversees the five   navigators whose sole job is to help people sign up for insurance coverage. ”We’ve been busy, you know, consumer after consumer all day,” she said in an interview Monday. She expects to be busier Tuesday. That may be surprising, given all the uncertainty surrounding the Affordable Care Act. Not far from   Republicans in Congress and President Trump are working to dismantle the health care law. Members of the House and Senate earlier this month took the first steps to repeal the ACA. Trump followed suit, issuing an executive order that asked his agency heads to do all they could to ease what he called the law’s ”burdens” on companies, insurers and individuals. So this could be the last enrollment day ever for Obamacare, which first provided coverage in 2014. Even so, as the midnight deadline to sign up for coverage approaches, Nicol says demand for insurance hasn’t waned. ”Our volume has been the same as it has been in past years,” she said. That tracks with the latest numbers released by the Department of Health and Human Services. As of Jan. 14, 8. 8 million people had signed up for coverage  —   slightly more than last year. Those numbers haven’t been updated since Trump moved into the White House on Jan. 20, so it’s unclear whether enrollments have picked up or slowed. At   Nicol says, her clients are worried about what’s next. ”We definitely have a lot of people coming in with a lot of anxiety surrounding the ACA and whether it’s still gong to be here just through the end of the year,” she said. She says they are reassuring people that insurance is available now and likely will continue to be available through the year. As for next year, who knows. That’s because Republicans have spent the last few months talking about repealing and replacing Obamacare, but details of a new plan have been sparse. The concern about the future that Nicol sees in D. C. is showing up across the country, says Jennifer Sullivan, vice president for programs at Enroll America, which works to get people affordable health insurance. ”Between action in Congress and actions from the new administration, consumers are confused,” she says. ”We are hearing that consumers are concerned and need clarification of what’s available.” In recent weeks, several polls have shown that with Obamacare threatened, more people view it more favorably. That’s likely at the top of the mind of many Republicans who are grappling with how to replace the ACA with a program that will insure at least as many people as the ACA."
751,"  health plans have been around for decades, bridging coverage gaps for people who are between jobs or have recently graduated from school, among other things. After the Affordable Care Act was enacted, some people gravitated toward the   plans because they were willing to trade comprehensive coverage for a cheaper sticker price  —   even if it meant paying a tax penalty for not having the comprehensive coverage required in the law. Sales increased sharply. Now, as Republicans look for ways to loosen the health law’s coverage requirements and explore the possibility of not enforcing the requirement that people have health insurance, sales of   plans may be poised to grow even more. If that happens, consumer advocates say it could be bad for consumers. As the policies’ name suggests,   plans provide coverage for a limited period, often six months or less. They generally don’t cover such things as   conditions, maternity services or prescription drugs. The policies typically have maximum coverage limits of about $1 million. Insurers can turn people down if they’re sick and may decide not to renew someone’s policy. All of these practices are prohibited in plans that qualify as individual insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Precisely because of these limitations, however, the premiums are typically a lot cheaper than those for   coverage. In the fourth quarter of 2016, the average monthly premium a shopper would pay for a   plan sold through eHealth. com was $124, compared with $393 for someone who bought a regular Obamacare plan and didn’t qualify for premium subsidies. When the health law passed, insurers increasingly began offering   plans that stretched the definition of ”short,” sometimes providing coverage for as long as 364 days. ”Carriers were exploiting a loophole in the law that defined a health insurance plan as one that was 365 days,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. ”If they were shorter they didn’t have to comply with ACA protections.”   plans serve a tiny but growing proportion of the roughly 22 million people who have coverage on the individual market. At the end of 2013, before the health law’s major reforms took effect, there were approximately 108, 800 people covered by these policies, which earned premiums of $97. 5 million, according to figures from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Two years later, roughly 148, 100 people had   plans and premium earnings had grown to $160. 5 million. Some insurers have taken notice. Online health insurance vendor Health Insurance Innovations launched Agile Health Insurance in the spring of 2015 to focus on sales of   plans. In the third quarter 2016, Agile sold 21, 000   policies. ”These   plans are not regulated like Obamacare plans, so carriers have a lot of flexibility in benefits and pricing,” said Sam Gibbs, Agile’s executive director. ”It’s almost like the old individual market before the ACA.” Not all insurers embrace widespread sale of   plans. ”The big health insurance companies are really mixed on this,” said Timothy Jost, professor emeritus at Washington and Lee University School of Law and a close watcher of the health law. ”They see this as a seriously destabilizing force in the market, this crap coverage.” Last October, the Obama administration issued a final rule that would make it more difficult for consumers to buy   plans to substitute for regular Obamacare plans. The regulation, which takes effect April 1, said   plans must be less than three months in duration. People can request a renewal of the policies, but insurers can turn them down. The policies and related materials also have to prominently display a warning that they don’t satisfy the law’s requirement that people have health insurance. Some hope that the rule may be changed or rescinded by the Trump administration or overturned by the new Congress under the   Congressional Review Act. Neither option can happen at the stroke of a pen, however. Health insurance brokers and agents would like to continue to sell     plans. ”Our folks do a lot of business with   plans,” said Marcy Buckner, vice president of government affairs at the National Association of Health Underwriters, an industry group. The regulation is one that the group will request that the Trump administration rescind. ”In most areas [a   plan] is cheaper, and it’s some consumers’ way of saying, ’I don’t need all of those things,’ ” said Buckner. Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Follow Michelle Andrews on Twitter: @mandrews110"
752,"He was Russia’s Mad Monk. A pale, bearded, wiry, horny,   debauch who was the preeminent power broker of the Romanov dynasty in its waning years. A party fiend, a drinker, a healer and a prophet who was poisoned, shot, drowned, and burned by his enemies. But was he really? The answer is, we will never know. The life of Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian peasant who, through a charismatic combination of spiritual and sexual power, rose to become chief mentor to Alexandra, the last czarina of Russia, is such a thick borscht of fact and fiction that it’s hard to distinguish the truth from the lies. But historian Douglas Smith, in his magnificently researched new book, Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs, attempts to do precisely that. It’s a herculean task, for as we soon learn, even when it comes to something as seemingly uncontroversial as food, there are competing versions of the truth. Did Rasputin have a sweet tooth? Was he a glutton who feasted on champagne,   expensive fish, and caviar? Did he really lick his fingers at the dinner table and hold them out for the grand dames of Saint Petersburg’s salons to kiss? As Rasputin’s notoriety spread and his hold over the lonely and impressionable empress tightened  —   she fervently believed he could soothe and protect her hemophilic son and heir to the throne, Alexei  —   whispers about him being a wicked, orgiastic cultist began to grow, as did his list of enemies. It was put about that the rube who once slurped on cabbage soup and raw garlic now glutted himself on the finest fruit, fish, caviar and champagne. It turns out that while Rasputin’s love of fresh fruit  —   oranges, strawberries  —   was real enough, the rest of the menu was made up. ”He did not eat too much or rich, heavy foods,” says Smith. ”He kept a simple table. It may have at times been loaded with fancy foods and drink, but these were gifts from admirers and petitioners trying to curry favor. He liked ukha  —  fish soup  —   and dark bread, radishes, onions and other plain vegetables. He drank tea, like nearly every Russian. Also, note that Rasputin never became fat or really even portly. His body remained trim his whole life.” His table manners, it is true, were alarming. His beard was flecked with food, he licked the spoon before using it to serve others, tore the bread and fish apart with his fingers and wiped them on the table cloth. Some were revolted by his crudeness, others saw it as part of his charm, and it’s quite possible that he exaggerated his gaucherie to set himself apart from the effete and mannered aristocracy. He cast such a spell on his worshipful female followers that they were known to kiss his freshly licked fingers, and vie for the leftover crusts of bread on his plate. It was Rasputin’s rootedness, however, that made him sensitive to the hunger pangs of ordinary Russians. He immediately recognized that the serpentine bread lines in Saint Petersburg  —   the food transportation system had broken down as a result of the First World War  —   were dangerous and contained the seeds of revolution. Genuinely stricken to learn that corn was rotting in the imperial warehouses while the people starved, he sent telegrams to Czar Nicholas II, who was away fighting the Germans on the front line, begging him to increase food supplies. But Nicholas  —   despite Rasputin’s missives, the labor strikes, the 300 percent inflation, and simmering anger in Moscow and Petrograd (the city ’s new name that replaced the   Saint Petersburg)  —   did nothing. Rasputin tried to get Alexandra to distribute food in the streets to show that she felt the people’s pain, and though she seemed agreeable, it never happened. He even wrote to senior government officials appealing for action  —   short, unpunctuated notes that testify to the sincerity of his pleas: kind dear apologies forgive me much meat is needed, let Piter [Petrograd] eat, listen help rosputin, kind dear apologies allow oats taken, much woe in zlaenburg province, lots of oats, Petrograd cart drivers are worried, that’s not good, Siberia is full of lard please feed Petrograd and Moscow, ”His notes were often scribbled and hard to decipher. His grammar and spelling were atrocious. His meaning was often hard to make out,” says Smith. ”But yes, Rasputin was very serious about the food problems in Petrograd. The czar did not heed his advice, regrettably.” Rasputin proved fatally prophetic. The February 1917 Russian Revolution was ignited by food riots, when hungry marchers stormed the legendary Filipov Bakery, whose delectable black breads, piroshky, kopeck buns, and chocolate cakes were daily delivered to the czar’s palace. The Cossacks, called out to quell the riot, refused to open fire. A petulant Alexandra, sounding like Marie Antoinette, relayed it all in a letter to her husband: ”They smashed Filipov’s bakery completely. . .. A hooligan movement, young boys and girls running about and screaming that they have no bread, only to excite. ..” By then, Rasputin, whom Alexandra lovingly called ”our dear Friend,” had been dead for two months  —   murdered in the early hours of Dec. 30, 1916 (Dec. 17, according to the Russian calendar then in use). Which brings us to his sweet tooth. Several biographies state that Rasputin was exceedingly fond of sugar  —   with one even citing his black teeth as proof. But his daughter Maria flatly states that her father disliked sweets. A trivial point of discrepancy  —   except that it has a bearing on how he died. The standard version is that Rasputin’s murderers, a group of monarchists led by Prince Yusupov, knowing of his supposed weakness for sweets, laced cakes and wine with cyanide and served them to him, and, when he miraculously survived the poison, shot him dead. So whom do we believe? Smith is unequivocal. ”I believe his daughter,” he says. ”The stories that he loved sweets come from    sources. Black teeth? Hard to say. I’ve never seen a single photograph of him with his mouth open. The love of sweets belongs, I would say, to the realm of myth.” And while it’s true that the    Rasputin was lured to a cellar and served cake and wine on his last night (perhaps Yusupov  Co. bought into the   myth as well) while Yankee Doodle played on the gramophone, neither contained any poison. The autopsy report said as much. ”As I write in the book, either no poison (real or fake) was used, or it was substituted for something else  —   maybe   aspirin,” says Smith. ”The entire description of the murder, which comes to us from the memoirs of Prince Yusupov, is highly unreliable, if entertaining.” Rasputin’s excessive fondness for Madeira is undisputed. ”Go on, drink, God will forgive you,” he would urge his dinner companions. ”I love wine,” he declared in 1916, by which time he had become a functioning alcoholic. His daughter Maria, while admitting that her father’s drinking was out of control, said he was far from a typical  . ”She noticed,” writes Smith, ”how he never spoke so beautifully about God as when he was drunk.” Nor dance so well. After a few glasses, Rasputin was known to leap to his feet in his tall, patent leather boots and dance with ecstatic abandon to the music of three minstrel gypsies who accompanied him to his evening parties. What comes as a surprise then, is to learn that the Madeira Monk supported the temperance movement, speaking out against the scourge of vodka and endorsing the Sobriety Society in his village. Smith spotlights this paradoxical nugget: ”I would not say I’m the first to write about this, but no previous biographer has explored it in such depth,” he says. ”It is a definite puzzle, given his own troubles with the bottle in his latter years. I’m still not fully certain how much of the press coverage about his support for the temperance movement was genuine or ’fake news.’ It’s difficult to say for certain.” Smith’s comprehensive biography portrays an intriguingly multifaceted figure who enjoyed power and had a seductive vitality, but who was also an earthy and compassionate family man. It’s a far cry from the demonic Rasputin of the irresistibly catchy 1978   song, with its fantastical claim that   Rasputin was a ”lover of the Russian queen” and ”Russia’s greatest love machine.” The former is salacious gossip. The latter is hard to prove, but in the succinct words of another historian, Robert K. Massie, ”He would send out for prostitutes late at night as people might send out for pizza.” Nina Martyris is a literary journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn."
753,"President Trump has gotten his man at the State Department. Rex Tillerson was approved by a   vote Wednesday in the Senate. Four senators who caucus with the Democrats crossed the aisle and joined all of the Republicans in voting for Tillerson. They were Democrats Mark Warner of Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, as well as independent Angus King of Maine. Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil  —   the world’s largest and most powerful oil company  —   will now guide American foreign policy and be tasked with enacting Trump’s world view. That worldview, however, isn’t entirely clear. Trump has expressed nationalistic and protectionist views and even isolationist tendencies, but he has also said the U. S. needs to do more about ISIS. He has promised to ”bomb the s*** out of them” and suggested it could potentially take 30, 000 troops to defeat them. In addition to his controversial travel ban instituted in the first days of his presidency, Trump has ordered the U. S. out of trade deals, threatened import tariffs with America’s adversaries (China) and allies (Mexico) questioned the importance of NATO, praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, said he thinks torture works and, during the campaign, floated the idea (that he later seemed to walk back) that perhaps more countries should have nuclear weapons to defend themselves without the U. S.’s help. Tillerson will be tasked with defending the United States under Trump around the globe, while walking the line when he disagrees. Tillerson faced tough questioning from Republicans and was almost derailed because of his relationship with Putin. But Tillerson talked tough in those hearings about Russia and, unlike Trump, said he fully believes Russia was responsible for the hacks and leaks of the Democratic emails during the presidential campaign. Tillerson, who has no diplomatic experience aside from his myriad international business ties as Exxon Mobil’s chief, will be tasked with overseeing the State Department bureaucracy. He is not   in the State Department, but those who have briefed him are sounding fairly upbeat about his management style. As CEO of Exxon Mobil, he oversaw a vast company with employees working in dozens of countries. The difference is that Exxon Mobil has one goal: drilling for oil and making money for shareholders. His job at the State Department may be especially complicated by apparent unrest in the ranks. NPR has reported that some 900 State Department officials signed a letter that went viral within the agency decrying Trump’s visa and refugee ban as not making America safer. And the White House isn’t making the task of internal diplomacy any easier for Tillerson. White House spokesman Sean Spicer on Tuesday urged American diplomats to ”get with the program” or go. But dissent is ingrained in State Department culture. In fact, the American Foreign Service Association, the professional association, gives awards every year for it. The State Department’s manual says there can be no retribution for employees who use the dissent channel, and some in Congress concerned about Spicer’s comments are now looking into ways to codify those protections. Trump, though, doesn’t exactly welcome dissent. While the new president is known for surrounding himself with differing factions  —   and even appeared to encourage his Cabinet nominees to have different points of view in their confirmation hearings  —   he also fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama holdover at the Justice Department, for speaking out against and refusing to defend the travel ban, and he said he has a ”running war with the media.” ”So much of the media seems to be the opposition party,” Trump said Wednesday, echoing his chief strategist Steve Bannon. He added, ”They’re very dishonest people.” At the State Department, Tillerson will be hearing from diplomats who are worried about where the Trump administration is heading and whether he and Trump will overlook human rights abuses in countries where Americans want to do business. So, the mood in the State Department is uneasy. The Trump administration nudged out several professional diplomats even before naming anyone to replace them. One example is Tom Countryman, a career foreign service officer who was acting undersecretary for arms control. He was on NPR’s Morning Edition Wednesday, where he echoed a very powerful retirement speech he gave Tuesday to the State Department. He noted that State employees proudly serve in both Republican and Democratic administrations and implied they are feeling sidelined now. ”We still have a duty,” he told the State employees. ”You have a duty  —   to stay and give your best professional guidance, with loyalty, to the new administration, because a foreign policy without professionals is  —   by definition  —   an amateur foreign policy. You will help to frame and make the choices. Because that is what we do. Our work is little understood by our fellow Americans, a fact that is sometimes exploited for political purpose. When I have the opportunity to speak to audiences across this amazing land, I explain, ’We do not have a Department of State, we do not have a foreign policy  —   because we love foreigners. We do it because we love Americans.” He also said something that directly relates to Trump (and perhaps even Tillerson). Countryman drew a distinction between business and diplomacy, and he seemed to dispute Trump’s foundational view of America. ”Business made America great, as it always has been,” Countryman said, ”and business leaders are among our most important partners. But let’s be clear: Despite the similarities  —   a dog is not a cat baseball is not football and diplomacy is not a business. Human rights are not a business. And democracy is, most assuredly, not a business.” He added, ”We want Americans to prosper, to sell the world’s best food and the world’s best products everywhere in the world. We want Americans to be protected and safe when they are abroad, whether they are missionaries, tourists, students, businessmen or (for those of you who have done consular work) the occasional false Messiah.”"
754,"Last week, President Trump signed an executive order suspending   admissions for 120 days and blocking travelers from seven   countries  —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   for 90 days. Syrian refugees are banned indefinitely. The move caused immediate controversy, sparking protests in cities and airports around the U. S. as federal authorities began enforcing the ban, preventing hundreds of travelers from boarding planes over the weekend. Other travelers and refugees landing in the U. S. have been detained or sent back. Federal judges quickly weighed in to issue temporary stays, and the future of the executive order will very likely be determined in court. The Trump administration has also come under criticism from scores of countries, including close allies. At the same time, a recent poll by   shows public opinion narrowly backing Trump’s action, with 49 percent of Americans agreeing with the order while 41 percent disagreed. NPR and dozens of member stations wanted to help the public understand where its lawmakers stand on the issue. Collectively, we searched for public statements on Twitter and Facebook, on lawmakers’ websites and in interviews with us in public media or other news organizations. We did this for each of the 536 members of Congress  —   100 senators, 435 voting members of the House, and the District of Columbia’s nonvoting House delegate. Overall, strong partisan lines are clear on the issue, with Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly opposed to the new travel restrictions many of them joined in the airport protests, and some called it a ”Muslim ban.” On the Republican side, members generally support the order, although significant numbers did not make public statements. A few Republicans, especially in the Senate, stated their opposition or offered mixed messages, with some critical of how the order was carried out. A few observations and notes on how we undertook this project:"
755,"Senate Republicans and conservative groups quickly rallied behind President Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, as Democrats focused on lingering anger over another jurist: Merrick Garland. ”I had hoped that President Trump would work in a bipartisan way to pick a mainstream nominee like Merrick Garland and bring the country together,” Sen. Patrick Leahy,  . a top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement in which he pledged a ”thorough and unsparing” confirmation process for Gorsuch. Democrats’ lingering anger over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to block any consideration of President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court almost a year ago is critical to understanding why Gorsuch’s nomination is likely to play out as an angry, partisan battle over an otherwise highly regarded jurist. Another Democrat, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, had already announced he would filibuster Trump’s nominee before it was made public. ”There is only one person in America who is a legitimate selection: Judge Merrick Garland,” Merkley said in a fundraising appeal Monday. By late Tuesday, another four Senate Democrats had already announced they would oppose his nomination: Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. ”Before even joining the bench, he advocated to make it easier for public companies to defraud investors,” Warren wrote on Facebook. ”As a judge, he has twisted himself into a pretzel to make sure the rules favor giant companies over workers and individual Americans. He has sided with employers who deny wages, improperly fire workers, or retaliate against whistleblowers for misconduct. He has ruled against workers in all manner of discrimination cases. And he has demonstrated hostility toward women’s access to basic health care.” Warren’s opposition will help galvanize progressive activists and groups against the nomination. ”Rewarding Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s nominee would be a total abdication of responsibility by Senate Democrats that would haunt them for the rest of their careers,” said Murshed Zaheed, political director for CREDO, a progressive communications company.   groups, including EMILY’s List and NARAL were also gearing up to oppose Gorsuch’s nomination. Senate Democrats are already battling the Trump administration over his Cabinet picks, a factor that has amplified partisan anger on Capitol Hill less than two weeks into the new administration. ”It is time to get over the fact that they lost the election,” McConnell said Tuesday of Democrats’ delay tactics. While Democrats’ can’t filibuster Trump’s Cabinet nominees, they can still force a   hurdle on Supreme Court nominees, and they intend to do so. Gorsuch’s nomination is likely to reignite debate over the ”nuclear option” in the Senate and whether the majority should force a rules change in the Senate to lower that threshold to 51 votes, as Democrats did in 2013 for all   Court executive branch nominees. McConnell generally opposes invoking the nuclear option, but an unpredictable political climate awaits. For their part, Republicans are lining up behind Gorsuch, who is cast as an intellectual heir to the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. ”By all accounts, he has the right temperament and experience for the job,” said Sen. Marco Rubio,  . who argued Republicans just won the White House and maintained control of Congress in an election in which Trump campaigned specifically on nominating a conservative to the court. ”On the issue of this Supreme Court nomination specifically, the American people gave the president and the   Senate a mandate to choose a successor to Antonin Scalia,” Rubio said. McConnell noted that Gorsuch’s 2006 nomination to the appellate court was approved by voice vote in the Senate, and he called on senators to ”respect the result of the recent election” and ultimately allow a vote on the nomination. Republicans have 52 votes in the Senate, and barring something unforeseen in the confirmation process, the party is likely to be unified behind Gorsuch. Senate Republicans say Gorsuch’s nomination could be ready for a Senate vote by early April, citing past confirmation timelines. Democrats have already indicated they’re in no rush. ”Judge Gorsuch has a long record, and it will take time to conduct a thorough review,” said Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein of California. ”At a time when public trust in our institutions is at an   low and our country is bitterly divided, a thorough and fair review is vitally important.”  "
756,"President Trump has two words of advice for Mitch McConnell when it comes to confirming Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: ”Go nuclear.” Trump was referring to the   nuclear option, whereby the Senate leader would change the chamber’s rules to prevent Democrats from filibustering the nominee. The president told reporters at the start of a White House meeting with conservative activists who support the nomination that Gorsuch ”will be a great justice.” He said it would be ”very dishonest” for Senate Democrats, who previously backed Gorsuch when he was nominated to serve on the U. S. Court of Appeals, to oppose him now for the Supreme Court. McConnell has previously stated that the decision whether to eliminate the filibuster is his and not the president’s decision and has indicated a reluctance to end the filibuster’s use unless absolutely necessary. To break a filibuster requires 60 votes, and the Republicans hold 52, meaning eight Democrats would also need to vote to end debate. ”If we end up with that gridlock” in the Senate, Trump said, he would tell McConnell, ”If you can, Mitch, go nuclear.”"
757,"President Trump has selected federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill a Supreme Court seat that has sat vacant for nearly a year, setting up a blockbuster confirmation hearing that could put the new White House’s domestic political agenda on trial in the U. S. Senate. The selection fulfills an early campaign promise by Trump to nominate a solidly conservative judge with a record of strictly interpreting the U. S. Constitution. Gorsuch, 49, sailed through an earlier confirmation process for a spot on the federal appeals court in Denver. Only weeks after his nomination in 2006, the Senate confirmed him by voice vote. The American Bar Association rated him as ”unanimously well qualified” at the time. Gorsuch has a sterling legal pedigree. He clerked for two Supreme Court justices, Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He also served as a clerk on the second most important appeals court in the country, in Washington D. C. for conservative Judge David Sentelle. Like Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he is in line to replace, Gorsuch has cultivated a reputation as a memorable and clear author of legal opinions. He also considers himself to be an originalist. Lawyers who practice before the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, where Gorsuch currently works, said he is a popular and approachable judge. SCOTUSblog, the leading Supreme Court blog, described some of Gorsuch’s parallels to Scalia as ”eerie.” ”He is an ardent textualist (like Scalia) he believes criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if that hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia) he is skeptical of efforts to purge religious expression from public spaces (like Scalia) he is highly dubious of legislative history (like Scalia) and he is less than enamored of the dormant commerce clause (like Scalia),” the blog wrote. Among other rulings that came to national attention, Gorsuch sided in favor of ”religious freedom” claims made by the Little Sisters of the Poor and the owners of the craft company Hobby Lobby, who challenged language in the Affordable Care Act that required them to pay for contraceptive coverage for employees. The Supreme Court backed those Hobby Lobby challengers, in a divided vote, in 2014. In a lecture to the conservative Federalist Society in Washington more than three years ago, Gorsuch elicited laughter from the audience as he quoted from the 1853 Charles Dickens novel Bleak House, referenced the work of the late novelist David Foster Wallace, and discussed irony and the law. ”Like any human enterprise, the law’s crooked timber occasionally produces the opposite of the intended effect,” he said. ”We turn to the law earnestly to promote a worthy idea and wind up with a host of unwelcome side effects that do more harm than good. . .. We depend upon the rule of law to guarantee freedom, but we have to give up freedom to live under the law’s rules.” Off the bench, Gorsuch in 2006 published a book called The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, criticizing the practice and defending the ”intrinsic value” of human life. He also contributed to The Law of Judicial Precedent last year."
758,"The remains of the world’s most destructive stone marten are now on display at a museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. On Nov. 20, 2016, the animal hopped over a fence at the $7 billion Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, touched a transformer and was electrocuted by 18, 000 volts. The marten died instantly. The collider, which accelerates particles to near the speed of light to study the fiery origins of the universe, lost power and shut down. ”There must have been a big flame,” said Kees Moeliker, the director of the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam and the man behind its Dead Animal Tales exhibit, where the preserved marten is now displayed. ”It was scorched. When you’re not really careful with candles and your hair, like that,” he explained. ”Every hair of this creature was kind of burned and the whiskers, they were burned to the bare minimum and especially the feet, the legs, they were cooked. They were darker, like roasted.” ”It really had a bad, bad encounter with this electricity.” The November incident wasn’t the first time a marten has sabotaged the vast scientific instrument. In April 2016, an animal originally thought to be a weasel and later guessed to be a marten, which is in the weasel family, appeared to have gnawed through a power cable, as we reported. (OK, to be fair, maybe that animal was really the world’s most destructive marten.) ”This was big news [in April]. The collider was out of work for a week, so they had other things on their mind than an excited museum director in the Netherlands,” explained Moeliker, who said he could understand why staffers at the collider weren’t able to provide him with the animal’s corpse. When it happened again in November, he was ready. ”We had a couple of people who got interested in the request from April, and we contacted them and they made sure [the corpse] wasn’t destroyed,” Moeliker said. He outfitted a car with a small refrigerator that plugged into the vehicle’s cigarette lighter, bought a block of ice at a local supermarket and drove to France’s border with Switzerland to pick up the carcass. ”It was in good condition,” he said. ”Well, for an electrocuted marten it was in good condition.” The exhibit also houses a sparrow that was shot to death after knocking over 23, 000 dominoes in the Netherlands in 2005, sabotaging a world record attempt. And a seagull that died after it flew into an ambulance. And a mallard duck known in the scientific community for its documented history of homosexual necrophilia. And a hedgehog that died after it put its head into a McDonald’s McFlurry cup and could not escape. And then there’s the smallest critter in the collection. A few years ago, Moeliker started collecting pubic lice after two British doctors alerted him that the animal might be endangered by habitat destruction associated with modern personal grooming habits. Moeliker said he has since provided specimens of human pubic lice to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ”The things we get are so surprising,” Moeliker said. ”Just before the stone marten we had a fish that lodged himself in the throat of a man.” The man had deliberately swallowed the catfish as part of a game with friends  —   they had reportedly worked up from goldfish to larger, more exotic species. But he didn’t know it was an armored catfish. When it entered the man’s throat, the catfish raised spines to defend itself, which did not save its life but did put the    man in the hospital for a week. ”I never thought we would get a fish . .. that had qualifications to be part of this show,” Moeliker remarked. ”Let me be clear, I prefer all wildlife to be happy and flying and crawling around alive,” he explained of the museum’s approach to the Dead Animal Tales exhibit. ”But if [an animal] has a story attached to it [that] shows how and when animal and human life collide, then they are welcome here. It’s only going to increase, the collisions between man and animal. We more and more share the same environment, the same habitat. Nature strikes back. We have to get used to it.”"
759,"The U. S. Embassy in Chile says it is sending an additional $740, 000 for protective equipment and firefighting tools, as the country continues to battle more than 70 active wildfires that have killed at least 11 people in the past two weeks. The latest contribution, announced Tuesday, brings the total wildfire aid to Chile from the U. S. government to $840, 000, including $100, 000 promised last week after Chilean President Michele Bachelet declared a state of emergency. Some of the U. S. funds were used to purchase personal hygiene kits for residents of the town of Santa Olga, on the central coast, which was completely destroyed by a fire last week. As The   reported: ”At least one body was recovered from the ashes in Santa Olga, according to Deutsche Welle, and about 6, 000 residents fled the city as the flames moved in. ” ’This is an extremely serious situation  —   of horror, a nightmare without an end,’ the mayor of the coastal city of Constitucion told the German broadcaster. ’Everything burned.’ ” ”We have never seen anything on this scale, never in the history of Chile,” Bachelet said last week. ”The truth is that the forces are doing everything humanly possible and will continue until they can contain and control the fires.” Drone footage published by the BBC over the weekend showed the skeletons of homes caught in the paths of blazes in the central region of Maule. The forest floor appeared white with ash, with only the charred remains of trees. About 20, 000 people are currently deployed to fight the blazes, including backcountry and local firefighters, military personnel and volunteers, according to Chile’s public safety department. According to Chile’s foreign ministry, at least 13 countries have sent people to help fight the wildfires, which are concentrated in the central and southern part of the country. The U. S. has sent four people, as has Japan. Panama, Russia, Colombia, Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, Spain, France, Venezuela and Argentina have all sent 20 or more firefighters. Argentina contributed the most manpower, with 130 people on the ground in Chile as of Wednesday. The Brazilian military has contributed a   aircraft to help fight the fires from above. The Russian government also sent an aircraft, according to Chile’s public safety department. As The   reported, a privately owned Boeing 747 ”supertanker” plane arrived last week in Santiago from Colorado, paid for by Fundación Viento Sur, which is part of the Walton Family Foundation and run by Ben Walton and his   wife, Lucy Ana Walton de Avilés. Earlier this month, NASA released images of the smoke from the fires, which is visible from space. The agency noted that the number of fires has increased in the past two years, going from ”roughly 5, 200 forest fires per season in the decade between 1990 and 2000, according to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization,” to ”more than 6, 700 fires during the 2015 —  16 fire season.”"
760,"Hours after Israel approved 3, 000 new settlement homes in the West Bank, Israeli security forces moved to evacuate settlers from an illegal outpost there, sparking scuffles. There’s been a clear uptick in the rate of settlement approval since Donald Trump was sworn in as U. S. president less than two weeks ago  —   and Trump is expected to be supportive of settlement expansion. Last week, Israel announced that it planned to build 2, 500 more homes for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Before that, it approved permits for 560 units in East Jerusalem. Settlements are seen as an obstacle to peace, an impediment to any future   deal, and are widely condemned by Palestinians and by the international community. There are many types of settlements  —   some are essentially large towns approved by the Israeli government, while others such as Amona, where the evacuation operation began midday Wednesday, are outposts built without government approval. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that Amona, located near the Palestinian city of Ramallah, ”was built on private Palestinian land and must be demolished,” The Associated Press writes. ”It set Feb. 8 as the final date for it to be destroyed.” ”On Tuesday, the Israeli army ordered residents to leave the outpost within 48 hours,” Haaretz reports. Today, police climbed the hill to initiate the operation, setting off a tense standoff and skirmishes with settlers and their supporters. Joanna Kakissis, reporting for NPR, was at Amona and this is what she saw: ”Many of the protesters traveled from other towns to prevent the evacuation of some forty families who have built their homes on this hilltop. ”They burned tires, slicked the roads with oil and helped families barricade themselves inside their homes. ”Ayelet Vidal, a    book editor and mother of four, sipped tea near her bookshelf. She said she’d stay until security forces physically carried her out.” Sixteen police officers and two civilians were injured in the melee, Haaretz says, adding that ”evacuation efforts were expected to last through the night.” Yesh Din, an Israeli organization that fought against the illegal outpost in court, hailed the start of the operation in a post on Facebook. ”We hope security forces and residents of the outpost will keep to a peaceful and   evacuation of the outpost,” it says. The group posted pictures of Palestinians who own the land, and said: ”After being prevented from accessing their land for twenty years, they are waiting to return.” The evacuation of Amona has been repeatedly delayed. Israeli authorities likely wanted to avoid the sort of violent clashes that occurred there in 2006 when troops attempted to dismantle eight empty homes. As NPR reported at the time, more than 300 Israeli soldiers and settlers were injured in the ensuing violence. Israel’s parliament is also expected to receive legislation next week which would ”retroactively legalise dozens of outposts,” according to Reuters. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports that proposed law, the wire service reports. Israeli   hardliners are finding reasons to celebrate these days: ”We have lost the battle over Amona but we are winning the campaign for the Land of Israel,” tweeted Naftali Bennett, leader of the   Jewish Home Party, according to Reuters. ”We are in a new period in which life in Judea and Samaria are back on track,” Defense Minster Avigdor Lieberman said in a statement, according to Haaretz. Judea and Samaria is the biblical name for the area that makes up the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has started ”urgent discussions” over the escalating pace of settlement expansion plans, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reports."
761,"President Trump used the occasion of a meeting with   supporters to launch into another attack on the news media Wednesday. At a photo op at the top of his meeting for Black History Month, Trump said that ”a lot of the media is actually the opposition party,” echoing a statement made by his adviser, former Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen Bannon, a few days ago. ”They really have to straighten out their act,” the president said, adding, ”We won so maybe they don’t have the influence they think.” Trump singled out CNN, which he said he doesn’t watch. ”I don’t like watching fake news,” he said, adding, ”Fox has treated me very nice.” In his remarks at an event billed as an ”African American History Month listening session,” Trump cited the erroneous  —   and quickly corrected  —   ”pool” report on Jan. 20 that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. that President Obama had placed in the Oval Office had been removed. Trump called it fake news and said ”the statue is cherished.” He said he was proud of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall, where, he said, people can learn about King and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, whom he called ”an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Trump also likened his announcement last night of his Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, to introducing a new product in the marketplace, calling it ”such a good launch.” Trump said his nominee was ”outstanding in every way. I think he’ll be very   it was a big evening, a very big evening.” Sitting next to Trump at the morning meeting was his nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson. Trump said heading up HUD is a ”big job that’s not only housing it’s mind and spirit.” Trump said his administration is ”going to work very hard on the inner city” and that Carson will be ”doing that big league, big time,” adding, ”that’s one of his big things that he’s going to be looking at.” Trump also returned to his election results, saying he ”ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years.” Among those attending the meeting was Darrell Scott, pastor of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland and, as Scott put it, a ”black Trump supporter.” Scott said he had been contacted by ”some of the top gang thugs in Chicago for a  .” The gang leaders reached out to him, Scott said, because they associated him with Trump. ”They respect you,” Scott told Trump. ”They believe in what you’re doing.” Scott said the gangs want to ”lower the body count” in Chicago, which has one of the nation’s worst murder rates. Updated Feb. 2 at 5 p. m. ET, Scott has since walked back his comments to Trump, after being criticized on social media. He said the ”gang thugs” that had met with him were actually three community activists, including Corey Brooks, who endorsed Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and was appointed to the state’s Tollway board. Our original post continues: Trump responded that what is happening now in Chicago ”shouldn’t be happening in this country,” adding that if officials there don’t act, then ”we’re going to solve the problem for them.”"
762,"As concerns over player safety mount, the national governing body for youth and high school football is considering a version of the game that could look radically different from what football fans might expect. It’s a leaner, less   game, focused on fostering   athletes and cutting down on the kinds of     hits that can leave parents cringing in the bleachers. It is also, for now, just a glimmer in the eyes of its creators at USA Football: The organization will be introducing new rules in a pilot run at select youth football programs across the country for the fall season. Here’s a breakdown of what players and parents can expect from the modified game, as told to NPR by USA Football Communications Manager Tom Yelich: Yelich bills the modified version of the game as the next step in developing youth football. ESPN, citing 2015 data from the Sports  Fitness Industry Association, reported that about 1. 23 million kids ages 6 to 12 played tackle football in 2015 in the same year, about 1. 1 million kids in the same age group played flag football, a   version. For Yelich, the new rules might offer a third way  —   a bridge between these two ends of the football spectrum. But he’s also careful to note these rules are still in development, by no means mandatory and currently without plans for a wide rollout. That will depend on how the pilot program goes, Yelich says. For USA Football, it appears be an attempt to protect its youngest players  —   who Yelich says can be as young as 7 or 8  —   and assuage parental fears about their safety, more and more scientific evidence points toward the lasting health problems incurred while playing the sport. As NPR’s Shots blog has reported, players are at relatively high risk of concussion in games and, somewhat surprisingly, even more so in practices. Concussions and repeated blows to the head have been linked to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease  —   a link that the NFL’s top health and safety officer acknowledged at a congressional roundtable last year. ”The earlier they started playing, the worse their brains fared later on,” Robert Stern, director of clinical research at the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center at the Boston University School of Medicine, told The New York Times. ”To me, it makes sense we would want to do everything we can to reduce or eliminate purposeful hits to the brain,” Stern continued. ”But if the culprit is the repetitive hits to the brain, that’s the starting point for making changes.” The modified game now under consideration would not be the first program instituted by USA Football in an attempt to curb injuries. In 2014, the nonprofit organization launched Heads Up Football, a series of primarily   clinics intended to teach players better form in tackling. That program  —   which the Times says has been less effective than hoped for  —   aims to reduce injuries by reforming the players. The new abridged version would aim to reduce them by reforming the rulebook instead."
763,"What’s the best time for students to have recess? Before lunch, or after? What happens if it rains? If students are misbehaving, is it a good idea to punish them by making them sit out recess? Those are just a few of the issues addressed in new guidelines designed to help schools have good recess. The recommendations come from a group called SHAPE (Society of Health and Physical Educators) America and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Recess might seem simple  —   just open the doors and let the kids run free. But only eight states have policies that require it, according to last year’s Shape of the Nation report. And when researchers started looking, they found very little consistency or guidance about what makes recess effective. The new guidelines, in two documents, offer educators a list of 19   strategies and a template to show them what a good recess policy looks like. Some of the suggestions seem obvious, like ”promote a physically active environment” or ”designate spaces for outdoor and indoor recess.” But there’s a point there. Without a designated indoor space, for example, schools might just cancel recess when it’s raining or snowing. Oh, and the answers to those other questions above? Before lunch is better, the guidelines say, because recess can make kids hungry, and thus more likely to eat healthy foods like fruits and vegetables. And maybe they won’t throw food away uneaten. And they say recess should never be used as punishment, because it deprives students of physical activity  —   which can be a   outlet. ”There’s a lot that has to be squeezed in[to] that time a student is in class,” says Michelle Carter, senior program manager at SHAPE who helped develop the guidelines. ”I don’t think there’s a value placed in recess and physical activity.” The guidelines seek to impress on schools that recess isn’t just downtime for educators or playtime for students. Research has shown that play helps students pay attention in class, prevents bullying and develops social and emotional learning. An evolving process  One school that has tried to put these guidelines into practice is Thomasville Primary School in Thomasville, N. C. The researchers at SHAPE and the CDC used the   through third grade school as a case study in developing the new policies. Alyson Shoaf, the school’s active living wellness coordinator, says the guidelines helped make recess part of the curriculum. ”There was really just nothing out there to help the   people support and implement this stuff,” she says. Before the new policy, Shoaf says, recess was often withheld from students as punishment. Teachers might be looking at their phones and not paying attention. And sometimes, students got into arguments. The new approach brought several key changes: creating special zones on the playground where teachers monitor students, scheduling teachers for recess duty and giving students access to the entire playground. The goals? More structure, more freedom and more fun. Initially, Thomasville’s principal wasn’t too wild about the idea. ”Absolutely not,” said principal Angela Moore. When Shoaf first brought the idea to her, Moore says the program seemed too structured, and she thought it would force the students to play games that didn’t interest them. But Moore says she changed her mind when she saw how much more active students were at recess. And how much more the teachers were involved. The numbers prove it was working: Schoolwide discipline referrals, she says, have declined  —   from more than 100 last school year, to 24 so far this year. If that pattern continues for the rest of the school year, Moore notes, it would be a roughly 50 percent drop. Alyson Shoaf says some teachers needed extra convincing, too. ”This was a process. It did not just happen overnight,” Moore says. ”And it’s still a process.” No equipment? No problem, A concern at some schools  —   especially in   neighborhoods  —   might be whether a structured recess program would require a lot of expensive equipment. Not so, says Michelle Carter of SHAPE. She’s a former physical education teacher, and she knows the struggle educators face when there are minimal resources. ”You don’t need equipment to have recess,” Carter says. ”If you have a place for them to go and you have adult supervision and this plan in place, you can have recess for students.”"
764,"Heading a soccer ball is both a fundamental skill and a dynamic way to score a goal, but research says it could be causing concussions along with player collisions. Players who headed a lot of balls, an average of 125 over two weeks, were three times more vulnerable to concussion than those who headed less than four in that time period, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. These   players reported having concussion symptoms like headache, confusion and even unconsciousness. This adds more cause for concern regarding traumatic brain injury in soccer, a sport already notorious for high concussion rates. The cause of these concussions, though, has been disputed. One study showed   contact was to blame for 69 percent of concussions in boys and 51 percent in girls. So some argue that changing the rules to limit heading would only reduce concussion by a small amount. ”Before banning heading, the focus should be to enforce existing rules prohibiting   contact,” says Dawn Comstock, an injury epidemiologist at the University of Colorado’s School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. ”That’s the main risk for head injury in soccer.” Still, others say that the risk that comes with headers is worth limiting as well —  especially when the effects of repeated,   head impacts aren’t exactly crystal clear. ”Over a quarter of a billion people play soccer all across the world,” says Michael Lipton, a professor of radiology and   sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and lead author on the study. ”So it’s key to understand the long term effects of headers, a skill unique to the sport.” Lipton adds that the smaller, more frequent impacts like those from heading a soccer ball often sneak under the radar compared to violent collisions, but they could still pose significant threats to brain health. To unearth what symptoms accompany heading a lot of soccer balls, Lipton and his colleagues had 222 amateur adult soccer players take web surveys over a   period. The surveys asked questions like whether they played indoors or outdoors, how many headers they did, if they unintentionally hit their heads and if they had any subsequent symptoms like headaches or confusion. After crunching the numbers, Lipton and his colleagues found that players who headed more had more concussion symptoms, a risk separate from aggressive player collision. Still, the work still bolsters the notion that soccer concussions are caused by    contact, which Lipton says shouldn’t come as a surprise. Overall, 35 percent of study participants reported accidentally hitting their head against other players or objects like goal posts. Another 16 percent said it happened more than once. These occurrences also produced symptoms of concussion in many participants, but Lipton reiterates that player contact and heading pose two individual risks to brain injury. As for the physical effects repeated   head impacts have on the brain, Lipton says it’s still unclear —  though his 2013 study found some players who headed over 1, 000 times a year had tiny structural changes in their brains. He’s planning to work more with the players from his most recent study to see if and how their brains change over time. To minimize any risks associated with   head hits, some organizations have taken steps to limit heading in soccer leagues. And the concern grows for kids, as research shows their concussion symptoms linger around longer than adults’ and likely pose risks to their brain development. For that reason, some youth leagues saw heading eliminated for players 10 and under. As for a universal soccer   to limit headers, Lipton says they’ll need more evidence before tackling the world’s favorite sport. Comstock says she hopes this research doesn’t make parents pull their kids from soccer teams. ”The benefits of sports greatly outweigh the potential that any child will sustain an injury.”"
765,"Genetically engineered crops are nothing new. But emerging technology that allows scientists to alter plants more precisely and cheaply is taking genetically engineered plants from the field to the kitchen. The first version of the Arctic Apple, a genetically modified Golden Delicious, is headed for test markets in the Midwest in February, according to the company that produced it. It is the first genetically engineered apple, altered so that when it is cut, it doesn’t turn brown from oxidation. Okanagan Specialty Fruits, based in British Columbia, Canada, wouldn’t say exactly where the apples will first be sold, but says the target consumers are those interested in convenience. ”The rapid expansion of the   industry  —   bagged carrots,   salads  —   has led to explosive growth of fresh cut produce,” says Neal Carter, president of the company. ”I can cut this up for my kid’s lunch box . .. and it doesn’t go brown and they’ll actually eat it.” The Arctic Apple is one of the first foods often termed a ”genetically modified organism” (GMO) to be marketed to consumers, not at farmers. And it’s a sign of how the science of genetic engineering is evolving. The first genetically engineered crops were global commodities like corn, soybeans and cotton. They were ”transgenic,” meaning they were resistant to pesticides or insects after scientists transferred new DNA into the plants. ”We were taking DNA sequences from another, often   species, and moving it into plants,” says Sally Mackenzie, a plant geneticist at the University of  . In contrast, new crops are ”cisgenic.” They work within a plant species’ own genome. ”The next generation of technologies, those being implemented now  —   including the new apple  —   we’re not introducing foreign DNA any longer,” Mackenzie says. The Arctic Apple uses a technology called RNA interference, sometimes called gene silencing. The target is the gene in the apple that controls production of the enzyme that makes it turn brown. When scientists add an extra strand of RNA, that gene is effectively switched off, or silenced. ”We’re basically   a gene that’s already within that apple,” Mackenzie says. ”So I see that as entirely different. And I think it’s important for the average consumer to recognize technologies have moved on.” Advances like gene silencing and other gene editing methods, like CRISPR technology, make biotech   cheaper and more precise than the first generation of genetically engineered crops. New technologies are also less expensive for companies when it comes to federal regulations, as the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration require fewer costly tests. Huge companies like Monsanto have dominated the industry, Mackenzie says, in part because of the high cost of regulations. Old biotech crops were aimed at big commodities in large part because it was a sure way to recoup that investment. Engineered plants that don’t introduce new genes don’t face the same regulatory hurdles. Groups critical of GMO technology want to see stronger regulations in order to evaluate potential   impacts of biotech crops on health and the environment. Federal agencies are reviewing their rules around GMOs to catch up with the technology. Under the current regulatory structure, however, it is more economically viable, Mackenzie says, for smaller biotech companies to market their own innovations. ”You’re going to see more and more traits coming out that are really consumer friendly, designed to respond to consumer demand,” Mackenzie says. Corn will still get plenty of attention from plant breeders, but more companies may shift their focus from field to fridge. Most genetically engineered crops are processed into ingredients in foods, so when we eat them they are a few steps removed from the field  —   think soybean oil in salad dressing or corn syrup in soda. When the Arctic Apple hits the produce aisle, however, it will be one of the first GMOs to reach consumers directly, but it is not the only one. A   Rainbow papaya is already on the shelf. So is Simplot’s   russet, called the Innate potato. The fruit company Del Monte has approval for a pink pineapple engineered to carry more lycopene, an antioxidant that supports the body’s defense system. The labels on packages of Arctic Apples won’t say much about GMOs. They will have a   snowflake logo, and a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to reach a website with information about the science. That fits within the framework of a GMO labeling law passed by Congress last year, but it makes genetic engineering in food less obvious than many consumer groups have called for. The vast majority of consumers support clear labels on foods that contain GMO ingredients, just as the vast majority of scientists agree that they are safe to eat. For stores that may sell biotech fruits and vegetables, it pays to be up front with shoppers that these foods are genetically engineered. ”Transparency is what everything is about,” says Joan Driggs, editorial director of Progressive Grocer which covers the grocery business. ”Any retailer or manufacturer has to be transparent with their customer.” The big question for the biotech industry: Once consumers know how these apples are created, will they care? The Arctic Apple’s test run will last through March. Okanagan Specialty Fruits expects a wider commercial release this fall. This story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration focused on food and agriculture. "
766,"International humanitarian aid organizations say the travel restrictions issued by President Donald Trump on Saturday could have a dramatic impact on how they operate. The Trump executive order temporarily bars all refugees and suspends  —   for the next 90 days  —   entry to the U. S. by citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The White House says the order was intended to protect the nation from ”foreign terrorist entry.” But the order raises many questions about the ability of aid workers to move around quickly and freely if they have ties to any of the banned countries. ”To function, humanitarians need visas and access,” says Sam Worthington, CEO of InterAction, a coalition of global aid groups. We spoke with several aid groups that work in the listed countries about the possible effects on their workers. 1. Aid groups are restricting employee travel. The executive order is clear about restrictions for anyone holding a passport from one of the seven restricted countries  —   and about exceptions. Some visa categories, like diplomats and U. N. workers, are excluded. But there’s a lot of ambiguity in the executive order on how individuals  —   U. S. citizens or otherwise  —   can travel to and from the seven banned countries, says Nick Osborne, vice president of international programs for CARE, a global aid group. At the least, Americans traveling to and from those seven countries could face scrutiny when returning to the U. S. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Reince Preibus said: ”If you’re an American citizen traveling back and forth to Libya, you’re likely to be subjected to further questioning when you come into an airport.” CARE has asked its U. S. government contacts to clarify the executive order, wrote Holly Frew, CARE’s emergency communications manager, in an email to NPR. Because of the uncertainty surrounding the order, CARE has placed immediate travel restrictions on their staffers. For example, U. S.  employees from the seven nations aren’t being authorized to leave the country at this time. As an added precaution, U. S. citizens employed by CARE, either at home or abroad, are not to travel to any of the seven countries, wrote Frew. Oxfam, an international charity organization, says they’ve had to rearrange travel plans for American employees and nationals of the listed countries. The group is concerned about   impact on the movement of staff, says Emily Bhatti, press officer of Oxfam America, The lack of clarity could make it hard for groups to quickly deliver aid if a crisis were to arise. For CARE, the brewing food crisis in Somalia is top of mind. ”We need to be able to deploy staff within 72 hours,” says Osborne, citing the need for    employees like water and sanitation experts or logisticians who can map out food transport. ”If we can’t do that, people are going to suffer.” 2. For the next 90 days, aid workers who are citizens of the seven banned countries will not be able to travel to the U. S. In many countries, local staffers make up much of the crew that operates aid projects on the ground  —   especially in countries where ongoing conflicts put foreign nationals at risk. Many times, these employees have crucial,    knowledge that shapes aid strategy. These staffers come to the U. S. for many reasons. Save the Children, for example, brings experts from various countries to meet with members of Congress and U. N. officials, share knowledge with American colleagues and tell their stories to journalists  —   including NPR reporters. Last March, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Syrian civil war, Save the Children brought in an expert from a partner organization in Syria that specializes in education, health and nutrition. ”Jiddah,” as she was called  —   she used this alias for safety reasons  —   shared the conditions children and families were facing in the besieged areas. This March, the group was planning to bring to the U. S. two Syrian experts on mental health to speak at the launch of a report on the effects of civil war on children. The travel ban would make this virtually impossible. Since the executive order was signed, Oxfam has had to cancel upcoming visits from citizens of the listed nations, says press officer Bhatti. Skype and phone calls are no substitute for real    engagement, says Michael Klosson, vice president of policy and humanitarian response at Save the Children. These encounters, he says, are ”much more meaningful than strangers meeting over a conference call.” 3. Trump’s ban could cause other countries to place travel bans on U. S. workers. There’s a chance the seven countries may restrict Americans from entering their countries. If that were to happen, aid workers would likely be affected. Unlike diplomats or U. N. employees, aid workers don’t have special visas that ensure safe passage when traveling. ”In today’s environment, where the U. S. is issuing executive orders that put up barriers, we could expect that Sudan or Iraq or others will begin to make it more difficult for individuals who are providing aid to come to their countries, too,” says Worthington of InterAction. In response to the executive order, Iran and Iraq have both called for reciprocal measures. In a statement earlier this week, the foreign affairs ministry of Iran called the restrictions ”insulting” and said they would take ”proportionate legal, consular and political action and . .. will take reciprocal measures in order to safeguard the rights of its citizens.” The Iraqi government is considering suspending visas for American citizens. Currently, the group has one American employee working in logistics in Mosul, where he manages aid sites and procures aid goods to distribute. ”What would we do if that staff member [leaves the country and] can’t get back to Iraq?” says Klosson of Save the Children. ”Where can we find that expertise that the staff member has?”"
767,"Many travelers were detained in airports after President Trump signed an executive order that temporarily prohibits people from seven   countries from entering the U. S. The order caused widespread chaos and confusion at airports as protesters crowded terminals and agencies struggled to interpret the new rules. Caught in the middle were the airlines, which were not only dealing with passengers denied entry, but with their employees who might violate the travel ban, too. ”We actually did have some flight attendants who were detained in the process, flight attendants who can legally fly in and out of the country today for U. S. airlines or who are based in the U. S.,” says Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. ”These flight attendants, we have to remember that they are subject to background checks, they are subject to a security clearance that is required for them to do this work,” she says. Not only must airlines enforce stringent  . 11 screening for their employees, but flight crew members who aren’t U. S. citizens already need a special visa to enter the U. S. Now airlines are scrambling to juggle staffing to assure no flight crew members working U. S.  flights are from the seven countries singled out in the executive order. ”I think the order really came out as something as a surprise, both in its breadth and its speed to the airline community,” says independent airline industry consultant John Strickland. ”Airlines are by their nature global businesses,” he says. ”They employ people from many countries and passport origins.” Strickland says the executive order is especially difficult for airlines, such as Qatar Airways and Emirates, that are based in the Middle East. Those companies now have to quickly check the birthplaces and backgrounds of all their crew members, to make sure that those from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are not working on flights headed to the U. S. ”When you’re talking about a   airline with crews in different parts of the world and aircraft in different parts of the world, that’s really somewhat like jelly trying to get your hands on it,” he says. Airlines had no advance notice of the president’s action, says Jason Sinclair, spokesman for the International Air Transport Association. ”The executive order was issued without prior coordination or warning, causing confusion among both airlines and travelers,” he says. ”It also placed additional burdens on airlines to comply with unclear requirements, to bear implementation costs, and to face potential penalties for noncompliance.” Those costs include airfare refunds to customers who are told they cannot board, or who cancel because of the chaos. Airlines want clarity from the administration, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly tried to provide some on the new travel restrictions in a news conference Tuesday. Kelly denied reports that even he wasn’t given details of the executive order until the president signed it, and said it will remain in place. ”We cannot gamble with American lives,” he said. ”I will not gamble with American lives.” Kelly suggested some of the new restrictions could be extended, and that some of the countries currently on the list may not be taken off of it anytime soon."
768,"Days after fire destroyed the Victoria Islamic Center in Victoria, Texas, donations to rebuild the mosque have passed $1 million. And that’s only one part of the support the mosque has received: Four churches and a synagogue say Muslims are welcome to hold services in their buildings. ”Our hearts are filled with gratitude for the tremendous support we’ve received,” wrote campaign organizer Omar Rachid, who attends the mosque. ”The outpouring of love, kind words, hugs, helping hands and the financial contributions are examples of the true American Spirit and Humanity at its best with donations coming in from all over the world.” With donations far surpassing the center’s goal of $850, 000, the fundraising page does indeed show a wide range of donors  —   including, on Wednesday, a man who described himself as an atheist Jew. ”But I send you my very best wishes and solidarity,” the donor, Vincent Graff, wrote. ”From one human to another, here’s to hope and kindness.” The financial support mirrors the Texas community’s efforts to support the mosque and its congregation. Hours after a raging fire gutted the building in the darkness of early Saturday, hundreds of people gathered for a prayer rally at the site. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, though the mosque has previously been targeted by vandals. With a congregation of fewer than 150 people, the mosque’s building was never insured, the Victoria Advocate reports. The newspaper’s Jon Wilcox, who reported from the scene as the mosque burned, told Texas Standard that it looked like an inferno. Later, he watched as supporters met to show solidarity. ”The reaction there was just overwhelming,” Wilcox said. ”Lots of tears. Very emotional. Support at that rally and also outside the rally . .. four churches and a synagogue in Victoria have offered the mosque to allow them to use their own property for worship services.” Discussing his synagogue’s offer to host Muslim services, Robert Loeb, the president of the town’s Temple B’Nai Israel, told the Forward website that in Victoria, ”everyone knows everybody. I know several members of the mosque, and we felt for them.” The synagogue’s offer prompted a Muslim woman who lives in Texas to write on the temple’s Facebook page, ”On behalf of the Muslim Community, I would like to thank you.” She later added, ”I am proud to call you all my brothers and sisters. Thank You!”"
769,"Updated 1:15 p. m. ET, A day after Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee boycotted votes to advance the nominations for President Trump’s nominees to lead the departments of the Treasury and Health and Human Services, the panel’s Republicans met in a surprise meeting Wednesday morning and voted to suspend committee rules to vote on those nominees without Democrats present. Sen. Orrin Hatch,   the chairman of the Finance Committee called the Democrats’ boycott ”the most pathetic thing.” Opening the meeting, Hatch said, ”We took some unprecedented actions today due to the unprecedented obstruction on the part of our colleagues.” Democrats consider the move in violation of longstanding rules on the finance committee, which require one member of each party present. Sen. Sherrod Brown,   posted a photo of empty seats in the committee room and said the Democrats were standing with people ”hurt by the abusive practices of Mnuchin’s bank.” Democrats boycotted yesterday, saying they had new ethical questions about both Treasury   Steven Mnuchin and HHS   Tom Price, as we reported: Price has been under a cloud of controversy for weeks over questions about whether he properly disclosed stock trading of a biomedical company, which says the congressman was able to purchase with a discount, according to the Wall Street Journal. As for Mnuchin, he faces more questions about his role in the foreclosure crisis as the head of OneWest Bank. As NPR’s Yuki Noguchi reported when Mnuchin testified before the committee earlier this month, he was grilled by Democrats ”for his role as CEO of a company that took over IndyMac Bank, now known as OneWest, which failed because of its bad home loans and later pushed through many controversial foreclosures, ultimately yielding massive profits for Mnuchin.” The Columbus Dispatch reported over the weekend that Mnuchin ”flatly denied in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee that OneWest used ’ ’ on mortgage documents. But records show the bank utilized the questionable practice in Ohio.” Hatch defended both nominees this morning. ”Dr. Price’s account of the investment hasn’t really been substantially refuted, let alone disproven. But, my colleagues claim that their misinterpretation of his testimony is grounds for an indefinite delay on his confirmation,” he said. Hatch also said the Mnuchin controversy is moot because there is ”no fixed definition” of  . Consumer advocates and the financial services industry have differing views on the term. Democrats have insisted that their issue with these nominees is strictly the issues they’ve raised, though Hatch accused them of being ”ready to leap off whatever cliff” that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asks them to. Schumer broke with   Senate decorum yesterday by voting against Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for Transportation Secretary. She was approved  . The minority party, with virtually no legislative power to block Trump Cabinet nominees as was illustrated this morning, is under pressure from liberal voters to do whatever they possibly can to stop Trump’s nominees from being approved. Democrats did stage another boycott against the committee vote for Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who sued the agency over   regulations as Oklahoma Attorney General and has expressed skepticism of climate change. That vote was supposed to occur Wednesday morning in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. GOP committee chairman Sen. John Barrasso,  . called the move ”political theater,” and said there would not be a vote today, declining to force a vote in the way Hatch did. He also said Democrats were simply stalling because they don’t like Pruitt’s views. Sen. Tom Carper,  . said he didn’t like that Pruitt would not definitively say whether he’d recuse himself from the lawsuit by the State of Oklahoma that he had filed as attorney general against the EPA if he were leading the agency. The real fight could come now with Trump’s nomination of a Supreme Court justice. Federal Judge Neil Gorsuch will need 60 votes to clear a procedural hurdle needed for confirmation. That threshold was removed for lower court nominees and cabinet positions in 2013. While the Democrats boycotted the Price and Mnuchin committee votes, they did allow other panels to move ahead on Trump nominees including Betsy DeVos for education secretary, Rick Perry for energy secretary and Ryan Zinke for interior secretary. Democrats have delayed the final floor vote on Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, but Rex Tillerson was set to be confirmed Wednesday afternoon."
770,"When House and Senate Democrats held a rally Monday night to oppose President Trump’s executive order on refugees and immigrants, the crowd wasn’t all on their side. Pockets of, ”Do your job!” jeers broke out, as did chants of ”Walk the walk.” A vocal wing of Democrats’ progressive base is growing increasingly frustrated that the minority party can’t seem to do much to stop Trump’s agenda. In fact, several progressive activists view the bipartisan votes for Trump Cabinet picks, like Defense Secretary James Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as signs that many Democrats are failing to put up a fight. That’s despite contentious confirmation hearings and the Trump White House complaining that it’s not getting its nominees through faster. Democrats are hamstrung when it comes to stopping the Cabinet picks. Aside from procedural delays, the elimination of the filibuster (the   threshold to advance nominees) has meant Democrats are powerless to fully stop Trump’s picks unless multiple Republicans oppose them, too. No Democrat appears immune to the criticism, Even Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren found herself writing a defensive Facebook post after being criticized for voting for Ben Carson’s Housing and Urban Development nomination in committee. And despite taking the unprecedented step of testifying against the fellow senator’s nomination in committee, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has found himself answering Twitter critics demanding to know whether he’ll stand up to Sen. Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general. Protesters disrupted an event organized by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse this weekend, and on Tuesday night, a rally titled ”What The F*** Chuck” was scheduled for outside Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home. A liberal Tea Party? In nearly every Senate office, phones are ringing off the hook with pleas to vote no  —   or do more to try to block Trump’s picks. Democrats argue that the bulk of Trump’s Cabinet picks are being delayed, and that less controversial nominations, like Mattis’ are being treated much differently than   Trump picks, like Rep. Tom Price for Health and Human Services secretary or Steve Mnuchin for Treasury. But that appears to be falling on deaf ears. A lot of the outreach has been prompted by the Indivisible Guide, an organizing project launched by former Democratic congressional staffers that is aimed at mimicking the successful Tea Party movement, but on the Democratic side. In the wake of Trump’s executive action on immigration and refugees, Indivisible organizers put together a conference call, urging people to ask their senators to do everything they can to walk back Trump’s order. ”One thing we want to make clear is, if you’ve got what you think is just a good, progressive senator, and they’ve made a nice statement saying they don’t support the ban, that’s not enough,” Indivisible   Ezra Levin told the call. ”And they can do much more. There are Senate procedural tools available to them that if they chose to implement them, they could slow down the Senate, or even stop all action in the Senate, which will go a long way to actually ending this ban.” Feeling the pressure, The fact is, many Democrats are appalled at the idea of grinding the government to a halt. Talking about the party’s tactics Tuesday, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown made sure to clarify that ”there’s not a plan to   or slow things down the way that Mitch McConnell did on   everything” when McConnell was the Republican minority leader. Still, as base pressure has ramped up, Senate Democrats appear to be changing their tactics. Schumer made waves in the   Senate on Tuesday by voting against Elaine Chao’s nomination as transportation secretary. In addition to being a member of multiple previous Republican administrations, she’s also married to McConnell. And Tuesday morning, Brown and other Democrats on the Finance Committee boycotted a meeting, in order to deny a quorum call and block votes for Price and Mnuchin. That’s not a permanent fix for Democrats. The committee will eventually meet, and the two nominees will likely be confirmed. But unlike Trump’s Cabinet, Democrats still do have filibuster power when it comes to Neil Gorsuch, the president’s pick for the Supreme Court. ”Make no mistake, Senate Democrats will not simply allow but require an exhaustive, robust, and comprehensive debate on Judge Gorsuch’s fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice,” Schumer said Tuesday night in a statement. The real test of whether Democrats are listening to these calls for more   stances? Whether and when the caucus allows for an actual vote on the court nominee."
771,"It’s an Indian dish you’re unlikely to find in India. Bunny chow is essentially a kind of bread bowl. You take a loaf of white bread, hollow out the middle and fill it with a curry, either vegetarian beans or some type of meat. But not rabbit. The name ”bunny” comes from the corruption of an Indian term referring to merchants. The dish has its origins in Durban, South Africa’s   city. ”It’s not known by Indian communities outside of South Africa,” says Rajend Mesthrie, a linguist at the University of Cape Town who has looked into its history. There are only a handful of places in the U. S. where you can order bunny chow. It’s a   dish that remains best known in its hometown. But bunny chow is classic fusion cuisine, in the sense that it resulted in the meeting of two disparate cultures  —   if not necessarily a happy meeting. There are many stories about how bunny chow originated, but the one cited most often describes it as a totally portable dish served up to black people under apartheid, South Africa’s 20th century system of racial separation. ”Bunny chow started as a way of selling food to black people who weren’t allowed to eat in certain restaurants during apartheid,” says Ameera Patel, a novelist who lives in Johannesburg. ”The bread was used as a holder, or a plate, so that nothing needed to be returned after eating.” Indians started coming to South Africa in large numbers during the 19th century. At first, starting in the 1860s, Indians were brought as indentured servants to work in the sugar cane fields around Durban. They were followed soon after by ”passenger Indians,”   because they paid their own way, coming to work as artisans or merchants. In those days, Indian cooks couldn’t find all the ingredients they used at home. The spice mix in a Durban curry remains distinct from what you’d come across in Delhi. And South African Indians made do with white bread flour as a substitute for chickpea or rice flour. In Imraan Coovadia’s novel, The Wedding, the    couple practically subsists on bunny chow after arriving in Durban in the 19th century. But Mesthrie and other scholars suggest that the dish was most likely created many years later, probably after World War II. ”I had no idea of the history of it,” Coovadia concedes. ”It was part of the Durban life I knew growing up.” Coovadia notes that the vast array of Indian cultures and castes were flattened upon arrival in South Africa. There, everyone became just Indian. The term ”bania” came from the Sanskrit word for merchant. ”From the ’bania man shop’ came the ’bunny man shop,’ and from bunny man shop came the bunny chow,” says Dilip Soni, a jewelry maker in Durban. Soni says the story he heard growing up was that beggars would come at the end of the day to ask for leftover food. The cooks didn’t have time to make them sandwiches, so they would dig out some bread and fill it with curry. Billy Mowbray, whose father opened the Victory Lounge in Durban in 1948, confirms that account. The more commonly told story, however, involves apartheid. The system, which was formally put in place in 1948 and ended a   ago, not only separated black and white people, but also Indians and ”colored” people (still the term used for   individuals in South Africa today). Every major city in South Africa has its ”suitcase sandwich,” some overstuffed creation that’s a meal put between slices of bread, such as the Gatsby in Cape Town or kota in Johannesburg. The very term kota suggests a link to bunny chow, Mesthrie says, because it’s a corruption of ”quarter.” Bunnies are generally ordered by size, such as a quarter loaf or half loaf. You would say ”quarter mutton” to order a quarter loaf of bread filled with lamb. ”There’s a whole range of all this food, a quarter loaf of bread dug out and filled with chips and bologna or all sorts of combinations,” says Panashe Chigumadzi, a Zimbabwean novelist and essayist who lives in South Africa. She notes that these dishes speak to the degradation of the black diet under apartheid, with the cheapest cuts, such as chicken feet and sheep’s heads, morphing over time into delicacies. ”This is a heart attack in a quarter loaf of bread,” Chigumadzi says. Mowbray says most of his black customers don’t order bunnies because they’re too expensive, even though, by American standards, they’re a huge bargain. (A mixed veg or sugar bean bunny sells for 15 rand at the Victory Lounge, which is about $1. 10, while the braised mutton goes for 48 rand, or about $3. 50.) ”The black regular workers around here, it’s quite pricey for them,” Mowbray says. ”They get a quarter (loaf of) bread and butter in the center, with a cup of tea. That’s fine for them.” Black workers subsisting on bread and soda for many meals are common all over the country. Even today, Coovadia says, there’s something transgressive about white people ordering   black or Indian bunny chows. ”It’s an exotic eating adventure,” Coovadia says. ”If you’re respectable, you definitely don’t eat with your hands.” Theoretically, it’s possible to eat a bunny chow with a knife and fork, but that’s like a New Yorker eating a slice of pizza using utensils. There’s an ad that’s been airing on Lotus FM, an Indian station in Durban, in which a couple argues about whether it’s ever OK to eat a bunny with a knife and fork. ”No, not each one to his own!” the man insists, arguing that some things are just beyond the pale. The ad turns out to be a public service announcement, noting that violence against women and children is also entirely unacceptable. Eating a bunny, with the sides of white bread growing increasingly soggy, can quickly turn messy. Zane Drew, one of the owners of Amawele’s South African Kitchen in San Francisco, worried about trying to sell bunny chows to his downtown food court clientele when the shop opened three years ago. ”You’ve got to eat bunny chow with your hands,” he says. ”This is the financial district and everyone is wearing suits and all that.” In South Africa, curries are contained within the bread loaf. At Amawele, the meat and sauce are served overflowing the sides. Nevertheless, it’s become a popular item. On a recent Friday afternoon, customers ordering it ranged from Americans who’d never heard of it before but found it intriguing on the picture menu board, to a young woman from South Africa who’s been living in San Francisco as a nanny and was overjoyed to be encountering her first bunny in a year. ”It blew up, bigger than we expected,” Drew says. ”Way bigger. I’m really proud it’s selling the way it does.”"
772,"When scientists first read out the human genome 15 years ago, there were high hopes that we’d soon understand how traits like height are inherited. It hasn’t been easy. A huge effort to find   genes so far only explains a fraction of this trait. Now scientists say they’ve made some more headway. And the effort is not just useful for understanding how genes determine height, but how they’re involved in driving many other human traits. At first, these problems didn’t seem to be so complicated. The   monk Gregor Mendel discovered that traits in his garden peas, like smoothness and color, could be passed predictably from one generation to the next. But Joel Hirschhorn, a geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Broad Institute, says it became evident that most stories of inheritance were not so simple. Height turns out to be a prime example. ”People’s height didn’t behave like Mendel’s peas,” Hirschhorn says. ”It wasn’t like they you had two tall people and they’d either have a tall [child] or a short [child]. Often the child was partway between the parents.” Scientists explained this 100 years ago, when they realized that height was influenced by many genes, and each makes a small contribution. So when the human genome was sequenced, scientists like Hirschhorn thought they could plumb that data to track all the height genes, and finally understand how height  —   and in fact most other human traits  —   are shaped by our genes. That effort started slowly. But now, Hirschhorn says. ”for height there are about 700 variants known to affect height, each of them usually with a pretty small effect on height, usually like a millimeter or less.” That massive global effort has involved studying the genes of more than 700, 000 volunteer subjects. Even so, the traits they’ve found only explain about a quarter of the inherited height factors. And, frustratingly, for most of those variants scientists have no idea what they actually do. Mostly the variants crop up in mysterious bits of DNA between genes on our chromosomes. That makes it hard to figure out their roles. So Hirschhorn and his army of colleagues, who reported on the effort Wednesday in the journal Nature, tried a new tack. Their study focused only on variants that are directly in the genes themselves. By knowing that the genes do, they can understand better how variants might influence height. For example, one is in a gene that influences hormones that regulate growth. The variants within genes are uncommon, but some have a remarkably large influence on height. ”We found some that, if you carry them, you might actually be an inch taller or an inch shorter, as opposed to just a millimeter difference that we found with the previous variants,” Hirschhorn says. Scientists are still very far from identifying all the genes involved with stature, but these new findings do help them better understand the natural biochemistry that influences height. So far most of our understanding of height has come from scientists who study children who have abnormal growth patterns, according to Constantine Stratakis, a pediatrician and scientific director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. ”There are rare experiments of nature that have told us these genes are involved in the regulation of growth,” he says. In fact, he discovered one of those rare genes, linked to a trait called gigantism. ”It leads to babies that double or triple their length in the first year of life,” he says. These natural experiments have been most useful for treating height disorders, but Stratakis hopes that eventually the   methods will provide leads for future treatments. The bigger lesson here is figuring out how the biology of a complex trait like height really works. Rare variants can sometimes make a big difference, ”but most of the time it’s all about systems that interact that define how an organism behaves, or grows, or has a disease, develops a trait and so on,” Stratakis says. ”And although it’s humbling to see the complexity, at this point it’s not unexpected.” Hirschhorn and his colleagues are expanding their already massive study of 700, 000 subjects. That approach has drawn skepticism from some scientists, who think it’s a waste of effort. David Goldstein, a professor of genetics at Columbia University, says an expanded effort could ultimately implicate every gene in existence, and that hardly helps scientists narrow down the biological factors that contribute to height. It’s likely scientists will never be able to figure out what these hundreds of common variants do to influence height, Goldstein says. Instead, a much better strategy is what Hirschhorn used in this latest study: looking for rare variants that pack a big punch. Hirschhorn is undeterred. ”We probably won’t get all of the way to explaining 100 percent of the genetic factors, but in some sense that’s not really our goal,” Hirschhorn says. ”Our goal is to use the genetics to do our best at understanding the biology.” To that end, Hirschhorn and his colleagues are not just looking at height they’re digging into traits that make people susceptible to diabetes and obesity."
773,"As Congress weighs repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence Tuesday sought to keep its   Medicaid expansion under the federal health the health law. Indiana applied to the Trump administration to extend a regulatory waiver and funding until Jan. 31, 2021, for its package of incentives and penalties that are intended to encourage   Hoosiers on Medicaid to adopt healthful behaviors. Beneficiaries pay premiums, get health savings accounts and can lose their benefits if they miss payments. Though Pence now supports the health law’s repeal, the Healthy Indiana Plan that he established in 2015 as the state’s governor has brought Medicaid coverage to more than 350, 000 people. The architect of the plan was health care consultant Seema Verma, who has been nominated to head the Centers for Medicare  Medicaid Services. Without Trump administration approval, federal money for Indiana’s expansion will run out Jan. 31, 2018. Indiana officials said the Medicaid expansion would continue even if Washington follows through on a Republican proposal to distribute federal Medicaid funds through a block grant program that would give states more flexibility in setting benefits and eligibility levels. State officials refused to say whether the expansion would continue if Congress repealed Obamacare and eliminated funds for Medicaid expansions. If that happened, it’s unlikely states would have the money to make up for the lost federal aid. Indiana’s effort to continue its Medicaid expansion demonstrates how states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act  —   even   ones  —   are counting on additional federal dollars to pay for those expansions. It also reflects deadline pressure: They can’t wait for Congress to finish its debate over the future of the health law because they need to set budgets and programs now for next year. According to Indiana’s request, continuing the Medicaid expansion will cost Indiana $1. 5 billion but bring $8. 6 billion in federal funding from 2018 to 2020. ”Indiana has built a program that is delivering real results in a responsible, efficient, and effective way,” Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, said in a statement. ”I look forward to maintaining the flexibility to grow this remarkably successful tool and to preserve our ability to respond to the unique needs of Hoosiers.” Several other states including Kentucky and Ohio are considering adopting features of Indiana’s Medicaid plan. Tuesday’s filing continues most core elements of the Healthy Indiana Plan, but also expands beneficiaries access to substance abuse treatment and adds incentives for members to quit smoking, use chronic disease management programs and take part in voluntary job referral and training programs. ”Certainly I think the new administration would give the waiver a friendly reception,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University. ”But again that doesn’t answer the question about whether the money is going away,” if Congress repeals the health law and the Medicaid expansion. Rep. Susan Brooks,  . broke the news of the waiver submission plans at a House committee hearing on Medicaid on Tuesday. ”It’s an outstanding program that I hope folks on both sides of the aisle see it is a way to save and help people who truly need it, and it can be replicated,” Brooks said. Some Republican plans to scrap and replace the Affordable Care Act don’t include a Medicaid expansion. Republicans have argued for years that the Medicaid program is broken and   adults who gained coverage under the expansion should not be covered. Under expansion, states received additional federal funding to expand eligibility to everyone with annual incomes at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $16, 000. Holcomb isn’t the only Republican governor counting on Medicaid expansion and the additional federal funding continuing at least through 2018. Ohio Gov. John Kasich proposed a budget Monday that maintains expansion coverage for 700, 000 individuals. But Kasich plans to switch from a traditional Medicaid expansion to a more conservative version that will require beneficiaries to pay more out of pocket. This story was produced through a collaboration between NPR and Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization. You can follow Phil Galewitz on Twitter: @philgalewitz."
774,"If the last few years are any guide, one group that may find itself in the crosshairs of Rep. Tom Price, President Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is an influential panel of medical experts. The U. S. Preventive Services Task Force, a group of mostly physician and academics from top universities, reviews medical practices to see whether they are supported by research and evidence. Under the Affordable Care Act, the USPSTF’s recommendations have been used to guide private insurers. If the group gives a test high marks, insurers are required to cover it. If it doesn’t, they are free not to. But letters reviewed by ProPublica show that Price twice pushed HHS to quash the task force’s recommendations to limit widely used cancer screenings. The panel said that the screenings too often led to unnecessary biopsies and other harmful treatment. Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee boycotted a Tuesday vote on Price’s nomination, citing unanswered ethics questions. In 2011, Price and other lawmakers signed a letter asking the head of HHS to ”push for the withdrawal” of the panel’s draft prostate screening recommendations. The panel was made up of ”bureaucrats,” the letter said, and decisions about prostate testing were best left to doctors and their patients. ”This recommendation jeopardizes the health of countless American men,” the letter said. The task force went ahead and in 2012 recommended that men of all ages forgo using blood tests to search for prostate cancer. The recommendation didn’t apply to men with a history of prostate cancer. Three years later, Price signed two letters protesting the task force’s proposed recommendations that mammograms be given every two years for healthy and   women between the ages of 50 and 74, and by individual choice for women between 40 and 49. Other groups, including the American College of Radiology, recommend starting mammograms at 40 and having them every year or two. In May 2015, Price and other lawmakers wrote that the USPSTF recommendations ”would jeopardize access to screenings.” In June, a second letter signed by Price and others with the GOP Doctors Caucus, went further, urging the head of HHS to ensure the recommendations weren’t finalized. The recommendations, the letter said, could ”result in thousands of additional breast cancer deaths.” Despite the complaints, the mammogram recommendations were issued in 2016. Proponents praised them as the fruit of the task force’s independent and   approach. But the guidelines raised the ire of a much more powerful constituency: the urologists and radiologists who made billions of dollars off the testing and related procedures. ”The dirty underbelly of screening is that it’s a great way to get more patients,” said Dr. Gilbert Welch, professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy  Clinical Practice and a close observer of the task force’s work. ”The financial underpinnings are huge.” The health care industry spends more money lobbying Congress than almost any other sector, according to the tracking site OpenSecrets. org. Price, an orthopedic surgeon, took in $479, 000 in health professional donations in the 2016 campaign cycle, one of the largest sums to any member of Congress. To be sure, the industry has a host of more pressing concerns, from the ACA and Medicare and Medicaid to the cost of drugs. But the task force’s recommendations have continued to draw complaints by lawmakers who received financial support from the industry. In November, lawmakers bashed its screening recommendations during a hearing of the health subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The task force ”can deprive patients of lifesaving services,” said Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas who received nearly $611, 000 from health professionals in the 2016 campaign cycle. His colleague, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican who received $259, 000 in donations from health professionals in the 2016 campaign cycle, predicted equally dire outcomes. The task force, she said, ”turned its back on over 20 million women by finalizing erroneous guidelines that would limit access to mammograms.” Earlier this month, Blackburn   legislation that would, among other things, add specialists to the panel. The group currently consults with specialists in the areas they are reviewing. Critics of the proposed bill say specialists are not ideal to perform the task force’s broad array of evidence reviews, and adding them could create conflicts of interest. ”There is considerable support for ’draining the swamp’ in Washington,” Welch wrote in testimony he submitted for the hearing. ”But there is no swamp currently in the task force. Please don’t create one.” Questions sent to Price’s office were answered by Ryan Murphy, who is currently an HHS adviser. Murphy was most recently communications director for the House Budget Committee, of which Price is chairman. ”Dr. Price’s concerns  —   shared by others as you noted  —   were with specific recommendations made by the task force,” Murphy said. ”As a physician, Dr. Price knows firsthand the value of scientific research as well as how important it is to ensure patients and their doctors are able to make choices regarding treatments that they agree are in the best interest of the individual patient.” Price has embraced task force findings that recommend more treatment. In 2014, for example, he   a letter to the HHS secretary and the Medicare administrator asking that Medicare expand its coverage for lung cancer screenings for smokers based on task force recommendations. With the shifts in power both in Congress and under the Trump administration, proponents of the task force fear setbacks in the   push for   medicine. The task force has 96 current recommendations, which it routinely updates. Its $11. 6 million budget is funded through HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which has been on the lawmakers’ chopping block in the past. If confirmed, Price or congressional Republicans could reduce the task force’s influence or independence, or cut its funding. ”Science is really under attack,” said Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition. ”We’ve spent decades building a scientific and research infrastructure and community all in order to produce the evidence that will save lives. Sometimes the science doesn’t give us the answer we would like, but it actually gives us the facts and the evidence.” While some disagree with the task force’s recommendations, its work is in line with a global push toward   medicine and with the guidelines of some other groups. The International Agency for Research on Cancer says there isn’t enough evidence to recommend for or against mammograms for women between 40 and 49. Like the task force, the American College of Physicians says mammograms should be an individual decision for women between the ages of 40 and 49 and be provided every other year at the patient’s request. The task force and others found widespread screening often led to false positives, painful biopsies and   operations for patients who were not actually at risk of cancer. Unnecessary screening also contributes to an overtreatment epidemic that the Institute of Medicine has estimated costs $210 billion a year. Dr. Kirsten   chairwoman of the task force, is a internist and epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. She said the attacks by Blackburn and others risk misleading patients about the effectiveness of screening for patients who are not at risk and are free of symptoms. ”Patients and clinicians need to understand the benefits and the harms so they are empowered to make the best decisions for themselves,”   said. Regardless of what happens politically, she said, patients and doctors will still need   recommendations to make informed decisions. The   work of the task force could be ”endangered” because the panel is caught up in the political fight around the ACA, said Dr. Sheldon Greenfield executive   of the Health Policy Research Institute at the University of California, Irvine. ”It wouldn’t surprise me if it does become a casualty.” The worst outcome, he said, would be for health care in the United States to revert to the way it used to be. The old joke is that doctors ignore science and say, ”I know best,” Greenfield said, trumping   medicine with ” ” medicine. Marshall Allen is examining how waste and overtreatment are affecting patients and raising the cost of care. If you have evidence of wasted health care dollars, please email him at marshall. allen@propublica. org."
775,"Georgia Republican Tom Price, who is   Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is suddenly drowning in questions over the investments he has made while serving in the House of Representatives. The issue: Did Price use his position to influence the stock prices of companies he had invested in? Or, alternatively, did he buy shares in companies ahead of actions in Congress that might boost their value? Price says he followed all congressional ethics rules. But a handful of   trades, and his apparent affinity for companies involved in health care, have raised concerns about his investing habits. Price has served as the Chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee and a member of the   Ways and Means Committee. As an orthopedic surgeon, he is a member of the health care and doctors caucuses. Any way you slice it, he has been deeply involved in making health policy. Phillip Blando, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team, said in an email to Shots Thursday, ”Dr. Price’s investment agreements for the   accounts provide the brokers with 100% investment discretion. He provides no direction regarding the investments in those three accounts.” A broker directing investments doesn’t mitigate the appearance of conflict, says Rob Walker, the former chief counsel to the Senate and House ethics committees. ”You can follow the rules and still enter into situations where the public and the press might have questions about whether there are divided loyalties, and conflicts between the personal interest and the public interest,” Walker told Shots. So here are three problems Price is facing. 1) Innate Immunotherapeutics, Price owns shares in this   biotech company worth as much as $100, 000. The concern among Democrats in the Senate is that he may have bought those shares while having access to confidential information. Price told Sen. Patty Murray (D. .) during a hearing Wednesday before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, that he heard about the company, which is trying to develop drugs to treat multiple sclerosis, from Rep. Chris Collins, (R. . Y.). Price said he researched the company, thought it was a good investment and bought a small amount of the stock in April 2016 on the open market. He later bought more shares, between $50, 000 and $100, 000 worth  —   in a   private placement, when stock is offered to a select group of   investors. The fact that Collins serves on the company’s board and is one of its largest shareholders raises questions about whether he may have had inside information that he shared with a select group of people. Since Price bought the second round of stock, the price has nearly quadrupled, according to Bloomberg. Price told Murray that he didn’t believe he got any inside information from Collins. 2) Zimmer Biomet, In March 2016, Price bought 26 shares in this   company, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of replacement hips and knees. Under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare was testing   ”bundled payments” for joint replacements, under which a hospital receives a flat fee for all the care surrounding the surgery  —   including the cost of the implant. The idea was to give hospitals an incentive to negotiate for lower prices for the replacement knees and hips that Zimmer Biomet and its competitors make. Less than a week after buying the shares, Price introduced a bill called the HIP Act that would have suspended the pilot program. Democrats on the Senate health committee, including Elizabeth Warren (D. .) and Al Franken (D. .) suggested Price bought the shares knowing his actions would soon boost the value. Price told the committee he wasn’t aware he owned the stock because his shares are managed by his broker, who buys and sells on his behalf. In heated questioning during Wednesday’s hearing, Warren made it clear that Price’s holdings weren’t in a blind trust and that he was regularly informed about the specific stocks his broker bought and sold. She also outlined several actions Price took after he was notified that he owned Zimmer Biomet stock to advance the HIP Act, including convincing several colleagues to sign on to support the bill. ”I’m offended by the insinuation, senator,” Price said to Warren in one of the more heated moments of the hearing. 3) Other Trades In Health Care Stocks, In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that Price traded in more than $300, 000 in shares of companies involved in health care over four years. Price, as head of the House Budget Committee and a member of the   Ways and Means Committee, has influence over health care legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act and programs that include Medicare and Medicaid. Price disclosed all the holdings to the House Clerk’s Office. Those disclosures are made regularly and the Journal compiled hundreds of pages of data and analyzed the trades. Price hasn’t disputed the paper’s findings. In his agreement with the Office of Government Ethics, he said he would sell his stock in 40 companies, including Zimmer Biomet and Innate Immunotherapeutics. ”We have agreed to every single recommendation that they’ve made to divest of whatever holdings we have that might even give the appearance of a possible conflict,” he said. The OGE made clear on Twitter Wednesday that it works with incoming members of the incoming administration to avoid future conflicts, but doesn’t investigate accusations of past misconduct. ”These trades were disclosed on his periodic transaction reports,” Walker said. ”That doesn’t mean that they were   or   by an ethics official.” He said to avoid an appearance of conflict, members of Congress should keep their investments to mutual funds, or in a blind trust."
776,"We all love a good redemption story: We’re front and center to watch our heroes get knocked down, and then we cheer for them to triumphantly rebound. What we’re witnessing with Shelly    —   a. k. a. D. R. A. M.  —   is the culmination of a story marked by resilience and stubborn strength. Making a hit record in the music industry is extremely difficult, and in 2015, D. R. A. M.’s debut single ”Cha Cha” was on the brink of exploding. It was getting played in clubs across the country and bubbling on the charts the Beyhive even got a hold of it. Then Drake’s ”Hotline Bling” happened. The reports are conflicting as to the inspiration for the record, but there are glaring similarities in the sound of each. ”Hotline Bling” was even originally billed as the ”Cha Cha” remix by Beats 1, where the song made its debut. Needless to say, ”Hotline Bling” practically swallowed ”Cha Cha,” but D. R. A. M. didn’t whine about it. He addressed it and went back to the drawing board, crafting another smash. ”Broccoli” became one of 2016’s biggest hits while setting up the release of his debut album, Big Baby D. R. A. M. We recently invited D. R. A. M. to NPR to lend us his jovial spirit and brighten our workday after all, his primary aim is to spread love through music. He was jarred by the Tiny Desk setting for a moment before the cameras started rolling. He’s accustomed to touching every corner of the stage, but like a pro, he walked to the desk, activated his signature smile and bounced through various highlights from his catalog. D. R. A. M. whose name stands for Does Real Ass Music, wrote his first selection, ”Cash Machine,” right after he’d received his first big music check. Don’t you know that I got that bag, And best believe my mama straight, I sent some bands to Tatiana, And if I brought you out I’ll pay your way,  What twentysomething doesn’t feel this way once they step into some money? The crowd beamed more with each performance, leading up to a climactic rendition of ”Broccoli.” The energy is all fun and games, but his talent is no joke: ”Broccoli” is nominated for a Grammy this year, right alongside ”Hotline Bling.” A victory would provide a fitting end to this chapter of D. R. A. M.’s career, but regardless of the outcome, he’s already victorious: Far removed from the ”Hotline Bling” shadow, he’s already creating bigger songs and more memorable moments, like this one at the Tiny Desk. Big Baby D. R. A. M. is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) D. R. A. M. (vocals) Rogét Chahayed (keys) Taylor Dexter (drums) Wesley Singerman (guitar). Producers: Bobby Carter, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Colin Marshall Production Assistant: Jenny Gathright Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
777,"Imagine that one day you’re kicked off Facebook. It happens, regularly. You may not know why exactly. It looks like an algorithm may have done it  —   and now you need to reach a human being at the company to get back on. NPR has interviewed more than two dozen users in that situation  —   all people who rely on Facebook to do their work, make their living. Their stories, which we’ll share in a separate article, made us wonder: If you needed to reach Facebook, what would you do? Many people would go online and search for ”Facebook customer service.” We tried that, and got this number:   . It was prominently displayed as the top search result on Google. Google even made it a ”featured snippet”  —   that is, a result highlighted in a box at the top, enhanced to draw user attention and lend credibility. Please do not call it. You will get someone real  —   just not from Facebook. The first time NPR called, someone picked up and then put the phone down  —   maybe on a table. You could hear mumbling in the room. It felt suspicious. So NPR gave the number to Pindrop, a company that specializes in phone fraud. A Pindrop researcher, who has to remain anonymous for his work, called up and recorded as he pretended to be a Facebook user in distress. A call center operator named ”Steven”  —   who, according to Pindrop analysis, is based in India  —   says: ”Thanks for calling Facebook.” He is pretending to be a Facebook employee. The Pindrop researcher plays along and explains he is locked out of his Facebook account. He needs help getting reactivated. ”Steven” gives him very unusual advice: Go to a   or a Target. ”Just walk up over there and tell them to provide you an iTunes card. OK? And on the backside of that iTunes card there would be a   security code.” Maybe you see where this is going. Steven continues: ”You need to call us back on this same number and provide me that   security code so that I can activate that access and we’ll be giving you the password for your new  —   for your old account.” This is a scam. The top Google search result for ”Facebook customer service” led to a person asking for codes on iTunes gift cards. This is a   method of stealing from innocent people online. (Both Apple and the Federal Trade Commission have issued alerts about it.) That   ”Facebook” line was not just on Google. That number and others have been circulating on Facebook itself, on pages where users are asking for help, for at least a year. In one instance, a user asked whether the number was valid and a member of the company’s Help Team responded: ”There isn’t a number to contact Facebook. . .. It sounds like the email or notification you saw is likely a scam.” It’s unclear whether the Help Team member reported it to her superiors to investigate. ”Wow. Wow. Wow. That’s crazy,” says Marty Weintraub, founder of Aimclear Marketing. He wrote a leading industry book on Facebook advertising, long before the rest of the world realized the company would dominate the Internet economy. ”This is an astonishing result.” He also wrote a book on how to manipulate search results, to get your brand or product up on top. He knows that companies monitor their search results, to see what their customers want, and that criminals and competitors try to exploit powerful brands. These are standard practices. What Weintraub finds astonishing is that a term as basic as ”Facebook customer service” slipped through the cracks. ”It’s not like somebody’s searching for ’Hey, what color are Mark Zuckerberg’s socks?’ It’s not like it’s something that’s off the beaten path,” Weintraub says. ”So one would think that a company as large as Facebook would be monitoring [the] search engine results page for a major query surrounding their services.” According to Google data, ”Facebook customer service” gets searched, on average, about 27, 000 times a month in the U. S. Weintraub says that is sizable, that Facebook should have known about it ”almost the first minute” it came up, and that the company should have guarded its users. ”I’d be so scared,” he says. ”These are people who are looking for help with the product and they’re getting scammed. OMG.” NPR informed Facebook and Google about the scam line. Facebook said that it has been investigating the group associated with this   number for some time that this group is targeting many platforms and that it’s up to Google to explain why it displays certain search results. A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the company has taken steps to remove the fraudulent number. Neither company explained how the prominent search result went unnoticed. And to be clear, Facebook does not have a phone number for regular users to call. It does have an online help center, located here. (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams.) NPR’s Aarti Shahani has started a page on Facebook for people to share concerns about the platform. It’s called Tell Zuck. If you use Facebook for work, and find you’re unable to reach the company, tell her your story at www. facebook. . "
778,"It was a dramatic market entry for the iPhone 7 last year. Many Apple customers grumbled when Apple took away the headphone jack and gave everyone an adapter to plug earbuds into the Lightning, or charging, connector. But everyone seems to have adjusted. Apple sold 78 million iPhones over the holiday season. In an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook indicated Apple could have sold more of them if it had enough in stock, says Gartner Research analyst Brian Blau. ”That was encouraging news,” Blau says. ”That means that there’s   demand out there, and that means that it’s very possible that that demand will be continued into this quarter.” Apple has more than a billion activated mobile devices around the world. Along with the increased iPhone sales, it’s also bringing in more revenue from its app store, iTunes and cloud services. Cook mentioned the current U. S. political climate in connection with future growth. He seems to believe it’s likely that Congress and the Trump administration will make it less pricey for Apple to bring billions of dollars back into the U. S. by decreasing the tax penalties. Apple is expected to move into creating original film and TV content. Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey says he could imagine a way for Apple to spend that money. ”Perhaps investing in a major studio in the U. S. in such a way that you can start making original content right away. Having more of that money here locally to do that would be one way to spend that money,” he says. Earlier this week, Cook was less sanguine about the Trump administration. He criticized it for the executive order banning immigration from some countries, which would affect some Apple employees."
779,"It’s been a tense week for immigrants and people of color throughout the country, but there was some good news in California: a new study by the advocacy group National Council of La Raza points out that the state’s Latinos, as a group, are doing much better in many areas. ”Latinos in the Golden State: An Analysis of Economic and Demographic Trends” reveals an increase in the median household income for the state’s Latinos, and a decrease in their poverty rate. Median incomes for California Latinos rose more than $5, 000 annually, and the poverty level dropped 2. 4 percentage points (a larger dip than for the state’s   white households). And more Latino children now have health insurance: between 2013 and 2014, California ”had the largest decrease in the number of uninsured Latino children,” according to the study. The state’s drop in those numbers accounted for a 44 percent drop in uninsured Latino children nationwide, although the report points out ”the Latino child uninsurance rate (4 percent) is still double that of   White children (2 percent).” Further, children who have access to health care are an indicator that covered children ”are more likely to surpass the economic status of their parents than those who lack coverage.”   enterprises are also on the rise: ”The number of businesses owned by Latinos in California increased by 43. 9 percent between 2005 and 2011.” They generated $98. 9 million in gross receipts in 2012, a 23 percent increase from $80 million in 2007. Since 1990, Latino purchasing power rose by 367 percent to $320 billion. Part of the increased prosperity may be attributable to more Latinos earning college degrees, a figure that increased by 25 percent from 2011 to 2015, nearly three times the increase for   white Californians (8. 8 percent). There was a similar bump for associate’s degrees earned in the same period. News for   Latinos is more sobering. While almost half of all students in California classrooms are Latino, less than half of Latino fourth graders were reading at grade level in 2015. (In comparison, over   of white fourth graders had   proficiency.) The math gap is even greater, with 17 percent of Latino fourth graders on or above math proficiency in 2015. Latinas also fall behind in key indicators. They have the highest poverty rates in the state, with just about 22 percent of those 18 and over living in poverty, according to La Raza’s report. The rate of Latina poverty is twice as high as   white women. Many are single mothers facing the high costs of rental housing and child care —  two things which sometimes add up to 74 percent of their monthly income. In general, California has some of the highest housing costs in the country, which might be a contributing factor to Latino homeownership stalling since 2012, as the report points out. (And according to the Center for Responsible Lending, the subprime mortgages offered to many minority families meant from   the collapse of the state’s superheated housing market in 2008 left many homeowners underwater  —   especially Latinos and African Americans. ) Because the state is 39 percent Latino, a group that skews younger than the general population, they represent a large and growing portion of the state’s economy and tax base. Arguably, the economic health and prosperity of California  —   and other states with similarly large Latino populations  —   will be intrinsically tied to its Latino contingent for the foreseeable future."
780,"Some physicists, mind you, not many of them, are  . They see the world or, more adequately, physical reality, as a lyrical narrative written in some hidden code that the human mind can decipher. Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist and author, is one of them. Following his   Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, a book that the author himself was surprised to see becoming so popular, Rovelli has a more ambitious book out (written before Seven Lessons). In Reality Is Not What It Seems, he describes his view of reality  —   the poem he has spent a career attempting to decipher. His writing style is enchanting, as lyrical as a book on physics allows one to be. His references to other poets, in particular Dante and Petrarch, exude patriotic pride and the understanding, unfortunately rare in most physics departments, of the deep connection between the sciences and the humanities as twin partners in the human struggle to find meaning in a puzzling and mysterious universe. How could one face the vastness of space and the shortness of life and not wonder about our place and purpose? Writing a   popular book on his ideas about quantum gravity  —   the theoretical attempts to bring together Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum physics, Rovelli had to rethread the   path of the historical roots of modern physics, starting with   Greece and advancing, through Galileo, Kepler and Newton to Einstein and quantum physics. But he does so with a fresh new look, showing a knack for summarizing difficult ideas in short and effective sentences. When describing how Einstein gave physical reality to Newton’s inert and empty space, Rovelli writes, ”the gravitational field is space. ..it is a real entity that undulates, fluctuates, bends, and contorts.” When describing the strange new world of quantum physics, where we can only claim the reality of a particle through its interactions with others, he writes, faithful to the ”relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics: ”It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.” Or, ”The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events.” Rovelli sees the world as his (justly) beloved Ionian philosopher Anaximander did around 600 BC, as an eternal flow between events, some, like rocks or people, more ”monotonous” (durable) than the ones belonging to the fleeting reality of quantum processes. The nature of reality is a very tricky subject. Can we make sense of it, get to the end of it? Or are we so imprisoned in our own ways that, like the slaves in Plato’s Cave, we can’t break loose of our chains? In my The Island of Knowledge, I traced humanity’s evolving views of the world, also from the   to modern times, focusing precisely on the elusiveness of the very concept of reality and how it depends on our human perspective. To state, or believe, that the science we do brings us closer to a final, underlying truth seems to be as wrong historically as it is naïve philosophically. As Heisenberg memorably wrote, ”What we observe is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The way we see the world shapes our narrative describing it. Even through the objective lens of science, it is still the human view of the world. If science is the best way we have to avoid being fooled by our perceptions, it still reflects those perceptions. The human touch is in everything we create, science included. To a certain extent, Rovelli’s view reflects this, as he retells the evolution of our answer to the question ”What is the world made of?”  —   what philosophers would call ontology. In Newton’s time, it was space, time and particles. After quantum physics and Einstein, it is spacetime and quantum fields. This is where the tension lies  —   and where we go to the edge of what we know, without any certainty of what comes next. It is here that hypothetical ideas such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, Rovelli’s favorite answer, appear as the next step into the deeper aspects of physical reality. And it is here that passions and preferred world views often cloud one’s judgement, biasing this or that goal with a sense of purpose that is undeservedly deemed unique or unavoidable. We are most blind at the end of knowledge, the boundary between knowing and  . What’s the big problem with quantum gravity? On the one hand, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity has equated space and time with the gravitational field, an entity that stretches and contorts in response to matter and energy. This is physics with a notion of continuity, applied at large scales, tangible to us humans, even if with weird effects like   times and black holes in space. On the other, it’s quantum fields, the notion that the very substrate of what we call matter and radiation is emergent from different kinds of quantum fields, electron fields, quark fields, photons and the like. Quantum fields offer an uneasy compromise between the continuous and the granular, where the particles we observe are excitations of underlying continuous fields, little energy lumps that bash against one another and with the particles of the detectors we use to measure them. Their reality is revealed as they interact, as Rovelli so clearly describes. The challenge is to somehow bring the notion of granularity to spacetime, bring the discrete to the continuous. This is the problem that has baffled theoretical physicists for at least half a century. Rovelli describes as masterfully as one can the basic ideas behind loop quantum gravity, how if we take the granularity of spacetime seriously, the concepts of space and time as we understand them dissolve  —   and we are left with a network of linked loops representing the fields that we attribute, at large distances, to spacetime. Applying techniques from quantum physics to the volume and area of space, it is possible to show that there is a finite spectrum of possible volumes and areas, a quantization of space itself, just as the energy levels of the electron are quantized in an atom. I was surprised that in the preface he claims his book is a first on the subject, even if he lists two others in the bibliography at the end. Both are very worthwhile Martin Bojowald’s Once Before Time: A Whole Story of the Universe and Lee Smolin’s Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Since Rovelli has worked with Smolin, I find the inconsistency curious. The construction is incredibly ingenuous and Rovelli proceeds to apply it to many different situations. The only point of caution here, and one that surely defenders of both loop quantum gravity and string theory would consider so heretical as to be certainly wrong (but I advance it here anyway) is that all arguments that we have to quantize gravity, that is, to quantize spacetime, are based on analogy. Why do we need to quantize spacetime? Because spacetime is a field and all fields must be quantized. However, one could imagine that Einstein’s theory is a beautiful description of physics that is only effective at large enough spatial scales, that there is no quantum granularity of space that even though spacetime is described as a field, it is a very different kind of field from those describing matter and radiation fields, stuff that actually bashes into one another. In short, gravity is different. Reductionist arguments by analogy should be taken with a grain of salt. So, why try to do it? Apart from analogy, the usual answer goes as follows: because within the Big Bang picture of modern cosmology, as we go back sufficiently close to the beginning of time the universe itself becomes a quantum entity. This is quite possible, but we aren’t sure it’s an extrapolation. An alternative that has gained a lot of traction in the past few years is that the universe goes through a bounce near the initial time and its size never crosses the quantum barrier. (Of course, there are both loop quantum gravity and string theory solutions with bounces but we don’t really need these theories to find it.) Another reason usually given for quantizing gravity is that black holes are unstable objects and evaporate, losing their masses slowly. If we follow this process to its conclusion, what happens when a black hole disappears? What’s left at its very center or inner core? I’m bypassing a lot of subtleties here, but we could easily argue that we don’t know enough about black holes, and certainly about the final stages of their evaporation, to be sure that quantum gravity effects are present. It may very well be that black holes don’t completely evaporate, that something new and unexpected happens below a certain size, including a puff of radiation and particles well before it reaches the length scale where quantum gravity effects become important. (The Planck length, for the experts.) Whatever your take on this very complex issue  —   to quantize gravity or not, loop quantum gravity or superstrings or. .. Rovelli’s book is a gem. It’s a pleasure to read, full of wonderful analogies and imagery and, last but not least, a celebration of the human spirit, in ”permanent doubt, the deep source of science.” Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer  —   and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for   Engagement at Dartmouth,   of 13. 7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser"
781,"President Donald Trump’s ”America First” pronouncements will frame the first major international trip of his administration this week, as Defense Secretary James Mattis visits South Korea and Japan. Trump’s disruptive approach to foreign policy may challenge an already shaky government in Seoul, Mattis’ first stop. ”I think visiting Korea to continue with the existing agendas is an   action that in a way, ignores the Korean people’s will,” protester Kim   says. She and others are spending much of this week outside the Korean Ministry of Defense, demonstrating against the coming visit. The current South Korean government may not last past the next few weeks. The defense minister who will meet with Mattis, and the acting president, are appointees of an impeached president, Park  . They’re placeholders, until the president’s impeachment trial is over. ”So, this is a real dilemma,” says John Delury, professor of international relations at Seoul’s Yonsei University. ”It’s a real dilemma for the Americans because they’re going to have a series of conversations with someone who really doesn’t speak for the South Korean public.” Among the Korean public there is distrust of the new Trump administration on Korean matters. Mainly because Trump’s statements have been, in the eyes of many South Koreans, inconsistent. Trump has said that he would be willing have a burger with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un  —   but also that the U. S.  South Korea alliance is stronger than ever. ”Trump was unexpectedly elected as the president,” protester Oh   says. ”But his eccentric actions are just unpredictable.” Which leads to another major question for the trip. ”Does Secretary Mattis actually speak for President Trump? Who’s really calling the shots on American foreign policy? Those are also huge questions that affect [South Koreans’] fate,” says Delury. A fate that matters for the entire region. And given the nuclear weapons just across the border, it matters for the world. ”The Korean peninsula is arguably the security fault line for Asia. You need to be very careful in your approach,” Delury says. Both key U. S. allies  —   South Korea and Japan  —   are hoping for some clarity in what that approach will look like under Trump. Haeryun Kang and   Gong contributed to this story."
782,"President Trump may be breaking many of the rules in Washington, but the tradition of   politics shows no sign of ending anytime soon. A   of Trump’s campaign aides have formed a nonprofit group called America First Policies to support and promote the president’s agenda, The Associated Press reported Monday. ”Some of the same   individuals who put their energy into getting Mr. Trump elected are now going to be part of a   group to go out there and help with the agenda, help the White House to be successful,” said Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital and data director. Also involved are Katrina Pierson, who served on the campaign’s communications team, and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, who also headed the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, as well as Nick Ayers and Marty Obst, advisers to Vice President Pence. The group appears to be a 501( c)(4) ”social welfare” organization. Federal law allows such groups to raise money in unlimited amounts without revealing the donors’ identities. They’re allowed to participate in politics, but it cannot be their primary purpose. In recent campaigns, 501( c)(4) s have become a major conduit for undisclosed money. Among the most famous of these groups is Crossroads GPS, which was founded by Karl Rove to promote conservative causes. ”You have a situation in which people who are accurately perceived as key political advisers to a sitting president are going out and raising money for a group that does not have to disclose their donors,” says Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, a nonpartisan group that works to reduce the influence of money in politics. ”And they’re doing it, and everyone who is giving understands the wink and the nod, that if you want the person in power to know that they’re playing on your team, to get the gratitude and support that president’s ambitious policy goals, you’re going to give to this entity,” she adds. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a progressive group, says America First Policies differs from other 501( c)(4) s in that it is tied to a sitting president and aims to promote his agenda. But that is not unprecedented, Weissman says. ”When it’s designed and structured so that it can take   contributions from secretive donors, it’s a method for those people to channel money into [the president’s effectively] permanent campaign, with an expectation of reciprocal benefits. But the public will never know about it and moreover, if we did know about it there’s not much we can do about it,” Weissman says. Another group, Organizing for Action, promotes former President Barack Obama’s agenda, but it voluntarily reveals its donors."
783,"French authorities are investigating allegations that conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon hired his wife for what was essentially a sham position. He is accused of putting his wife, Penelope, on his parliamentary office payroll and paying her about $900, 000 of taxpayer money over a   period, according to the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine. Fillon also reportedly hired two of his children. Hiring one’s spouse is not illegal, reports NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley, but ”there’s little evidence she actually worked.” ”The growing scandal is damning for a candidate whose greatest asset was his integrity and Catholic family man image,” Eleanor says. She adds that Fillon has denounced the allegations and is asking fellow conservatives to stay loyal to him. The Guardian reported Tuesday that French police had searched the lower house of parliament and that Fillon and his wife were questioned separately for five hours on Monday by   officers in connection with the allegation. Fillon’s support among French voters has faltered, based on a poll conducted Sunday and Monday, according to Reuters, which could hurt him in the rounds of voting in April and May, where he has been widely expected to face either   nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen or centrist Emmanuel Macron. The same poll found support for Le Pen had grown, despite separate allegations of misconduct. Le Pen has been asked to pay back more than $320, 000 to the European Parliament because two of her aides in Brussels were actually working for her campaign in France. She has denied any wrongdoing. Le Pen is a serious contender for the presidency, as NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley reported in a story last week about the candidate and her National Front party platform: ”Though Le Pen calls Islamic fundamentalism one of the biggest dangers facing France, she says she is not  . Le Pen says there are two kinds of Islam and one is completely compatible with French values. ” ’Practicing Muslims, like Christians and Jews, have never posed a threat to French values,’ she says. ’But there’s another political fundamentalist, totalitarian Islam that wants sharia [Islamic] law over French law. And this is the one I will fight without mercy.’ ”Le Pen has made no secret of her admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. She says he always has the interests of Russia and the Russian people in mind, which is the way it should be. Le Pen supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea after what she called a legitimate referendum.” Eleanor says the scandals, particularly the accusations against Fillon, have boosted the fortunes of Macron, President Francois Hollande’s former economic minister who left the Socialist Party to run as an independent."
784,"Toward the middle of Paul Auster’s new novel, 4 3 2 1, young Archie Ferguson, recovering from a car accident that could have killed him, quotes the satire Candide to his optimistic girlfriend. ”You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Pangloss,” he complains. ”Everything always happens for the best  —   in this, the best of all possible worlds.” It’s hard for Ferguson to believe that he’s living in the best of all possible worlds. And he shares this belief with the three other iterations of him that make up Auster’s bold, remarkable novel. The Ferguson quoting Voltaire to his girlfriend is just one of four Fergusons: ”Identical but different, meaning four boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances.” 4 3 2 1 follows all four Fergusons from their births to a Jewish family on March 3, 1947, in Newark, N. J. (Auster himself was born in the same city, exactly one month earlier.) Each chapter is divided into four numbered sections, corresponding with each different version of Ferguson. They’re the same person, in a way, but their lives follow dramatically different paths. One dies at 13, struck by a falling tree limb during a thunderstorm his sections after that are left blank. There are a few constants among the different Fergusons. In each iteration, his father is a retailer and his mother is a photographer though their careers, and their relationship, have varying degrees of success. And each Ferguson has feelings for the beautiful and intelligent Amy  —   in one version, they have a   romance, in others, she ends up Ferguson’s stepsister and   respectively. Auster’s novel is never boring, but it can get confusing, especially at the beginning of the book  —   readers will likely find themselves flipping back: Is this the Ferguson whose father was killed in a fire, or the one whose father expands his store into an empire and thrives? But the differences become more clear as the book progresses and the Fergusons start making drastically different choices from one another. Despite its publication date, 4 3 2 1 is very much a novel of the 20th century. The Fergusons all bear witness to the assassinations and riots that marked the 1960s and ’70s, but Auster wisely chooses not to make Ferguson a Forrest   character, implausibly present for every significant historical moment. He also gives each iteration a subtle   about their parallel existences: One of them, at a fairly young age, thinks ”One of the odd things about being himself . .. was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn’t just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well.” There aren’t many authors who could pull an   novel like this off, and it’s a little surprising that Auster manages to do it so well. That’s not because he’s not a great writer, but he’s never been known for his loquacity or long, flowing sentences before. But he’s a gifted observer, and his writing is so energetic, he makes it work with passages like this: ”Adolescence feeds on drama, it is most happy when living in extremis, and Ferguson was no less vulnerable to the lure of high emotion and extravagant unreason than any other boy his age . ..” Occasionally, Auster goes on a little too long  —   the novel is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be. And his exuberant writing can get the best of him, like when he describes two teenagers kissing: ”. .. a delicious slobber of flailing tongues and clanking teeth, instant arousal in the rambunctious nether zones of their postpubescent bodies . ..” (There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but I probably don’t need to read the phrase ”rambunctious nether zones,” evocative though it may be, ever again.) Nonetheless, it’s a stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. Auster’s writing is joyful, even in the book’s darkest moments, and never ponderous or showy. ”Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past,” one of the Fergusons muses, ”. .. and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.” Auster proves himself a master of navigating these worlds, and even though all might not happen for the best in any of them, it’s an incredibly moving, true journey."
785,"Kristian Bush is one of the most successful artists in country music, both as a songwriter and part of the duo Sugarland. But his latest venture, Troubadour, is a musical  —   about country music in the 1950s, and a relationship between a star and his son. When it comes to collaboration, Bush says he’s open to just about anything  —   ”If you ask nicely.” That’s how he and Atlanta playwright Janece Shaffer ended up connecting on the project. ”I wrote him an email and we met for breakfast,” Shaffer says. ”By the end of breakfast, he’d written the first song for the show, ’Father to the Son. ’” Troubadour is a story about family and legacy  —   familiar themes in many country songs. The idea for the musical came from a clothing exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. ”It started out with church wear, dark clothes, dark pants, white tops, string ties, very, very plain,” Shaffer explains. ”And then there was this moment in the exhibition where it exploded with color and decoration and rhinestone  —   I wanted to know what happened at that moment.” That moment was in 1951, when tailor Nudie Cohn’s embroidered and   outfits began to catch on with country and western musicians. Director Susan Booth says a character based on Cohn was the original focus of Shaffer’s story. ”But it was an idea and it wasn’t yet a   narrative, and we talked for a while and she went away,” Booth says. ”And she came back and  —   all of a sudden  —   the story of the tailor was the story of a father and a son. It was a moment of profound transition musically, personally, and aesthetically. And I was in.” In Troubadour, reigning king of country Billy Mason is nearing retirement. His son Joe sings backup in his father’s band, but is looking to break out on his own. To convey a story that’s so intrinsic to Nashville, Booth says, it was important for the actors to have   stories that reflected those of the characters they would portray. So the   theater company held auditions in Nashville. Radney Foster, who plays Billy Mason, has had Top 40 country hits and songs recorded by Dixie Chicks and Keith Urban. He’d never acted before landing his role in Troubadour, he wasn’t used to the    of rehearsal, where it’s okay to fail. ”It’s really going to come down to my best effort to get the playwright, the composer, and the director’s vision in front of people,” he says. ”It feels weird to crash and burn in front people. I’m not used to that!” While Foster is steeped in the traditions of country, the playwright and composer come from more contemporary worlds. But Kristian Bush says it didn’t take a whole lot of work to find the sound of another era  —   not with Google on his side. ”[I] went out and started typing in obvious things, like ’country music in 1949,’” Bush says. ”So, I didn’t really have to go dig through bins.” Bush wrote 16 songs for Troubadour, 14 of which made it into the final show. Foster says it was a little strange at first to perform music written by someone else. But when he first heard the title song from the show, he was in.  ”Because that song is my life,” he says. ”And I think it’s really any other  ’s life.”"
786,"The tribal delegation visiting Sheikh Abdelraouf   was still talking in the very early hours of the morning last Sunday when his nephew, Abdullah, noticed strangers approaching on foot across the rocky, inhospitable terrain of central Yemen. ”Who are you?” Abdullah called out into the night. ”Who are you?” The men shot him dead. Startled by the gunfire, the Dhahab family scrambled to take up its own weapons and defend its house. According to accounts by locals, this was the way the battle began with U. S. special operations forces and some of their allies, which would unfold over several hours on the ground  —   and end with an aerial bombardment. By dawn, one American sailor was dead and three other service members were injured. Locals say numerous civilians, including women and nine children, were among the Yemenis killed. The U. S. military has opened an investigation, and U. S. military officials tell NPR that civilians were indeed among the victims. Taken together, claims and counterclaims from the U. S. military and local residents described a chaotic operation, one that drew sharp criticism from Yemeni officials who usually support the U. S. The aftermath of the raid shows the potential dangers if the U. S. military relaxes its current restrictions about using force and protecting civilians, which President Donald Trump has asked the Pentagon to review. One local man, Sadeq   was monitoring the battle from his village about 3 miles away, in constant telephone contact with men from his tribe who were visiting the Dhahab family. American officials described the raid as an attack on a compound. But Jawfi’s description was of a family house in a village with similar houses, albeit one with guard posts, where people were  . The Dhahabs and other families fought against the American raiders, who called in air support. The bombardment struck houses in which families were sheltering. Jawfi told NPR that 24 people were killed and provided a list of names including nine men, six women and nine children. He has served on a body known as a   committee, which works with the U. S.  Yemeni government in coordination with the United Nations to try to quell violence in the troubled country. NPR previously reported the death of the    daughter of   terrorist Anwar  . She lived with her grandfather in the capital, Sanaa, but was visiting her mother, who is Abdelraouf  ’s sister. The fighting also claimed the life of a Navy SEAL, Chief Special Warfare Operator William Owens. Other U. S. troops were injured when their aircraft   as part of the operation. On Wednesday, President Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base to take part in the transfer of Owens’ body from the military to his family. The casualties were the military’s first under Trump, who approved the special operations raid after planning began in November under his predecessor, Barack Obama. The battle and its aftermath, described to NPR by U. S. national security officials as well as the local witnesses, are the subject of a new investigation by the U. S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East. Although the Americans are continuing to look into what happened, CENTCOM Wednesday acknowledged ”regrettably that civilian   were likely killed.” By around 5 a. m. Sunday, the raiders were gone and the skies were clear, locals said. Abdullah   a tribal sheikh who lives in the village and confirmed much of Jawfi’s account, watched the attack from his house. ”I walked out of my house when it was over and began burying the dead,” he said. ”By noon, we were done.” Taissi said he counted about 28 bodies. Abdelraouf was among the dead, as was his brother, Sultan, and a tribal sheikh named Saif  . In Washington, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the raid  —   which he called ”very, very well thought out and executed”  —   had yielded valuable intelligence about   in the Arabian Peninsula. The local witnesses disputed that, saying the special operations troops never entered any buildings to take any computers or documents. Spicer said 14 of those killed were AQAP terrorists. Sadeq   also disputed that Abdelraouf   was a member of AQAP  —   though he did not deny family connections with the group. ”Look,” Jawfi said, ”there were brothers who had connections to   this is true.” But the three Dhahab brothers he named were already dead before Sunday’s raid  —   two killed by drone strikes and one by a fourth brother. Jawfi said Dhahab was working with the displaced Yemeni government that the U. S. and its allies have been supporting against Houthi rebels, who are armed and supported by Iran. In fact, Jawfi said, Dhahab had just returned from a trip to Maarib province to collect money to pay the salaries of   fighters. The Yemeni government’s foreign minister condemned the attack. A spokesman for the armed forces confirmed to local news media that Dhahab had been working for them. ”Abdelraouf   was not a terrorist or connected to any radical group,” said Mohsen Khasrouf, the spokesman. ”We are surprised this has happened.” Reuters, on the other hand, reports that AQAP called Abdelraouf a ”holy warrior.”  Also conflicted: Women in the compound may have started out as bystanders but became combatants when they took up weapons from the dead men, said one senior U. S. military official. Thus they would have posed a threat to the special operations raiders, complicating the issue of which casualties were civilian. Central Command may answer some of these questions in its investigation, but given the highly sensitive nature of U. S. special operations, the information may not become public. Trump has criticized Obama for being overly cautious against   and Trump’s national security advisers have suggested that he could lift current restrictions intended to avoid civilian casualties. Spicer suggested Thursday that the loss of life in Sunday’s raid was justified. ”When you think of the loss of life throughout America and institutions and in terms of the world, in terms of what some of the individuals could have done, I think it is a successful operation by all standards,” he said. The complex and risky nature of such raids is underscored by the death of a senior American special operator, the deaths of children and the fine line between being a legitimate tribal sheikh and one allied with a U. S.  government. Yemen has been in chaos since the fall of its government in 2011. As the poorest Arab country, it had always struggled, but its civil war has reduced it to the level of a failed state in which its onetime government,   Houthi rebels,   and other groups all are struggling for power. The U. S. has continued its   series of counterterrorism operations against AQAP throughout the conflict, while supporting a campaign of Saudi and other Arab airstrikes against the Houthis. But human rights groups have called the Saudi operations brutal, causing indiscriminate deaths of civilians as well as combatants. And a Saudi blockade of Yemen has created one of the world’s worst food crises, putting millions of people on the brink of famine. So far, Trump has not outlined a plan to try to put Yemen on a sustainable footing over the long term. Administration officials are, however, focused on the security dangers they see there, including the threat to the West from AQAP and the local danger posed by Iran’s use of the local Houthis. A suicide boat attack this week damaged a Saudi warship in the Red Sea, and last year, Houthis using   weapons launched missile attacks on United Arab Emirates and U. S. warships. On Wednesday, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn cited these and other ”malign actions” by Iran when he announced the United States was putting Tehran ”on notice.” The next time the Iranians launch a ballistic missile, attack ships or engage in similar actions, a senior administration official warned, the United States will take unspecified ”appropriate action.”"
787,"When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived at the State Department for his first day on the job, he made a point of visiting two walls in the entryway that pay tribute to fallen foreign service personnel. ”They died in service of causes far greater than themselves,” Tillerson told the hundreds of employees who packed the C Street lobby at Foggy Bottom. ”As we move forward in a new era, it is important to honor the sacrifices of those who have come before us, and reflect on the legacy that we inherit.” It was a message many diplomats needed to hear, after the White House called on ”career bureaucrats” to ”get with the program” or leave, remarks that were meant to target those who have expressed dissent over recent Trump administration moves. Tillerson’s visit was also in stark contrast to President Trump’s speech in front of a memorial at the CIA, where the president spent more time trashing media coverage of his inauguration than remembering career professionals who died on the job. At the State Department, there are 248 names on the memorial plaques, the first of which was unveiled in 1933 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson. According to the American Foreign Service Association, which maintains the plaque walls, these Americans died in 64 countries. Recent additions include Anne Smedingoff, a foreign service officer killed in Afghanistan in 2013, and the U. S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, killed in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Tillerson spent a few extra moments reading the names of Benghazi victims. ”The safety of every single member of our State Department family, regardless of where he or she is posted, is not just a priority for me. It’s a core value, and it will become a core value of this department,” Tillerson told his staff. He also alluded to the dissenting views about the Trump administration’s suspension of the refugee program and the temporary ban on visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries. ”Each of us is entitled to the expression of our political beliefs, but we cannot let our personal convictions overwhelm our ability to work as one team,” he said, assuring them that he would tap into their expertise. The   Texan and former CEO of Exxon Mobil promised to run the State Department efficiently. He also showed his humorous side, when he explained that he was late because of the morning’s National Prayer Breakfast. ”People felt the need to pray a little longer,” he said to laughter."
788,"Updated at 7:30 p. m. ET, Despite the religious underpinning of the National Prayer Breakfast, President Trump couldn’t resist settling a score. He slammed former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor as host of Celebrity Apprentice, for poor ratings. He also got in a dig at the show’s creator, Mark Burnett, who introduced Trump at the breakfast. ”We had tremendous success on The Apprentice, and when I ran for president, I had to leave the show. That’s when I knew for sure I was doing it,” Trump began. ”And they hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place. And we know how that turned out. The ratings went right down the tubes. It’s been a total disaster. And Mark will never, ever bet against Trump again.” ”And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings, OK.” Burnett was critical of Trump during the campaign, saying, ”I am not now and have never been a supporter of Donald Trump’s candidacy. I am NOT ’ .’ Further, my wife and I reject the hatred, division and misogyny that has been a very unfortunate part of his campaign.” Schwarzenegger responded in a video on Twitter with a provocative proposal: ”Why don’t we switch jobs? You take over TV because you’re such an expert in ratings, and I take over your job and then people can finally sleep comfortably again, hmm?” The tone  —   given the usual sobriety and apolitical nature of the gathering of religious leaders, lawmakers and other dignitaries  —   was stunning, if not unsurprising given how Trump has long ignored the usual rules. Trump did get to a serious point, pledging to ”totally destroy” a law that bars political activity by churches and other religious institutions. Referring to the ”Johnson Amendment,” an Internal Revenue Service rule that forbids clergy to preach politics, Trump said he ”will get rid of and totally destroy” the amendment and ”allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Trump also made a reference to a report in the Washington Post that he had a contentious phone call with the prime minister of Australia, one of the nation’s closest allies. ”When you hear about the tough phone calls I’m having, don’t worry about it,” Trump told the breakfast gathering in Washington, D. C. on Thursday. ”We’re taken advantage of by every nation in the world, virtually. It’s not going to happen anymore.” Trump referred to the controversial temporary ban on travel from seven nations and the pause in immigration he has implemented. ”We want people to come into our nation,” he said, ”but we want people to love us and to love our values, not to hate us and to hate our values.” Many religious leaders have been critical of the refugee ban. The Johnson Amendment is named for  . Lyndon Johnson, who proposed the rule forbidding   institutions such as churches to become involved in politics. It was imposed in 1954. Trump promised several times during his campaign to revoke it. He has not said how or when he intends to follow through on his pledge. Trump called the annual gathering a testament to the power of faith and one of the great customs of the nation. He said he hopes ”to be here seven more times with you.”"
789,"Ruffling U. S. ties with one of its closest allies, President Trump is sharply criticizing an   agreement with Australia  —   a deal that also reportedly prompted the American leader to tell Australia’s prime minister that his was the ”worst” phone call Trump received after his inauguration. Late Wednesday night, the president vented his anger on Twitter, saying: ”Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!” As the Australian Broadcasting Network notes, Trump’s tweet ”incorrectly labels refugees ’illegal immigrants’ and cites ’thousands’ of people instead of 1, 250.” The deal concerns refugees, many of them children, who’ve been housed in offshore detention centers on Nauru and other islands. The arrangement has been controversial in Australia, particularly after incidents of abuse emerged. Speaking to a radio station in Sydney, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he’s aware Trump doesn’t like the agreement, but, he added, the question is will he commit to honor the deal. He has given that commitment.” Turnbull says he’s disappointed that details about his communication with Trump were leaked  —   and while acknowledging that the talk was ”very frank and forthright,” he has dismissed the version of events reported by some outlets, that the American president hung up on his Australian counterpart. ”The report that the president hung up is not correct,” Turnbull told Sydney radio station 2GB. ”The call ended courteously.” After news of the apparent rift emerged, Sen. John McCain said he called the Australian ambassador ”to express my unwavering support for alliance” with the country that he described as one of America’s oldest friends and allies. The two allies, McCain noted, have fought together from World War I to Vietnam and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Melbourne, Louisa Lim reports for our Newscast unit: ”The trouble started during an acrimonious telephone call between Trump and Turnbull. The U. S. president had spoken to four other world leaders. But he told Turnbull this was the ’worst call by far’ and ended it abruptly, according to The Washington Post.” Louisa adds, ”This episode has already added weight to calls for Australia to   its decision to host U. S. Marines.”"
790,"Just how bad is the state of the nation’s highway infrastructure? So bad, tires on FedEx trucks last only half as long as they did 20 years ago, as they deteriorate rapidly from crumbling pavement and get more flats from gaping potholes. ”We’re using almost 100 percent more tires to produce the same mileage of transportation,” FedEx Chairman and CEO Fred Smith told the U. S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Wednesday. ”Why is that? Because the road infrastructure has so many potholes in it, it’s tearing up tires faster than before.” In addition, ”the cost of congestion is getting worse,” Smith continued. ”It’s preventing   deliveries” for his and other businesses whose growth is dependent upon   orders and rapid,    delivery. The House committee is beginning to lay the groundwork for what is expected to be a massive infrastructure proposal from the Trump administration in coming months. The president has said he will spend up to $1 trillion rebuilding the nation’s roads, bridges, tunnels and airports but has offered few specifics. The hearing was intended to outline the vast need for infrastructure improvements and start discussing ways to pay for it but therein lies the rub. There is almost universal agreement that there’s a great list of things in need of repair, whether seaports or airports, railways or waterways. But few in Congress, especially in the majority party, seem willing to back specific taxes or fees to fund infrastructure. ”Finding the money is the   gorilla in the room,” said Republican Rep. Brian Babin of Texas. Democrat Peter DeFazio of Oregon reminded fellow committee members that the Highway Trust Fund is running out of money because the current 18. 4 cents per gallon federal gas tax falls far short of funding present needs. DeFazio says the existing highway and transit spending plan already relies on ”gimmicks” and ”funny money that we’ll never see.” The Trump administration has floated a plan to use tax credits to lure private investment in infrastructure projects, but experts say that can work only for projects such as toll roads that will generate a revenue stream to pay off investors. And none of the corporate chief executives testifying before the committee Wednesday said they believe such   partnerships could generate anywhere near enough revenue to meet the infrastructure needs. ”We at Federal Express support an increase in the gas tax,” said Smith. But he quickly added that his company is rapidly moving toward using more electric, hybrid electric and natural gas fueled vehicles, which would not pay traditional gasoline and diesel taxes. So he says his company would support a tax on vehicle miles traveled, tolls or   pricing, which would charge all highway users. Others testifying before the committee, including David MacLennan, CEO of agribusiness giant Cargill BMW of North America CEO Ludwig Willisch Mary Andringa, CEO of   manufacturer Vermeer Corp. and   President Richard Trumka, expressed support for increased user fees to pay for fixing up, rebuilding and expanding the nation’s infrastructure. But a coalition called the Alliance for   Interstates, which includes the American Trucking Associations and the   Independent Drivers Association, asks committee members to ”reject tolling of existing interstates as a financing method.” Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, a Republican from Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post this week that adding tolls to existing interstate highways is a political nonstarter. Such opposition to tolls, combined with ”no tax increase” pledges signed by many Republicans, reduces the prospects for any increase in motor fuel taxes, frustrating some Democrats. DeFazio suggests his proposal for a small increase in the gas tax that is indexed to inflation would have few political consequences. ”Gas would go up 2 cents a gallon,” he said. ”Anybody think they’re going to lose their election over that?” Near the end of the hearing, which lasted more than three hours, Democratic Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada said it ended up sounding like too many hearings in Congress in years past. ”We’re having the same conversation,” she said. ”I keep hearing the same rhetoric without action.”"
791,"It’s tempting to keep the computer running late and promise yourself an extra 30 minutes of bed rest in the morning. It’s tempting to do it again the next night, too. But sleep inevitably loses out to getting up early for school or work. There’s a simple way to combat this: End all artificial lights at night for at least a weekend and drench your eyes in natural morning light, says Kenneth Wright, a professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and senior author on a study on resetting sleep cycles. The most straightforward way of doing this is to forbid any electronics on a camping trip. In the study, published Thursday in Current Biology, Wright reports on the latest of a series of experiments where he sent people out camping in Colorado parks to reset their biological clocks. Small groups of people set out for a week during the summer, an experiment published in Current Biology in 2013. This most recent study shows the results of camping a week in winter and once over a winter weekend. Others stayed at home to live their life. Along with sleep, Wright kept track of people’s circadian rhythms by measuring their levels of the hormone melatonin, which regulates wakefulness and sleep. Before each camping trip, Wright says that he noticed something odd about the study participants’ melatonin levels. In general, melatonin makes us feel tired. Levels of the hormone rise a couple of hours before we sleep, and they fall right when we wake up. ”In the modern environment, those melatonin levels fall back down a couple of hours after we wake up,” Wright says. ”Our brains say we should be sleeping several hours after we wake up.” The participants’ sleep and wake times were slightly out of step with their internal clocks, like constantly being a little jet lagged. But after people got back from a   camping trip, the jet lag was gone. ”[Melatonin] would go down at sunrise and right when people woke up,” Wright says. And people’s entire sleep schedules had shifted earlier so that they were going to bed and rising two or more hours earlier than they had been before camping. Those who had gone camping for just a weekend had their sleep schedules shifted by a little less than an hour and a half. Why this happens probably has to do with how drastically different an environment lit by light bulbs and laptops is from one of sun and starlight. Outside, ”you are pretty constrained by natural   cycles and the intensity and light spectrum that you see in nature,” says Dr. Phyllis Zee, director for the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University who was not involved with the study. Natural light, particularly morning sunshine, which is enriched with blue light, has a very powerful influence on setting internal clocks. That bright light can affect our circadian rhythm is nothing new, Zee says. But this collection of studies make very clear how an artificially lit environment at night can push our sleep timing further back, while bright,   light can train our circadian rhythms to sync earlier in a way that is actionable. Sleep doctors will often suggest that people use a light box indoors in the morning to simulate dawn, but’s not always as effective as real dawn. ”I actually have used that [summer camping] study to treat some of my patients,” Zee says. ”We see people who can’t fall asleep until 4 am. It can be very difficult to use this light box in the morning and avoid light at night. So you say, okay, there’s this camping thing.” If camping is not your thing, Zee suggests trying to copy a natural   cycle, at least on the weekend. ”Over 60 percent of the shift can happen over a weekend. It’s pretty amazing,” she says. ”We can on weekends or days off go out or sit by the window and just expose ourselves to a natural   cycle.” And in a perfect world, homes, schools and offices would have artificial light that could mimic the spectrum and the intensity of natural light. ”As a new design philosophy, think about light as important as having clean air,” Zee says. ”It’s possible. It’s totally possible.” Angus Chen is on Twitter @angRchen"
792,"Researchers in Hawaii have captured dramatic footage of a ”firehose” of   lava plummeting down a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, sending fragments of lava and clouds of gray smoke into the sky. It’s coming from the big island’s Kilauea volcano, which has been erupting since January 1983. On New Year’s Day, about 21 acres of rock from the Komokuna lava delta collapsed. After that, ”the exposed lava tube continued to feed a cascade of molten rock down the steep sea cliff,” according to the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. That’s what we’re looking at now. It goes without saying that a tube of   lava is extremely dangerous. In the footage, the hot lava hitting cooler water continually explodes, sending off fragments of molten lava and volcanic glass in all directions. The USGS said last week that large bursts have sent the spatter ”about twice the height of the sea cliff.” The lava stream has appeared to narrow in the past few days. National Park representatives have set up a viewing area for the stream of lava, where visitors can see it from a safe distance through binoculars or a telephoto lens. Meanwhile, the researchers are concerned that the cliff itself continues to be unstable. They’re noticing a widening crack, ”making the site extremely dangerous for anyone who ventures too closely to the ocean entry by land or by sea.” Researchers can actually hear grinding noises coming from the crack, and they’re warning that it ”could collapse at any time.”"
793,"The United Nations is warning that Somalia could soon be facing a famine without urgent international action, raising concerns about a repeat of 2011’s famine which killed more than a quarter of a million people. The country is in a severe drought after two seasons of weak rainfall, the U. N. said in a statement. ”In the worst affected areas, inadequate rainfall and lack of water has wiped out crops and killed livestock, while communities are being forced to sell their assets, and borrow food and money to survive,” the U. N. says. ”If we do not scale up the drought response immediately, it will cost lives, further destroy livelihoods, and could undermine the pursuit of key   and peacebuilding initiatives,” said the Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, Peter de Clercq. The number of people in need of assistance is rising rapidly. In September, that figure was at 5 million people  —   now, it’s over 6. 2 million. There are growing concerns about the possible human toll, but de Clercq emphasized that at this point, famine is not a foregone conclusion. ”A drought  —   even one this severe  —   does not automatically have to mean catastrophe if we can respond early enough with timely support from the international community,” he said. The U. N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Somalia representative, Richard Trenchard, pointed out some of the warning signs: ”Labour prices are collapsing local food prices are rising food availability is becoming patchy animal deaths are increasing and malnutrition rates are rising, especially among children.” Conditions are particularly severe in the rural area of Puntland, he said. And as NPR’s Gregory Warner explained, it’s rare for a famine to officially be declared, and can come after much of the damage has already occurred: ”Consider Somalia, a country that’s been mired in war and chaos for more than two decades. When [the U. S. government’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network] declared famine there in 2011, aid money poured in, as did television cameras. The famine was quickly defeated. ”But by the time the Somali famine was officially declared, at least half of its 260, 000 victims had already died. So by the time conditions become so dire that they warrant the famine label, it can be too late.” Somalia also faces regular militant attacks from the      group. The country is currently going through a historic political process. It has sworn in a new Parliament and is in the process of planning presidential elections."
794,"  bodegas across New York City’s five boroughs shut their doors at noon ET Thursday to protest President Trump’s executive order barring travelers from seven   countries. Under the order signed last Friday, travelers from not only Yemen but also Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria are barred from entering the U. S. for 90 days. The order also suspends admissions of new refugees for 120 days. For Sulaiman   who works at the Best and Tasty Grocery on 143rd Street, the travel ban sends the message that he is not welcome here. Audi was born in Yemen but has been in the U. S. since 2002. ”We’ve been here over a decade, and we’ve never posed any threat to anybody. We’re just here to make a living,” he told Annmarie Fertoli of NPR member station WNYC. Audi says he has started the application process to bring his wife and baby to the U. S. But he doesn’t know what happens next. Debbie Almontaser, who organized Thursday’s bodega protests, says about 1, 000 shops are participating. She says that restaurants and other stores have also closed in solidarity. ”The message that the merchants are sending is that they are part of the American fabric and the Muslim ban has devastated them and their families,” says Almontaser, who is of Yemeni descent. She too, is personally affected by the new travel restrictions. ”My   ’s wife is still stuck in Jordan,” she told me. ”She was awaiting her visa and now because of the ban she won’t be able to join him and her children.” At Best and Tasty Grocery, a sign greeted customers. It read: ”In support of our family, friends and loved ones who are stranded at U. S. airports and overseas, we are closing our business today.” Alina Babar, a hospital worker and regular customer, expressed sympathy for the strike. ”I think it’s brave of them to take a stand,” she told WNYC, ”and I think they have every right to do it, and I think that they feel like they’re being treated poorly.” Many bodega workers and their supporters have gathered for a rally at in Brooklyn Borough Hall in solidarity with the   community."
795,"A large crowd turned out to see Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day Thursday, waiting to learn whether the animal saw his own shadow on Gobbler’s Knob. Phil was in an unusually feisty mood, but once he settled down, he saw his own shadow, officials deemed. As aficionados of the annual ritual will know, that means we’re in for six more weeks of cold weather, and as the prediction was read out in in Punxsutawney Pa. a sign was held aloft reading, ”We love Old Man Winter.” But other groundhogs did not agree with Phil’s assessment. In particular, Staten Island Chuck  —   owner of the highest accuracy rating (at 80 percent) among prognosticating rodents  —   informed a New York audience that we would see an early spring. And to the north in Nova Scotia, Shubenacadie Sam concurred with Chuck. We’ll note that Sam seems to have the most polished media presence among his peers: When the door to his little house slid open this morning, he quickly emerged and sprinted across his snowy enclosure, delighting the crowd. It was the 131st time Punxsutawney Phil has shared his meteorological ideas with a grateful nation, and this time around, the information was  . His eponymous day seemed to sneak up on Phil, and despite more than an hour of loud music and the adoring shouts of human admirers that preceded the sunrise event, his handlers had to grapple with the groundhog so he could have his moment in the sun (or shade). Phil’s rambunctious behavior could be interpreted as a sign that he’s connected to a larger animal collective conscious  —   one that might recall that in olden times, the Gobbler’s Knob celebration included eating the star rodent, as NPR intern Cecilia Mazanec reports. ”But as Phil rose in popularity, he moved off the menu,” Cecilia notes. The event in Punxsutawney is a party, with officials wearing top hats onstage and many in the audience wearing groundhog hats made of brown fleece. For the record, it was around 30 degrees at the event this morning. To awaken the groundhog, the crowd chanted ”Phil! Phil! Phil! Phil!” The door on his   lair was unlocked. And then, on the count of three, his handlers (wearing protective gloves that they would sorely need) brought Phil out. ”He’s squealin’ he’s hollerin’!” the emcee said, before concluding, ”Phil is feisty!” The animal, known in his hometown as ”the seer of seers,” was then displayed to the crowd before being placed on a stump to determine whether he might see his own shadow. An official decree was then read aloud, declaring our cold future. If you just like the movie Groundhog Day and don’t know what the fuss is about, here’s a video for you."
796,"The famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow Thursday and saw his shadow. As the legend goes, the sighting gave us six more weeks of winter. (If he hadn’t seen a shadow, we would have been rewarded with an early spring.) But why is a groundhog predicting the weather for us in the first place? Here are a few tidbits of information about groundhogs and the day that celebrates their meteorological skills. Predicting new weather came from old tradition  A celebration of future weather conditions existed long before groundhogs were involved. Originally, the idea sprang from the ancient Christian celebration, Candlemas Day. It fell between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and clergy would bless candles and pass them out to people. Like Groundhog Day, if skies were sunny, people could expect a longer winter. And if the day was cloudy, warm weather was soon to come. Eventually, a hedgehog was brought into the mix, only to be later switched out for a groundhog. In the 1880s, however, groundhogs served as both the celebration and a meal: Members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club hosted the annual February celebration, along with a groundhog hunt in the summer. But as Phil rose in popularity, he moved off the menu. It’s not just Phil, and it’s not all about weather, From Pennsylvania’s less famous Grover the Groundhog to North Carolina’s Sir Walter Wally to New York’s Staten Island Chuck, there is no shortage of groundhogs called upon to predict the weather. Washington, D. C. even has Potomac Phil, a stuffed groundhog, though it’s unclear how a dead groundhog is able to see his shadow. But while we’re focused on the weather, it turns out there’s another reason male groundhogs pop their heads out their holes on Feb. 2. Stam Zervanos, emeritus professor of biology at Penn State Berks, in Reading, Pa. told National Geographic that these guys are looking for love: ”At this time of year, males emerge from their burrows to start searching for the females. The females come out probably seven days later and stay just outside of their burrow or maybe just inside their burrow.” After the male groundhogs lock down the address for their fave female groundhog, everyone heads back to their own house to burrow in some more. As Zervanos told National Geographic: ”In March, they all emerge together, and that’s when mating occurs. The males know exactly where the females are, [so] mating can occur very rapidly.” Crunching the numbers, Punxsutawney Phil is by far the most famous among these rodents, as his predictions are heard around the country. But how accurate are his forecasts? Since 1988, Phil’s predictions have only been correct about 46 percent of the time, according to USA Today. In comparison, Staten Island Chuck’s accuracy rate of 80 percent is nearly double that of Phil’s. In 2009, Staten Island Zoo’s Doug Schwartz told Time that Phil may be more popular, but Chuck had better numbers. ”You want accurate readings, you go to Chuck,” he told the reporter. But the members of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle, who care for Phil and help plan the event every year, claim he is correct 100 percent of the time. The language and many lives of Punxsutawney Phil, According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, the chubby rodent we see every year on Feb. 2 is the same one that has been making predictions for more than 131 years. (We have no idea how they ate Phil back in the day, and kept him alive for nearly two centuries too.) Every summer, Phil takes a sip of the ”elixir of life”  —   a secret recipe, of course  —   and it gives him seven additional years of life. Maybe he’s used that extra time to perfect his ”Groundhogese,” a language only understood by the president of the group’s Inner Circle. The current president, Bill Deeley, has been a member of the club since 1986. Each year Phil whispers his prediction to Deeley, who then translates it for the world. Last year, Phil told Deeley that springtime warmth was on its way. This year, the rodent of the hour advised we keep our hats and mittens handy. Cecilia Mazanec is a Digital News intern. "
797,"When Phil Connors, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, wakes up at 6 a. m. to an alarm clock playing Sonny and Cher’s ”I Got You Babe,” it sounds like a lovely and chipper musical start to a regular day. That is, until  —   spoiler alert  —   Connors gets stuck in a time loop that forces him to relive that day over and over and over again, and therefore start the morning listening to Sonny and Cher. Every. Single. Day. In honor of Groundhog Day, we figured we’d ask: If you had to wake up and relive the same record every day, over and over, for the rest of your life, what would it be? Here are what some of your   pals wouldn’t mind hearing on loop for all time."
798,"For the second time in as many days, a Senate committee’s GOP leadership has bypassed a boycott by Democrats to advance President Trump’s Cabinet nominees. The Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee boycotted the second meeting in a row to confirm Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA. Committee rules say that two members of the minority party must be present for a vote, but chairman John Barrasso,  . suspended the rules so Pruitt’s nomination could pass the committee with only Republican votes, and he passed  . Pruitt will still need to be confirmed by the full Senate, which appears likely. A Democratic aide from the EPW committee says they recognize that the move is ”allowable under Senate rules” even if it’s unprecedented for the committee. Upon reconvening the committee, Barrasso said: ”It is disappointing that they chose that course of action. We will not allow it to obstruct.” Hearings on Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, Rep. Mick Mulvaney,  . C. were moving ahead Thursday morning. Pruitt has faced fierce opposition from Democrats. He sued the EPA as Oklahoma’s attorney general and was asked during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 18 by Sen. Edward Markey,  . whether he would recuse himself from cases he was a part of. Pruitt’s response was that he would ”follow the guidance and counsel” of ethics lawyers at EPA, which was not a satisfying answer for Democrats. Democrats say they have not received full answers on Pruitt’s record and positions. The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Tom Carper,  . sent a letter to Barrasso on Monday requesting more records from Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma attorney general, as well as more complete answers on his positions regarding clean air and water regulations. ”It’s unacceptable and sets a dangerous precedent for the committee to allow him to stonewall on these important questions,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley,  . in a statement from committee Democrats after the vote on Thursday. ”This committee has conducted an extremely thorough and fair process of reviewing attorney general Pruitt’s nomination,” Barrasso said on Thursday. ”That includes a hearing of unprecedented length, number of questions and timely responses from the nominee.” In the past, Pruitt has questioned climate change. Here’s what the EPA nominee told senators at his confirmation hearing: ”Let me say to you, science tells us that the climate is changing and that human activity in some matter impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue. And well it should be.” Democrats boycotted a hearing to vote on Pruitt’s nomination Wednesday. Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee did the same to block votes on Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of the Treasury as well as Health and Human Services earlier this week. On Wednesday, Finance Committee chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch,   suspended committee rules to approve those nominees without Democrats present. Delaying nominees is the most Democrats can do. Due to rule changes in recent years, Cabinet positions can clear the Senate with a simple majority, as opposed to the   threshold required on most legislation and Supreme Court nominees  ” setting up a big fight in the months ahead of Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia. There is growing frustration among some Democratic voters that their leaders are not doing enough to block nominees. At a rally held Monday night by congressional Democrats to protest Trump’s executive order to pause the entry of refugees from all nations and immigrants from seven   countries, some in the crowd demanded action in addition to the words being offered. ”That’s just like the Republicans did for Obama, only this time with a good cause. They should really be fighting for everything they can do to hold up the administration,” Tom Johnson of College Park, Md. told NPR. In addition to boycotting committee votes, Democrats have delayed other Cabinet nominees on the Senate floor. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was confirmed Wednesday night after Democrats forced two full days of deliberation. Without the filibuster, Democrats have been unable to block any Trump nominees so far. The only one that looks to be in serious trouble is Betsy DeVos, the nominee to lead the Department of Education. An advocate of school choice, she lost the support of Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska on Wednesday. She has no support from Democrats, and if one more Republican opposes DeVos she will not be able to be confirmed."
799,"The U. S. Treasury Department has modified sanctions against Russia, allowing U. S. companies to interact with Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB. The sanctions were imposed by the Obama administration on Dec. 29 in the wake of Russia’s meddling in the U. S. presidential campaign, and were meant to deprive the FSB of access to some technologies. NPR’s John Ydstie reported that some U. S. tech companies complained the policy limited their ability to sell their products to   parties in Russia, ”because the FSB controls the licensing needed to sell consumer products including things like cellphones and tablets.” The change announced today allows companies to do limited business with the intelligence agency in order to acquire those licenses. He also reported that ”a senior Treasury official who also worked on this issue during the Obama administration says the action represents a technical fix to avoid unintended consequences.” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at a news conference that it was ”common for Treasury, after sanctions are put in place, to go back and look at specific carve outs for different industries or products and services.” During a Thursday meeting with Harley Davidson executives at the White House, President Trump was asked about easing sanctions against Russia and replied, ”I haven’t eased anything.” During a brief background call with reporters, a senior Treasury official said the department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, which oversees sanctions, had begun to get complaints from U. S. companies on Dec. 30, and that the change covered mostly consumer devices and consumer software. The senior treasury official confirmed that there was a cap of $5, 000 per company per year on fees that could be paid to the FSB in order to obtain the necessarily licenses to sell their products, and that no exports are allowed to Crimea, which Russia took over in 2014."
800,"More than 70 people were arrested on Wednesday afternoon near the proposed route of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, as Western lawmakers expressed opposing views on the future of the $3. 8 billion project. The Morton County Sheriff’s office said it had arrested approximately 76 people who were camping on land the sheriff’s department said was privately owned, north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and south of the pipeline’s proposed crossing under the Missouri River. The   Last Child Camp was near the larger, and still occupied, Oceti Sakowin Camp established last year on nearby federal land, according to a Facebook post yesterday by Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, one of the groups that have organized protests against the pipeline. Across the Cannonball River, the Sacred Stone Camp is also still occupied by protesters. Construction of the final piece of the nearly   pipeline is awaiting approval from the U. S. Army. On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process, and earlier this week the Army said that it had been directed to expedite its review of the route, which requires an easement to cross under a portion of the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. ”These initial steps do not mean the easement has been approved,” the Army wrote in a statement. As we reported, on Jan. 18 the Army announced it was gathering information for an environmental impact assessment and that it would accept public comments through Feb. 20, according to a notice published in the Federal Register. It was unclear what, if any, effect the presidential directive will have on that process. On Wednesday, three Democratic senators, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jon Tester of Montana,   a letter to the president saying they were ”deeply concerned” and arguing that truncating or overriding the environmental review process would be illegal. All three are members of the Senate Indian Affairs committee. ”Long standing legal precedent requires the United States to uphold its trust responsibility to tribes and to protect the lands and resources that were guaranteed to them by treaty,” they wrote. ”By ’expediting’ this process and proceeding without appropriate consultation and pushing for a predetermined outcome, the United States would be turning its back on its most solemn trust responsibility with the Tribe.” Other members of Congress disagreed. Rep. Kevin Cramer,  . D. repeatedly referred to the ”approval” of the pipeline project, tweeting, ”Start your engines. #DAPL #Approved” on Tuesday. ”Got word from the White House today and the Dakota Access pipeline now has its final green light,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. Sen. John Hoeven,  . D. the current chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs committee, issued a statement celebrating the imminent approval of the easement. Meanwhile, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe promised to ”vigorously pursue legal action to ensure the environmental impact statement order issued late last year is followed so the pipeline process is legal, fair and accurate.” As of Thursday, no formal legal action had been announced. The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, Dave Archambault II, requested that the president meet with tribal leaders, and he challenged the president’s authority to change the ongoing environmental review process. ”President Trump, the [Environmental Review Statement] is already underway,” Archambault wrote. ”This change in course is arbitrary and without justification the law requires that changes in agency positions be backed by new circumstances or new evidence, not simply by the President’s whim.”"
801,"Updated at 12:15 p. m. ET on Feb. 1, Sen. John Hoeven,  . D. said Tuesday that the acting secretary of the Army had directed the Corps of Engineers to ”proceed with the easement” necessary for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. If it’s granted, the easement under review would allow the pipeline to cross under a federally controlled section of the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. On Wednesday, the Department of the Army said in a statement that it had been directed to expedite its review of the easement request, but that ”these initial steps do not mean the easement has been approved.” The directive is in line with President Trump’s Jan. 24 memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process. ”The Assistant Secretary for the Army Civil Works will make a decision on the pipeline once a full review and analysis is completed in accordance with the directive,” according the Army statement. On Jan. 18 the Army announced it was gathering information for an environmental impact assessment, and that it would accept public comments through Feb. 20, according to a notice published in the Federal Register. It was unclear what, if any, effect the presidential directive will have on that process. The project, which is slated to carry North Dakota crude to Midwestern refineries, has drawn protesters who say oil might leak from the structure and contaminate water supplies, and that construction is disturbing lands sacred to the Sioux tribe. In December, the Obama administration ordered a pause for an environmental study, but President Trump moved soon after his inauguration to support the pipeline, along with the Keystone XL pipeline for Canadian crude. Hoeven said he had spoken with both acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer and Vice President Pence about the easement: ”This will enable the company to complete the project, which can and will be built with the necessary safety features to protect the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others downstream. ”Building new energy infrastructure with the latest safeguards and technology is the safest and most environmentally sound way to move energy from where it is produced to where people need it.” Hoeven also said he is working to get additional funds for law enforcement at the site. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has fought against construction of the pipeline for months, with members and supporters living on the site, trying to block construction. The tribe said it will continue its battle: ”[The announcement] is . .. not a formal issuance of the easement —  it is notification that the easement is imminent. . .. ”The Army Corps lacks statutory authority to simply stop the [environmental study] and issue the easement. The Corps must review the Presidential Memorandum, notify Congress, and actually grant the easement. We have not received formal notice that the [study] has been suspended or withdrawn.” Rep. Kevin Cramer,  . D. said in a statement that the pipeline is an ”important piece of energy infrastructure enhancing America’s energy security and putting North Dakotans and Americans back to work. President Trump has proven to be a man of action and I am grateful for his commitment to this and other critical infrastructure projects so vital to our nation.” Amy Sisk of Prairie Public Broadcasting contributed to this report."
802,"Humans get along pretty well with most microbes. Which is lucky, because there are a lot more of them in the world than there are of us. We couldn’t even live without many of them. But a few hundred have evolved, and are still evolving, to exploit our bodies in ways that can make us really sick. These are the microbes we call germs. Think plague, flu, HIV, SARS, Ebola, Zika, measles. This is a series is about where germs come from. In this first of three episodes, we see what our early encounters with germs may have been like  ” and how germs first got the upper hand. Next up: Episode 2: The Golden Age of Germs, What do you want to know about pandemics? Share your questions by submitting them in our special tool here. Our global health team will answer some of them in an upcoming story. . "
803,"During a   span, a team of primatologists witnessed 15 daytime births in wild gelada monkeys residing in the grasslands of   Ethiopia. It’s unusual to witness daytime births. Most monkeys and apes give birth at night, probably because it’s adaptive for new mothers to have time to rest and recover from labor before having to keep up during group travel and, possibly, confront predators. It’s still unclear why these 13 live births and two stillbirths  —   a small percentage of the overall births that occurred during the decade of observations  —   took place during the day. It may be because this   band of about 200 monkeys provides extra protection for new mothers through its sheer numbers, thus, to some degree, relaxing selection pressure against daytime births. Behavioral biologist Nga Nguyen and her colleagues in the Guassa Gelada Research Project describe the births in a new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The paper provides ”the most detailed account of behaviors surrounding birth for any wild nonhuman primate to date.” Two issues taken up in the paper are particularly fascinating: How do the behaviors of experienced mothers (nine of the 15 geladas) differ from those of   mothers? And how does the geladas’ birth process compare with that of humans? On the first question, Nguyen et al. write this: ”At Guassa, gelada mothers with prior experience delivering at least one other infant were more likely to: a) give birth later in the afternoon b) give birth away from conspecifics c) manually assist infants out of the birth canal and d) consume the placenta following delivery of the infant.” These learned behaviors seem likely to confer advantages, as the researchers explain. Giving birth later in the day allows more recovery time staying away from the group might cut down on aggression from other females during labor guiding the fetus out of the birth canal reduces the risk that the infants might fall to the ground and eating the placenta may result in ingestion of a dose of   opioids. In humans, placentophagy almost never occurs  —   though exceptions do exist  —   and this is just one way in which we humans aren’t typical when it comes to primate birth. Women in labor usually have active help from birth assistants and, in fact, human birth is a social event or ritual visibly important to our whole family  —   maybe even our whole community. This isn’t so for the monkeys. This divergence attests to the intensification of our social and community bonds throughout the period of human evolution. Other differences are related to the evolution of bipedalism in the human lineage. Most of the gelada infants in this study (11 of 15) were born   with head and neck extended. Human babies are typically born with the top of the head appearing first and directed toward the mother’s spine, or as it’s sometimes called ”facing backwards” (as chimpanzees’ babies may be as well) with the neck flexed. Our   birth presentation happens after what Nguyen et al. describe as ”a complex series of rotations” as the fetus travels through the birth canal. That precise sequence happens because women, owing to our bipedal gait, must birth   babies through a pelvis that is narrow, with bony projections that protrude into the birth canal. Back in the 1980s, I studied how infant baboons in Kenya learn from their elders what foods to eat. Among my most memorable moments during those 14 months was rejoining my study group in the early morning to discover an       baby clinging to a monkey mom’s chest. I never was lucky enough to witness an actual birth, though, and so I was curious to know what that experience felt like. C. Barret Goodale,   on the AJPA paper who had witnessed two of the births, recounted this about one of them by email: ”I was following the geladas across the   grassland and was climbing out of a valley when I noticed [female monkey] Belle was adopting a strange stance and whipping her tail around in a peculiar way that I had never seen before. The realization that Belle was about to give birth struck me with a weight of responsibility and importance, and I responded by documenting every detail of the process I could, to the point of being painfully focused and even detached from myself during the event. Meanwhile, Belle’s family members continued to graze and grunt as though nothing spectacular was occurring, suggesting that this event is one, of only a few, that a female gelada bears alone.” Niina Nurmi, another   who had witnessed three of the births, also was struck by the isolation of the birthing females: ”While the geladas are habituated to human presence and data are being collected on subjects surrounded (most of times) with their group members, the birth events were characterized by a sense of vulnerability because while the other group members often kept moving further, the behavioral options of the individual in labor appeared to be limited by [her] condition. I recall feeling affected by the seeming calmness of the individuals giving birth, albeit the actual level of their inner discomfort or stress remained unknown to me.” Lead researcher Nguyen reflected on what the broad significance of this work might be: ”Like nearly every female mammal the world over, human females alone carry infants internally, give birth to them, and provide much (if not most) of their care after they are born. And like our primate cousins, human females give birth to   kids, and must somehow maintain ties with their friends and families even after giving birth, while being largely (or wholly) responsible for the   of their newborns. These are some of the challenges that human females share with their primate brethren, and research like ours highlights the ties that bind us to each other.” So, yes, specific differences are documented in how monkeys give birth versus women. But meaningful similarities exist, too, for female primates in these major life events. The ties that bind us in evolutionary perspective? I couldn’t have said it better. Barbara J. King is an anthropology professor emerita at the College of William and Mary. She often writes about the cognition, emotion and welfare of animals, and about biological anthropology, human evolution and gender issues. Barbara’s most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve, and her forthcoming book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, will be published in March. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape"
804,"Federal health officials may be about to get greatly enhanced powers to quarantine people, as part of an ongoing effort to stop outbreaks of dangerous contagious diseases. The new powers are outlined in a set of regulations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published late last month to update the agency’s quarantine authority for the first time since the 1940s. The outlined changes are being welcomed by many health lawyers, bioethicists and public health specialists as providing important tools for protecting the public. But the CDC’s increased authority is also raising fears that the rules could be misused in ways that violate civil liberties. The update was finalized at the end of the Obama administration and was scheduled to go into effect Feb. 21. But the Trump administration is reviewing the changes as part of its review of new regulations. So the soonest the changes could go into effect has been pushed to the end of March. Under the old rules, the CDC’s authority was primarily limited to detaining people entering the country or crossing state lines. The agency was also limited to quarantining people who had one of about a dozen diseases, including cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, plague, smallpox and yellow fever. Yet even then, the CDC rarely exercised these powers and generally deferred to state and local health officials. With the new rules, the CDC would be able to detain people anywhere in the country without getting approval from state and local officials. The agency could also apprehend people to assess their health if they are exhibiting medical problems such as a high fever, headache, cramps and other symptoms that could be indicative of a dangerous infectious disease. ”Because of the breadth and scope of the definition of ill persons, CDC can target a much wider swath of persons to assess and screen,” says James Hodge Jr. a professor of public health law and ethics at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Hodge says the new rules are ”really necessary,” given the potential threat that infectious diseases pose. Some others who have studied the issue agree. ”The CDC has been operating its infectious disease powers under really antiquated regulations,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University. But other attorneys say they fear the new rules give the CDC too much power  —   with insufficient safeguards to protect an individual’s rights. ”It could represent a great danger to Americans’ health and civil liberties,” says Wendy Parmet, a health policy lawyer at Northeastern University. For example, she says, the rules would allow the CDC to hold someone in quarantine for 72 hours before their case is subject to review. And that review would be conducted by the CDC itself instead of an outside, objective entity. ”The concern,” Parmet says, ”is that unless these regulations are carried out with care, and by people who [base their actions] on science, they can be used to trammel the civil liberties of Americans.” Parmet is especially concerned that the CDC’s enhanced powers would take effect just as the Trump administration is assuming control over the agency. ”A lot of the signals we’ve received from President Trump suggests he may be inclined to not always listen to the science,” Parmet says, ”and to ground policy in what I guess we’re now calling ’alternative facts,’ instead of scientific facts. That’s scary.” When contacted by NPR, officials at the federal Department of Health and Human Services would only confirm that the new rules are under review they declined further comment. NPR also contacted the CDC, but the agency has not made anyone available to discuss the new quarantine powers. ”My worst fear is we have a replay of Ebola and we have, say, President Trump assert the policy he thought we ought to have when he was citizen Trump,” says Scott Burris, a professor of law at Temple University. During the   Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Burris points out, Trump tweeted that American health workers who got sick while treating victims should be prevented from returning to the United States for medical care. Some public health specialists fear the CDC’s new powers could backfire on efforts to prevent disease. For example, some sick people might hide their symptoms for fear of being detained. ”The   scenario is that people may try to evade these procedures by, say, taking medicines to reduce their fever, or be afraid to report it if they are feeling ill on a plane,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, a research epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. ”We don’t want to drive cases underground by putting measures in place that seem as though they carry some penalties associated with them,” Nuzzo says. Gostin agrees that the rules are imperfect and that quarantining anyone is a very serious step. ”It’s really a quite, I would say, draconian public health measure,” he says. ”The most draconian measure, because it allows you to literally imprison somebody who you don’t know for sure is a danger to the public.” But quarantines also can be key to stopping an outbreak, Gostin says. He believes the new rules give the CDC   flexibility. ”We know that the United States is vulnerable to a whole range of infectious diseases that are circulating around the world,” Gostin says. ”But we don’t know which one will be next. And so when something sweeps up on our shores, we don’t want to have delay and have political debate.” While he agrees the civil liberties protections in the new regulations should be even stronger, Gostin argues they’re better than relying on the protections in the old rules. The new president is a   ”germophobe,” Gostin notes. ”If you’re a germophobe, then you’re going to overreact and the last thing we want in the face of a public health crisis is overreaction,” he says. ”And I think having rules in place that are modern at least will provide some buffer against the whims of an administration that may overreact.”"
805,"They are just three little words  —   ”health savings accounts”  —   but they are generating a lot of buzz as Republicans contemplate plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Expanding the use of these accounts, based on a   conservative view that consumers should be more responsible for their health care spending, is a part of almost every GOP replacement plan under consideration on Capitol Hill. Here’s the theory behind HSAs: Making consumers bear a bigger upfront share of medical care  —   while making it easier to save money   for that purpose  —   will result in more judicious use of the health system that could ultimately slow rising costs. While the details of the current proposals differ, they all generally seek to allow larger   contributions to the accounts and greater flexibility on the types of medical services for which those funds can be used. Some include tax credit subsidies to help fund the accounts. Supporters say premiums for the insurance linked to an HSA are lower, and they like HSAs’ trifecta of tax savings: no taxes on contributions, the growth of the funds in the account or on their withdrawal if spent on medical care. But skeptics note the tax break benefits wealthy people more than those who earn less. Still, expect to hear a lot more about HSAs in the coming months. Here’s a rundown of some of the basics: How do HSAs work? HSAs currently must be paired with qualifying health insurance plans that have annual deductibles of at least $1, 300 for individuals or $2, 600 for a family, although surveys show average deductibles are generally higher than those minimums. Unlike some other types of insurance, the consumer pays the full cost of most doctor visits, drugs or hospital stays until the deductible is met. There are some exceptions for services deemed preventive, such as certain vaccines, prescription medications or cancer screenings. To pay for those deductibles and other medical costs, consumers can make   contributions to the HSA account. This year, that allowable amount maxes out at $3, 400 for individuals or $6, 750 for families, and unused portions can roll over to the following year. The amounts in the HSA grow   similar to retirement accounts. Some employers who offer   insurance contribute to the accounts on behalf of their employees. Money in the funds moves with the policyholders, even if they change jobs or insurers, similar to how workers can take their 401( k) retirement fund to a new employer. Still, polls have shown that most Americans already have little or no money saved for an emergency, so skeptics say they are not likely to embrace medical accounts. ”Americans who are struggling to afford health insurance right now don’t have the money to set aside,” said Maura Calsyn, managing director, health policy, at the Center for American Progress. ”Raising the limits is essentially just providing   individuals with a greater tax benefit and doesn’t do anything to increase coverage.” Critics also point out that older or sicker people could blow through their entire fund every year and never accumulate any savings. How would they change under GOP proposals? Several proposals  —   including the Better Way white paper authored by House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . would increase HSA contribution limits. Ryan’s plan would allow the   contributions to total as much as the insurance plan’s annual deductible and    maximum. For families, that could be more than $14, 000 a year. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s Obamacare Replacement Act would get rid of the upper limit on contributions entirely. It would also allow the accounts to be coupled with any type of insurance, not just   plans. What services can HSA funds cover? Currently, money in the accounts can be used only for certain health costs, such as deductibles, copayments for doctor visits, hospital care and other    costs. The funds cannot be used to pay premiums on health insurance plans. Both the Ryan proposal and one from Rep. Tom Price,  . the physician nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services, would allow the funds to be used to pay fees directly to doctors, for ”concierge care,” which refers to arrangements in which consumers pay annual or monthly fees for special coverage that provides quicker access, longer visits or, in some cases, all primary care services. Christopher Condeluci, an attorney and former counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, said Republicans might seek to loosen the rules around what services are exempt from the deductible, potentially to incorporate medical care important to people with chronic illnesses, such as annual eye exams for people with diabetes. ”That would recognize that there are individuals who are high medical utilizers and   plans just are not appealing to them . .. unless you can change the definition to make them more appealing,” he said. How common are HSAs? An estimated 26 million Americans  —   policyholders and their dependents  —   are covered by some type of   plan. That’s a small share of the overall 178 million who have coverage through their jobs or purchased on their own, but it has steadily grown since HSAs first became available in 2003. Among employers who offered insurance last year, about 24 percent had   plans, with average annual deductibles of $2, 295 for single policies and $4, 364 for families, according a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.) Paul Fronstin, with the Employee Benefit Research Institute, noted that the slow   is similar to most trends in health benefits. Now, he said, with the GOP focus on changing the health system, ”we could see an acceleration of that trend.” How much do they cost and what are the advantages? Eligible health plans may have lower premiums than other types of insurance because of their higher deductibles. Policy experts and economists say the accounts might make people better consumers of health care because they have more ”skin in the game” and are more likely to shop for the best prices on drugs, medical care or hospitalizations  —   and avoid running to the doctor with the sniffles. ”It makes people more conscious that the health care they are getting is being paid for with real dollars and not coming out of the ether,” said Joe Antos with the American Enterprise Institute. What are the disadvantages? For one thing, it isn’t easy for people to comparison shop on the prices for medical care. And, consumers don’t always make good choices. Among those with HSAs, overall spending on medical care does indeed go down, Fronstin and other researchers have reported. But they also uncovered a disturbing trend: at least in the first year or two, policyholders cut back on everything, including   services they should really seek. ER visits go up. And many even forgo screening exams  —   such as mammograms or other cancer tests  —   even though they are specifically excluded from the deductible and are therefore ”free” to the consumer. Bypassing preventive or other care could lead to higher costs in the future. Follow Kaiser Health News’ Julie Appleby on Twitter: @Julie_appleby."
806,"Updated at 6:40 a. m. ET, A planned appearance by   commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled Wednesday at the University of California, Berkeley, after a group of protesters shot fireworks at police, broke windows, started fires and threw barricades. It’s far from the first time a Yiannopoulos speaking event was canceled because of protests, which occur regularly at his events. In a statement, the university said: ”The violence was instigated by a group of about 150 masked agitators who came onto campus and interrupted an otherwise   protest.” It said that at the time more than 1, 500 protesters were gathered outside the event. ”This was a group of agitators who were masked up, throwing rocks, commercial grade fireworks and Molotov cocktails at officers,” UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennet told The Associated Press. Police put the campus on lock down for several hours. There were no reports of arrests or serious injuries, according to the AP. On Twitter Thursday morning, President Trump questioned future federal funding for the school, saying it ”does not allow free speech.” Sukey Lewis of NPR member station KQED captured images of the demonstrations. Protesters marched down the street with banners reading, ”Become Ungovernable” and ”This Is War.” According to the university, the talk was canceled and Yiannopoulos was ”escorted from the building and left campus” about two hours before the planned start time of 8 p. m. Yiannopoulos is an editor for the   website Breitbart News, which has promoted conspiracy theories and has been described by its former chief as ”the platform of the  .” The   is an   movement widely seen as espousing white supremacist and   views. Among other things, Yiannopoulos has equated feminism to ”bowel cancer.” He was banned from Twitter for inspiring racist tweets against actress Leslie Jones. The cancellation isn’t unprecedented. Yiannopoulos’ appearance at UC Davis was canceled on Jan. 13 after protests, and UCLA revoked an invitation to speak Thursday, according to The Associated Press. A man was shot outside a scheduled Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington on Jan. 21. In an interview with Fox News afterward, Yiannopoulos blamed the violence on ”the left that is terrified of anyone who they think might be persuasive or might be interesting or might take people with them.” He continued: ”You know, I am not a scary   you know, kind of   as some of the posters claim. They put those things on posters to try to legitimize their own violence against me and against my supporters. Instead, I’m just sort of libertarian, gay,   provocateur who likes to, you know, present interesting arguments. . .. [The left] just cannot tolerate anyone popular on campus who does not subscribe to their own crazy views.” The tension between free speech and provocation has been a constant point of discussion and disagreement at many college campuses, including UC Berkeley. Yiannopoulos’ talk was ”the subject of much controversy here on campus, with people calling for the speech to be canceled and saying there’s no room for his message here,” KQED’s Lewis says. One protester held a sign reading: ”Hate makes spaces unsafe so why should we make safe spaces for hate?” ”On the other hand, Berkeley is also known as a bastion for the Free Speech Movement” of the 1960s, Lewis notes. The university said that while ”Yiannopoulos’ views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to those of the campus,” it is committed to the ”enabling of free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective.” The Berkeley College Republicans sponsored the event. ”The Free Speech Movement is dead,” they said in a statement. ”Today, the Berkeley College Republicans’ constitutional right to free speech was silenced by criminals and thugs seeking to cancel Milo Yiannopoulos’ tour. Their success is a defeat for civilized society and the free exchange of ideas on college campuses across America.” The UC Berkeley police tweeted that the lock down had been lifted shortly before 11 p. m. local time, and announced that classes and business will go on as scheduled Thursday."
807,"Sure, we all know the adage: ”The best things in life are free.” So why doesn’t anyone advertise them? We’ve got ads for deodorant, luxury cars and snacks  —   why not ads for sunshine, balmy breezes and children’s laughter? That’s the question we put to our listeners way back in 1972, challenging them to write some very noncommercial commercials and then producing a handful of our favorites. With a little help from our Research, Archives and Data Strategy team, we dug up that    dusted it off and retooled the challenge for more modern times. Go ahead, we told you in December, sell us something wonderful we can’t buy. More than 2, 000 people responded  —   with pitches for bonfires, breezes, silence and simple kindness . .. the list would last all day. As difficult as it was, though, we could pick only five of our favorites to produce with sound effects and professional narration to broadcast on All Things Considered. Here are our favorite little nuggets of joy, polished and posted here for your listening pleasure. Scroll down for all of them  —   or if you’d like to hear just one, click the link on an item below to go directly to its ad. PunsEar scratchesTreesNothingYummy words, From Maya Khurana of Chicago, Are plain old   jokes just not funny anymore? Is the classic ”Why did the chicken cross the road?” not getting laughs like it used to? If so, try puns! Puns come in all types, such as: What do you call in alligator in a vest? An investigator, Or, If a friend starts telling bird jokes, remind him toucan play that game. Side effects may include:Groaning, your friends getting annoyed, wanting to make more puns, making puns in random conversation, forgetting other kinds of jokes existed, and people judging you. Ask your common sense before trying puns, if the situation does not call for them, it may result in many annoyed looks. If you are in need of a new kind of joke, try puns! They may be cheesy, but the results are grate. From Carrie Ghose of Columbus, Ohio, Hi! Your dog here. I see you’re sitting down, reading a magazine. Have you given much thought lately to . .. Ear Scratches? Here, let me help you by nosing aside that distraction and positioning my head right under your palm. There . .. isn’t that better? That article was bumming you out anyway. My silky fur and the way I’m   my eyes in pleasure right now have been clinically shown to bring down your blood pressure  —   and add years to your life! Wait, no, don’t pick that back up. To get the full benefit of Ear Scratches, doctors recommend continuing for 90 consecutive minutes. Oh all right, how about three? There, much better. Ear Scratches: Yeah, that’s the spot. From Adam Drake of Broken Arrow, Okla. I used to worry about what I was breathing in . ..Oxygen? Nitrogen? Carbon dioxide? And then I discovered Trees. *Whispered* Trees. Yes, natural trees, with their photosynthetic respiration helping to produce just the right blend of breathable atmosphere that our bodies need. *Whispered* Trees. Trees may not be right for everybody. Side effects include tree houses, tire swings, fruit, shade, and woodworking. Please consult your biome before selecting a tree. Not every tree is right for every biome, enjoy trees responsibly.   safe and effective: Trees  —   now with chlorophyll! Available on a planet under you. From Jennifer Harmon of Belle Isle, Fla. In a world . .. where everyone’s on and no one’s unplugged. Where being busy is a badge . .. of honor. Where the race from the gym, to the office, to the carpool and to the kitchen is unrelenting. When your spouse asks, ”what should we do for dinner?” And your boss demands, ”I need this ASAP.” Every. Single. Day. And silence and solitude is only achieved When. Your. Phone. Battery. Dies. We bring you a new kind of hero: Nothing. **Triumphant music begins** Yes. Nothing. No phone, no Netflix, no cooking, no laundry. No scrolling, Snapchat, soccer snacks or swiping left . .. or right. Nothing is here to save you. (Seriously though, Nothing. Do it.) Coming to a   you this February. From Maggie Monaghan of University Place, Wash. For a better life, try saying some yummy words. If you’re feeling blue and need a smile, try the fun and fizzy words: schnitzel, papyrus, echinacea, vavavoom! If winter makes you crave a little warmth, roll the kitchen words around: cardamom, ginger, pepperpot, spice. Alluring words are always fun, as sensual in your mouth as chocolate truffles: kumquat, redolent, shimmer, dusk. And don’t forget the penny words, small and common: love, thanks, coffee, hello. Yummy words. Which one will you choose today? Audio produced by Mallory Yu. Thanks to NPR’s Research, Archives  Data Strategy team (RAD) which has been digitizing NPR’s archival content, for uncovering the audio from the original project. That tape  —   like 150, 000 hours of audio from the early days of NPR  —   had been stored exclusively on    tape and CDs, before our RAD team embarked on a project to preserve it."
808,"The late Justice Antonin Scalia may not have been the original originalist, but he popularized what had once been a fringe legal doctrine. He argued for it both on and off the U. S. Supreme Court and brought originalism into if not the mainstream then at least into the center of legal debate. Judge Neil Gorsuch, who is nominated to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Scalia’s death, is a   disciple of Scalia’s crusade. Indeed, in a recent speech, he recalled how he wept on the ski slopes of Colorado upon learning of Scalia’s death. So what is originalism? Scalia famously described it this way: ”The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.” What drove the increasing acceptance of originalism on the Supreme Court was Scalia’s uncompromising commitment to his personal judicial philosophy and the growth of the conservative Federalist Society in academia, spawning, in turn, more and more advocates of the theory. Also significantly contributing was the luck of the Supreme Court draw. From 1980 on, Republican presidents got the chance to fill seven seats on the Supreme Court, and at each rotation, the new justice was more conservative than the person he or she replaced. That, too, reflected the increasing conservative drift of the Republican Party, with evangelicals and other social conservatives gaining more power and influence. Scalia and other justices have embraced originalism as a way to check what they viewed as the growing and unbounded power of the judiciary. They contended that if policy changes take place, the changes should come through the democratic process rather than through the unelected courts. At a 2016 lecture at a law school, Gorsuch said the ”great project of Justice Scalia’s career was to remind us of the differences between judges and legislators”: ”To remind us that legislators may appeal to their own moral convictions and to claims about social utility to reshape the law as they think it should be in the future. But that judges should do none of these things in a democratic society. That judges should instead strive (if humanly and so imperfectly) to apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be —   not to decide cases based on their own moral convictions or the policy consequences they believe might serve society best.” There are no transcripts of the framers’ conversations while they drafted the Constitution, so no one knows precisely what they were thinking as they wrote it. There are, however, records of the ratification debates, which originalists rely on to determine intent. ”The modern version of originalism is looking for the original public meaning of the Constitution and isn’t looking for subjective framers’ views, so the views of the ratifiers, in that case, is more important,” said Todd Gaziano, senior fellow in constitutional law at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Critics of originalism contend that its advocates pick and choose when they are willing to defer to the elected branches. They note that originalists have been willing to strike down federal laws adopted by large congressional majorities, invalidating laws and reversing decades of legal precedents governing campaign finance regulations and voting rights, for instance. The living constitutionalists’ take on originalism, Gorsuch has stressed, as have other originalists, that the job of a judge should be to ”look backward” at what the Founding Fathers meant at the time they wrote and ratified the Constitution. Onetime constitutional law professor Barack Obama summarized the critique of that theory this way in his book The Audacity of Hope: ”Anyone like Justice Scalia, looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict construction, has one big problem: The founders themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted not just about minor provisions, but about first principles not just between peripheral figures, but within the revolution’s very core.” Those critical of originalism argue that a static interpretation of the law lags behind society’s progress. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, currently the Supreme Court’s leading liberal voice, embraces the idea of a ”living Constitution,” a notion disdained by originalists as too flexible. ”As I see it, it isn’t the Supreme Court that is deciding for the whole society, like an imperial ruler,” she said at an event in February 2014. Speaking of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, she said, ”there hasn’t been any major change in which there wasn’t a groundswell among the people before the Supreme Court put its stamp of approval on the inclusion in the equality concept of people who were once left out. ”It was a huge embarrassment that racism persisted in our country, that our troops in World War II until the very end were separated. I think that World War II made inevitable the change with respect to the status of racial minorities. And it was the same way with women’s increasing demand to count as full citizens.” Sparring on the Supreme Court over constitutional interpretation, Some of the most discussed and controversial Supreme Court decisions come down to the justices’ disagreements as to whether the Constitution should be viewed as a ”dead” or ”enduring” document, as Scalia called it, or a ”living” one. Those disagreements were never more apparent than in a series of decisions about gay rights written by the usually conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is often dubbed the swing vote on the Supreme Court because he sometimes votes with the court’s liberals. In a decision striking down a Texas law that criminalized private, consensual ”homosexual conduct,” Kennedy asserted that the Founding Fathers did not specify all liberties because they expected that list to change. ”They knew times can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” Kennedy said while summarizing his opinion from the bench. ”It is the promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter,” he said. Scalia dissented, declaring, ”It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, and in particular, in that battle of the culture war that concerns whether there should be any moral opprobrium attached to homosexual conduct.” The    cases also divided along similar lines. ”The dynamic of our constitutional system is that individuals need not await legislative action before asserting a fundamental right,” Kennedy said from the bench in announcing the 2015    opinion. In his dissent, Scalia included a scathing footnote on Kennedy’s opinion. ”If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ’The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag.” Chief Justice John Roberts, reading his dissent from the bench, said policy arguments for   marriage are compelling. ”But allowing unelected judges to strike down democratically enacted laws based on rights that are not actually written in the Constitution raises obvious concerns about the judicial role,” he said. Leave it to the democratic process, said Roberts."
809,"In Washington, D. C. the cognoscenti confidently predict that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will be easily confirmed. But both supporters and opponents are chastened by the predictors’ embarrassingly wrong prognostications over the past year. And that is presenting Senate Democrats in particular with a strategic dilemma. Ron Klain has been a key Democratic player in four Supreme Court confirmations, first overseeing two Republican nominations in the early 1990s as a top staffer for  . Joseph Biden  —   who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee  —   and later promoting two of President Bill Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees while serving as a top White House aide. A filibuster is likely, and likely futile, Klain expects that most Democrats will end up voting against Gorsuch. But the strategic question is whether the Democrats will try to block the nomination with a concerted filibuster, which takes 60 votes to break. ”The reality is there’s going to be a filibuster,” Klain says. ”It takes only one senator to start a filibuster, only a handful to sustain it.” His guess is that there are more than a handful who will launch a filibuster, and everyone will have to wait to see where the votes fall. ”I think this is Round 1 of a   fight,” Klain says. ”We’ll see what Round 15 looks like.” Future Senate and Supreme Court seats could be at risk, A filibuster could cost the Democrats dearly if Republicans decide to exercise what’s called the ”nuclear option” and get rid of the filibuster altogether for Supreme Court nominees. ”What they lose is, this is their one chance to make this into a big issue, to get attention,” observes Richard Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. He suggests it might be smarter to save the political clout for the time when any of the court’s three oldest justices  —      Ruth Bader Ginsburg,    Anthony Kennedy, and    Stephen Breyer  —   might retire. If any of them were to leave during the Trump administration, he notes, that ”would really change the balance of power on the court.” Klain, the Democratic operative, acknowledges that the calculus is complicated. ”I do think that the level of toxicity and anger among    Democrats is at an   high,” he says. ”[The American public has] been ahead of the senators every step along the way here in the last couple of weeks. ”We’ve seen, for Cabinet nominees  —   some who seemed like they were going to be easy to get confirmed, have large numbers of Democratic voters  —   we’ve seen that vote tally peel back every day,” he says. Hasen, who closely follows social media, agrees the danger for Democrats is real. ”If [Senate Democratic leader Charles] Schumer and the other Democrats roll over, what is potentially likely to happen is that there will be some Democrats on the left who will try to primary these senators  —   who will try to act like a Tea Party on the left and try to enforce some ideological discipline on senators who are not willing to take a broader stand,” Hasen says. That could have dire consequences for Democratic numbers in the Senate in the election two years from now. In 2018 Republican incumbents are defending only eight Senate seats, while Democrats are defending 23  —   10 of them in states carried in the 2016 election by Donald Trump. ”This is going to put them in a very difficult spot,” Hasen continues. ”It could be that by the time we get the 2018 elections, the Democrats could lose more seats, and will have even less power in the Senate than they have now.” That, he says, could mean ”now is the time to take a stand, while you still have some powder left to use.” Neal Katyal, who served as the government’s chief advocate in the Supreme Court during the Obama administration, says he understands Democratic rage regarding the GOP’s unprecedented refusal for almost a year to even consider Obama’s nominee for this very Supreme Court seat. ”But in this world we are in, what I care most about is a judge who’s going to be independent from the executive and call it like he sees it,” Katyal says. ”And that’s how I see Judge Gorsuch.”"
810,"Algonquin, Ill. is a Republican stronghold. The growing town of 28, 000 is about an hour’s drive northwest of Chicago in McHenry County, the only one of six in the metro area to vote for President Trump. At Short Stacks, a small diner on Main Street, Ginger Underwood sits at a table with her two adult daughters. She voted for Donald Trump and says that, so far, she is glad she did. ”I think Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do when he ran for office,” she says. ”So that’s fine with me, that he’s doing what he’s doing.” It’s been 12 days since Trump was sworn into office and between a flurry of executive actions and his choice for the U. S. Supreme Court, it has been a whirlwind of activity. Underwood, who does volunteer work for a local environmental group, says she has no worries about the pace of executive actions during Trump’s first days  —   and, in fact, likes them all. But she does say she wishes the president would be more, as she says, tactful, when he does things like imposing restrictions on people traveling from seven predominantly Muslim countries. ”Not just suddenly doing it with no notice  —   not surprising his fellow Republicans,” she says. Both of Underwood’s daughters are independents, and neither voted for Trump. Jessica Underwood, 40, says she’s trying to come to terms with the new administration. But the horse trainer says she’s not a sore loser. ”He won fair and square,” she says. ”I’m not impressed, but now I feel we have to live with it.” Her sister, Dana, 43, is less accepting. ”All these decisions affect people’s lives,” the professional musician says. ”I can’t get past the fact that we’ve elected somebody who deals with conflict by tweeting.” After hearing what her daughters had to say, Ginger says she recently decided she’s actually a Libertarian all three agree they would have voted for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. No more Obamacare, There’s also agreement at a nearby table, where retired teacher Trudy Kirsch, 64, is eating lunch with her son John, 32. ”I think he’s doing great  —   absolutely wonderful,” Kirsch says. Kirsch says she is pleased with Trump’s pick of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, even though she anticipates strong opposition. She likes Trump’s push to get rid of Obamacare and his intention to build a wall at the U. S.  border, ”And if there was not a problem with people coming over illegally, we would not need the wall,” Kirsch says. ”But if it’s broken, then we need to start looking at other options on how do you fix it.” John Kirsch, who has owned and run a landscaping business for four years, agrees that Obamacare needs to go, saying that he has struggled with rising health insurance premiums. He also says he appreciated Trump’s promise to cut taxes on small businesses and his quick executive action to cut regulations. ”He’s changing all the rules, and I love it” At Anthony’s Barbershop down the street, proprietor Anthony Orlandino is joking with a friend while he trims his hair. The    has had his shop on Main Street for 14 years. ”You know what he’s got going for him  —   he’s got Twitter going for him,” Orlandino says. ”Now he can actually put it out. ’Here’s what I got  —   don’t listen to the media, this is what I’m doing.’ ” And Orlandino says he simply likes Trump’s style. ”He’s a businessman, not a politician,” he says. ”Politicians have gotta talk from both sides of their mouth, gotta please everybody because they want votes. He don’t have to. He’s saying, listen, this is the way it’s going to be. He’s changing all the rules, and I love it.” Divided on travel ban, In the parking lot outside of a Meijer grocery store, a few cars have Obama bumper stickers on them. But Annette Jones, who’s helping her granddaughter load groceries into the car, is a Republican who voted for Donald Trump  —   and she is, as she puts it, ”ticked” about the executive order on travel restrictions. ”I thought he was doing good until he stopped all these people from coming in, and had them all at the airport. And I think that’s wrong,” she says. ”So now it’s like . .. wait and see, what else he’s going to do.” But Angela Fletcher, a    social worker who also voted for Trump, says that executive order doesn’t bother her at all. ”I’m happy with him,” she says. ”I know that’s not the popular answer, but I like it, and don’t have any issues with things he’s done so far, I guess.” Fletcher, like many Trump voters in this small town, says she appreciates that the president is moving quickly to turn many of his campaign promises into policy."
811,"Aggrieved at what they perceive as acquiescence to President Trump’s agenda, liberal demonstrators have begun taking a page out of a doctor’s playbook: They are making house calls. On Tuesday night, more than 4, 000 protesters signed up to pay a visit to the Brooklyn apartment of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The Facebook event  —   bluntly named ”What the f*** Chuck? !”  —   called on the New York senator to show ”no appeasement, no dealmaking, no collaboration.” As protesters crowded outside the apartment, fresh off a walk from a nearby plaza, they made their frustrations plain with chants of ”Don’t sell us out.” At the rally, attendees unfurled a banner reading ”#ResistTrumpTuesdays,” a reference to a coalition of liberal organizations planning weekly protests. Schumer’s not the only one to get this treatment. In   California on Sunday, a group of protesters headed to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s house in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. ”Hey hey, ho ho, Jeff Sessions  —   just say no!” the demonstrators chanted, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. FiveThirtyEight has ranked Feinstein among the Democratic senators who have shown the most support for Trump’s nominees. Feinstein’s voting record so far didn’t sit well with the protesters outside her home, or with progressives at large. Among the Democratic base, there is not exactly a climate for compromise at the moment. As NPR’s Scott Detrow explained, liberal protesters are following a familiar, if surprising, model: the Tea Party movement’s. ”A lot of the outreach has been prompted by the Indivisible Guide, an organizing project launched by former Democratic congressional staffers that is aimed at mimicking the successful Tea Party movement, but on the Democratic side. ”In the wake of Trump’s executive action on immigration and refugees, Indivisible organizers put together a conference call, urging people to ask their senators to do everything they can to walk back Trump’s order.” Through   protests, pressure on politicians and a few front lawn demonstrations, the Tea Party effectively rolled back Democratic gains in Congress in 2010 and stymied many of President Obama’s policy proposals. And like the Tea Party’s, progressive demonstrations against Democratic representatives already appear to be showing results. Schumer surprisingly voted against Elaine Chao, a Trump pick who had been considered a   for transportation secretary (and ultimately still was). And on Sunday, demonstrators in Rhode Island confronted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about his vote in favor of Mike Pompeo for CIA director. When Whitehouse came outside, he was handed a list of upcoming votes and a bullhorn. Whitehouse went through the list, eliciting cheers each time he promised a ”no” vote. And the movement shows no signs of relenting, as evidenced by lawmakers’ voicemail machines. North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, for instance, reported being contacted by some 1, 400 of her constituents  —   95 percent of whom objected to Trump’s education secretary pick, Betsy DeVos, according to Reid Epstein of The Wall Street Journal. NBC News reports Va. Sen. Tim Kaine received some 25, 000 calls and letters against DeVos, while in the state next door, W. Va. Sen. Joe Manchin received more than 800 calls on Monday alone about a variety of nominees, according to USA Today."
812,"The first time   chef Jamal Hashi put camel meat on his menu in Minneapolis, it didn’t go well. He tried grinding it into a burger and using chunks of it in a spicy stew, but no matter, the texture was bad and the sales were worse. ”It was like chewing on a patty of rubber bands,” he said of the burger. At its best, camel meat tastes much like lean beef. But certain cuts can be tough, and if the meat comes from an old camel, it can also taste gamey. Hashi had used a shoulder cut, and neither he nor his customers were happy with the results. Camels may first have been domesticated in the region around Somalia, where they have long been prized for their nutritious milk and meat, and as a mode of transport in the arid environment. ”We are a people who constantly travel,” says Hashi. ”This is our livestock.” Which is why Hashi wanted to bring the  ’s meat to Minneapolis, home to the largest population of Somalis in America. So, four years later, he tried again  —   in 2010. At the time, Hashi owned Safari Express, an East African grill at Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market. But it was when he applied for a booth at the Minnesota State Fair  —   a place famous for crazy creations like Spam sushi and   Snickers  —   that Hashi thought to reintroduce the traditional ”meat of kings” to an American audience. When the fair gave him the green light, Hashi purchased two tons of wild camel from R. W. Meats, a   halal importer and a leading distributor of camel meat in America. This time, Hashi served the camel   style: a skewer of spiced, ground meat mixed with egg and breadcrumbs. It was a hit. He sold out of camel meat in four days. Soon after, he started offering the ”The Hashi Burger” at Safari Express, and began ordering a pallet of meat every few months  —   each of which arrived from, of all places, central Australia. To understand how Australia became the world’s No. 1 source for camel meat  —   soothing the culinary homesickness of thousands of Somalis in Minnesota along the way  —   you have to understand why camels are a problem in the outback: They’re totally feral, and have caused huge headaches. In the   the British introduced   Arabian camels from Pakistan and India to help with transport across the vast, arid landscape of Australia. The animals proved hardy and reliable, but with the arrival of the railroad in the early 20th century, the camels became obsolete and were freed. Unchecked by predators, their population swelled. ”By the late 1990s, it had become obvious that something had to be done,” says Quentin Hart, former manager of the Australian government’s Feral Camel Management Project (AFCMP). Though camels tend to roam in small groups, they congregate en masse to look for water during dry spells. That notion of camels storing water in their humps? Not true. The humps store fat, and while this is a good source of energy for trekking across arid landscapes, Hart says it is ”a bit of a myth” that camels can survive for a long time in extreme conditions. Like any animal, they get thirsty. And when they get thirsty, they get desperate. In 2009, 6, 000 thirsty camels stormed the outback town of Docker River, population 350. The creatures, each of which can weigh a thousand pounds or more, butted into water tanks, tore faucets from walls, overran the town’s airstrip and stranded terrified residents in their homes. A study found that camels also did a great deal of damage to the region’s biodiversity and environment, trampling vegetation and stunting plant regeneration. And when they died in or near water sources, their carcasses fouled drinking water for Aboriginal communities. A few months before the Docker River stampede, the Australian government put up the equivalent of about $15. 5 million to launch the AFCMP, a   effort to manage more than a   camels loose in the countryside. With helicopters and marksmen, Australia culled some 135, 000 camels between 2009 and 2013, and processed another 15, 000 for human consumption. The meat camels were slaughtered according to halal standards, then shipped to places like Dubai, home to camel hot dogs and the world’s first   chocolate company, and Minnesota. Still, wrangling wild camels in remote areas isn’t easy, and it continues to frustrate both suppliers and buyers today. The central question, according to Hart, is whether the quantity and quality of the wild meat is reliable. To ensure the stability of camel commerce in the   he believes the animals would have to be domesticated. But with no strong incentive for cattle ranchers to pursue camel meat  —   in Australia, it fetches a market price comparable to beef but costs more to produce  —   a farmed future seems far off, says Hart. That said, eating feral camels does have environmental benefits. It’s in line with researchers who urge a ”pestatarian” diet  —   eating animals that are environmental pests  —   as a sustainable alternative to a diet of mainstream meat. And it’s one arguably more palatable than eating insects or   burgers. Wild game is free of antibiotics and growth hormones, and tends to be leaner than its farmed relatives. Before Hashi and his family fled Somalia at the start of the civil war in the 1990s, he grew up in the capital of Mogadishu and spent summers in a nomad town just north of the city. He remembers drinking lots of camel milk, which is low in fat and full of Vitamin C, and eating camel meat, which is low in saturated fat and high in protein. Hashi plans to highlight the meat  —   using camel trim, a tender cut from below the camel’s hump  —   in   camel sliders at his newest Minneapolis restaurant, which is slated to open in late February. Many Somalis in Minneapolis treat camel as they would back home: as a celebration food. Randy Weinstein, owner of R. W. Meats, says many of his clients place two orders a week: the first for goat and beef, and the second with the addition of camel, to serve at weekend weddings and other events. Weinstein started importing camel about 15 years ago, after Somali retailers in the Twin Cities expressed a longing for the taste of home. Now his wife calls him the ”camel king,” and he is expanding his inventory to include   camel meat. The majority of his sales are to halal shops and restaurants in areas where the Somali population is growing, such as Portland, Maine, or Seattle. Weinstein believes that Somali chefs in those places could bring camel to a larger audience. ”The challenge is getting mainstream America to open their eyes to this product,” says Weinstein. But he has faith this will happen in the next few years, as East African dishes become more common in America’s food scene. At Safari Express, which is now owned by one of Hashi’s brothers, the camel burger isn’t cheap  —   it costs $13. 50 with a drink and fries  —   but Jamal Mohamed, a cashier, says it is still the   item, typically selling about 40 a week. Garnished with grilled pineapple, peppers, onions and a generous dousing of creamy ”secret sauce,” the   patty is soft and juicy and tastes a lot like beef. Anastasia Flemming, a frequent customer at Safari Express, hasn’t ordered the burger, but says she’s been converted after having a bite of her friend’s. ”I’d come back for it,” she says. Erica Berry is a writer based in Minneapolis. Find her online at @ericajberry. This story was produced in collaboration with the Food  Environment Reporting Network (FERN) a   investigative journalism organization."
813,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Since the Tuareg guitar band Tinariwen from Mali was launched into the international stratosphere nearly 20 years ago, it’s become something of a rite of passage for rock musicians to guest on their albums. This time around, for Elwan (Elephants) their eighth international release, they’re joined by Kurt Vile, Mark Lanegan (formerly of Screaming Trees) Alain Johannes (formerly of Queens of the Stone Age) and guitarist Matt Sweeney, who’s worked with everyone from Will Oldham to Run The Jewels. But that’s all a sideshow: The main draw continues to be Tinariwen itself  —   with the band’s swirling guitars, rhythms inspired by the gait of camels and gutturally declaimed poetry. The band has become globally peripatetic  —   partly due to their   touring, but also because the situation in their home community in northern Mali continues to be incredibly dangerous and culturally toxic. As a result, the recording sessions for Elwan were split between the Paris suburbs, a studio in Joshua Tree, Calif. and a southern Moroccan town called M’hamed El Ghizlane, an oasis very near the Algerian border and home to its own Saharan music festival. Time and turmoil have both taken a serious toll  —   and the new music on Elwan reflects that hard reality. When Tinariwen started coming into the eye of international tastemakers nearly two decades ago, the band’s political thrust revolved more around the Tuareg people’s struggles to achieve political and social equality within the various Saharan countries they inhabit  —   and their   push toward   possibly even by establishing their own nation. As on past albums, the group’s lyrical concerns focus on the Tuareg, their culture and their people’s tenuous future. The tenere  —   the desert itself  —   is not just a backdrop or even subject matter in their songs. Usually performing in their native language, Tamashek, they sing direct addresses to those endless sands. In fact, the band’s name, Tinariwen, is just the plural of ”tenere” in Tamashek. Listen to the beginning of Elwan’s second track, ”Sastanaqqam” (I Question You): ”Tenere,” they sing, ”can you tell me   of anything better   Than to have your friends and your mount   And a   goatskin, watertight . .. To know how to find water in   The unlikeliest of places?” But the chaos, warfare and corruption of the last several years has been tremendous. They’ve endured seeing a fellow ethnic Tuareg tried in The Hague for war crimes against cultural monuments in northern Mali, watching a former friend of the band emerge as a key leader of the Islamist group Ansar Dine, and even having a member of their own band kidnapped by Ansar Dine (and later released). Even this week, the news continues to be discouraging: Mali’s vaunted Festival in the Desert, which served as a major launchpad for Tinariwen  —   and which had been organized entirely in secret to take place this past weekend  —   was cancelled at the last minute by government officials, due to terrorism fears. Unsurprisingly, Tinariwen’s message has grown more bitter than on past albums. ”The strongest impose their will   And leave the weakest behind,” they sing on the track ”Tenere Taqqal” (What Has Become Of The Tenere). ”Many have died battling for twisted ends   And joy has abandoned us, exhausted by all this duplicity.” The song also includes another telling line that references the album’s title: ”The tenere has become an upland of   elephants (elwan) fight each other   Crushing tender grass   underfoot.” And yet  —   there is still sweetness, and hope, on Elwan. There are outright love odes like ”Hayati” (My Life) which is sung in Arabic, and songs like the spare solo ”Ittus” (Our Goal) a    composition performed by one of the group’s founders, Hassan Ag Touhami, that is just three lines long: ”I ask you, what is our goal?   It is the unity of our nation   And to carry our standard high.” One of the album’s most rollicking songs on Elwan is ”Assawt” (The Voice Of Tamashek Women). It’s a paean to Tuareg women that calls for their freedom  —   a summoning that still rings out clear and true over the desert sands."
814,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Jesca Hoop first attracted national attention in the early ’00s, when her unusual backstory  —   the daughter of musical Mormons, she’d served a long stint as nanny to Tom Waits’ kids  —   helped fuel critics’ interest in songs that always seemed to be coming at you sideways. Albums like Hunting My Dress and The House That Jack Built, both of which hold up incredibly well, left Hoop constantly on the verge of a major breakthrough that never quite materialized. Last year, though, she got a big lift in the form of Love Letter For Fire, an   collaboration with Iron And Wine’s Sam Beam. In addition to reaching a new audience  —   and, in the process, finding her a new label home  —   that record found ways to highlight Hoop’s idiosyncratic songwriting voice, as well as her gift for distinct phrasing. She keeps Love Letter For Fire’s momentum alive with Memories Are Now, a   collection that further showcases Hoop’s enviable capacity to surprise. Take the voices she brings to Memories Are Now’s title track: The song could just as easily be the work of a sister act like Lily  Madeleine, Joseph or First Aid Kit  —   the kind of group where impeccable voices weave in and out, complementing each other with improbable precision  —   but it’s just a showcase for Hoop, whose voice sounds alternately soaring, breathy, wearily assertive and, in the backing vocals, downright heavenly. (Later, at moments in ”Simon Says,” her layered voices conjure images of a   country duo.) In both content and construction, Jesca Hoop’s songs practically burst with ideas: They’re as strange and smart and heartfelt as they are gorgeous, and that’s saying something."
815,"Note: NPR’s First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify or Apple Music playlist at the bottom of the page. Chuck Prophet’s   new collection, Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins, begins with a celebration of the enigmatic   rock curiosity who sang ”I Fought The Law” in 1964 and then, shortly after the song took off, was found dead in his car at age 23. Fuller’s death remains a mystery, and perhaps as a result, his song and story has resonance for record geeks like Prophet. He begins the second verse of ”Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins” by talking about the experience of listening: ”I hear the record crackle, the needle skips and jumps,” he   as pedal steel guitar careens   overhead. That leads to Prophet’s central confession, and the record’s animating theme: ”I never saw a movie that moved me half as much.” With that, we’re off, riding shotgun down some mythic highway with a rock true believer who is not sure of much beyond the primacy of two     and a handful of raggedly hacked chords. On this journey, the   old Prophet  —   whose discography includes the pioneering psychedelic Americana of Green on Red and a stack of strong solo albums  —   is not hunting for transcendent wisdom. He’s just taking in the view, with occasional detours into communication breakdowns (”Coming Out in Code”) and assorted other paradoxes of life (the rousing ”Rider or the Train”). Prophet has described his new work as ”California Noir.” With a few exceptions  —   the gloriously leering ”Your Skin,” a gem of a song that recalls X at its most impassioned  —   the record bears little resemblance to the stylized L. A. noir of James Ellroy novels. It’s murky, coated with fog and shadows  —   in some ways, it picks up where Prophet’s   history of San Francisco, 2012’s Temple Beautiful, left off. Its narratives are often dark: Several songs are set in the aftermath of gun violence  —   one pays homage to Alex Nieto, a Bay Area man killed by police another tells of the tragic encounter between a shopgirl with a song in her heart and a brutal ”Killing Machine” who offs people at a store as casually as others buy gum. Mostly, though, Prophet is drawn to the romance of rock culture  —   the enduring ritual that boils down to ”drop needle, seek redemption.” (Indeed, your enjoyment of Bobby Fuller may depend on your tolerance for rock songs about enjoying rock songs.) Prophet has been on the road forever, he’s spent lifetimes amongst its traveling circus of savants and misfits. Sometimes his passion gets misplaced: The album’s most obvious misstep is ”Bad Year for Rock and Roll,” which deserves an award for stating the obvious, over and over again. Its chorus ends with a telling couplet: ”I wanna go out, but I’ll probably stay home.” It’s an odd moment, especially since the rest of Bobby Fuller deals with what happens when you don’t stay home. The unsparing, possibly autobiographical ”We Got Up and Played” finds Prophet and band standing around after soundcheck, facing the prospect of another night in a grimy club. Prophet goes acidic as he sketches the scene’s    aspects  —   the cast of characters includes ”the bartender standing in the middle of the street with his pants around his neck.” It’s slightly sordid, sure, yet the song captures something fundamentally compelling about people who, despite long odds and great indifference, climb onto a stage and attempt to create music night after night. ”We plugged in our guitars and tried to make it rain,” Prophet sings with all the wistfulness his   voice can muster. The song comes near the end of the record, after he’s used the guitar to make it rain, and hail, and everything else. The ragged,   sound makes clear that he doesn’t want the gold commemorative watch or bonus points for surviving the rock ’n’ roll gauntlet. All he wants is the chance to go out and do it some more."
816,"Updated at 4:30 a. m. ET Saturday, A federal judge in Seattle has issued a nationwide temporary stay against President Trump’s executive order that prevented citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries from entering the United States. Judge James Robart acted to stop implementation of the order while a case brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota is heard. The White House issued a statement Friday night, saying the Justice Department will appeal the Seattle judge’s action: ”At the earliest possible time, the Department of Justice intends to file an emergency stay of this outrageous order and defend the executive order of the President, which we believe is lawful and appropriate. The president’s order is intended to protect the homeland and he has the constitutional authority and responsibility to protect the American people. ”As the law states, ’Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.’ ” The White House soon amended the statement, deleting the word ”outrageous.” After the judge’s order, Qatar Airways announced on Saturday it would allow passengers who are nationals of the seven affected countries and all refugees with a valid U. S. visa or green card to travel to the U. S. according to a statement on the company’s website. The airline said it made the change after direction from U. S. Customs and Border Protection. The State Department said earlier Friday that it had already revoked some 60, 000 visas, so even if the stay survives appellate review, it’s not clear whether many travelers from those countries will be immediately free to enter the country. The State Department said today ”roughly 60, 000 individuals’ visas were provisionally revoked” as a result of Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order barring refugees from seven countries. That number is considerably lower than the number given by a Justice Department attorney, who said today in federal court in Virginia that 100, 000 visas were revoked as a result of the order, as Carmel Delshad of NPR station WAMU reported. Both numbers are much larger than the figure provided by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this week. Kevin McAleenan, acting commissioner of U. S. Customs and Border Protection, told reporters on Tuesday that 721 people with visas had not been allowed to board airplanes to the U. S. in the first 72 hours after the order went into effect. An additional 1, 135 people with visas were granted waivers to enter the country, he said. The 100, 000 figure came out during a hearing for two lawful permanent residents from Yemen who filed a lawsuit after arriving at Dulles International Airport last Saturday. The two men allege they were detained and coerced into giving up their immigrant visas before being put on a return flight to Ethiopia, Delshad reported. ”U. S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said that it was clear to her the temporary travel ban on seven   countries went into effect too quickly, and not a lot of thought went into it,” and she issued a   extension of a temporary order barring the deportation of green card holders from Dulles Airport, Delshad reported. The executive order bans people from traveling to the U. S. from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for three months, suspends   admissions for 120 days and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely. State Department spokesman Will Cocks says the executive order doesn’t mean a visa holder already in the U. S. is in the country illegally. Asked, by way of example, about a hypothetical Iranian student currently in the U. S. he said such a student ”likely has a visa that could have been revoked. However this has no impact on legal status on those in the U. S. So they are not here illegally.” New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, Minnesota and Washington state all have sued the federal government regarding the order. Eric Schneiderman, the New York state attorney general, described the order signed a week ago as ”unconstitutional, unlawful, and fundamentally ” reported The Guardian."
817,"A terrorist video released on Friday by the Pentagon to show what it called intelligence gleaned by the recent raid in Yemen actually was made about 10 years ago, it acknowledged. Defense officials canceled a briefing they had called to discuss the value of the information recovered from Yemen and took the video off the website of the U. S. Central Command. They circulated clips from a video that showed how to prepare explosives without knowing it had already been public. However, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman, stuck by the Pentagon’s main argument:   in the Arabian Peninsula remains dangerous and wants to recruit and train people to attack the West. ”Even though the video is old, it shows their intent,” he told reporters. But defense officials declined to release any other, newer intelligence they said was in computers recovered by the American and allied special operations troops who attacked the Yemeni town. The messaging kerfuffle turned an ongoing counterattack into a damp squib. Critics in Congress and within the national security establishment  —   speaking without identification in press reports  —   have called the Yemen raid botched. They accused the White House of hurrying troops into an operation with bad intelligence, or pressing commanders to go ahead with a raid after it lost its element of surprise. Spokesman Sean Spicer began to return fire on Thursday: The initial planning began in November, he said, and then the military and intelligence community worked to refine it in the succeeding months through the transition. With a strong case for action, Spicer said, the only thing needed was a moonless night in Yemen, which fell after President Trump’s inauguration. Trump ultimately authorized it on Jan. 26. SEAL Team Six and its partners attacked the AQAP target early on Sunday, as NPR’s Alice Fordham and Tom Bowman have detailed. The U. S. says some 14 terrorists were killed in the operation, which also claimed the life of an unknown number of civilians  —   including women and children  —   and Navy Chief Special Warfare Operator William Owens. An American   Osprey aircraft also   injuring its crew, and U. S. troops went on to deliberately destroy it to keep it from being compromised."
818,"Donald Trump has been president for two weeks, and he is already facing dozens of lawsuits over White House policies and his personal business dealings. That’s far more than his predecessors faced in their first days on the job. The lawsuits started on Inauguration Day, and they haven’t let up. Most of the   lawsuits filed so far relate to the travel ban on refugees and nationals from seven   countries that Trump ordered on Jan. 27. They were filed in 17 different states by doctors, professors, students, people fleeing violence and Iraqis who have worked for the U. S. military. Some were detained in American airports for hours over the weekend others were barred overseas from boarding planes bound for the U. S. Two Syrian brothers with visas to enter the country say they were turned around at Philadelphia International Airport and sent back to Damascus. Human rights organizations and attorneys general in five states jumped aboard some of the suits, and their lists of legal grievances were long. They alleged violations of the First, Fifth and 14th Amendments, which guarantee religious equality, due process and equal protection under the law, as well as denials of asylum and discriminatory visa processing. San Francisco sued over Trump’s directive to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. Lawyers representing the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued over Trump’s alleged conflicts of interest. Deepak Gupta told NPR last week that the lawsuit could have broad implications. ”This is about testing the proposition that the framers really meant it when they said the president has to have undivided loyalty to the American people and should not have financial entanglements with foreign governments,” Gupta said. The White House is fighting all the lawsuits. Trump says the ethics suit is ”without merit” and argues that the immigration orders are necessary to keep the country safe. This flurry of litigation goes far beyond what other administrations faced. At the same point in Obama’s presidency, his administration had been sued just five times. The George W. Bush White House faced only four. ”The Trump administration may set records in terms of the number of lawsuits filed against the administration, or against President Trump personally,” says Jonathan Turley, who teaches at the George Washington University Law School. Turley knows firsthand about suing the president. He was lead counsel in a case brought by Congress that successfully challenged part of the Affordable Care Act. Legal challenges like that one have become basically standard procedure in Washington. Princeton University political history professor Julian Zelizer says that in an era of heightened partisanship, executive orders are an increasingly popular way to make policy. The Obama administration used them. Now the Trump administration is doing the same. According to Zelizer, Democrats and their allies are pushing back the only way they can: in court. Just like Republicans did. ”When a president releases an executive order, one of the instant responses is to try to tie it up legally,” Zelizer says. ”Opponents of President Trump are looking to what the Republicans did in the last few years as a road map forward. Conservatives know this can be an incredibly effective tool to stop presidents from doing things that you don’t want them to do.” Trump is no stranger to litigation. He has been a defendant and a plaintiff in thousands of lawsuits as a real estate developer and reality TV star. His general legal strategy? Fight back. ”When I get sued, I take it right  —   just take it all the way,” Trump said during the campaign. ”You know what happens? If you settle suits, you get sued more.” In November, though, the    did settle lawsuits related to Trump University. Some of the lawsuits from Trump’s business career will follow him into office. Turley of George Washington University said that, too, is novel  —   and could be a distraction for the White House. ”Those lawsuits that are found to have merit and are based on President Trump’s personal conduct are likely to be something of a nuisance,” Turley said. The lawsuits over Trump’s executive orders could be huge obstacles to his agenda for years to come. Court hearings on the challenges over his travel ban are getting underway across the country."
819,"”You don’t look like you’re from around here,” a young Adolphus Busch is told as he arrives in America from Germany to pursue his dream of making beer. So begins Budweiser’s new Super Bowl ad, released earlier this week into an ongoing political maelstrom over immigration. The ad depicts the company’s founder trudging through swamps and mud, surviving a steamboat fire and being greeted with outright hostility before getting to St. Louis and meeting Eberhard Anheuser  —   i. e. the Anheuser in  . Despite the beer giant’s protestations that the ad is not political, it has hit a nerve among conservatives for taking a seemingly   stance at a time of widespread protests against President Trump’s ban on travelers from seven   nations. But lost in all the brouhaha is the true story of the 19th century German immigrants behind the rise of American brewing. First, let’s start with a little historical nitpicking with that ad. Historian Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, says that when Busch arrived in St. Louis, he didn’t just run into Eberhard Anheuser  —   he married his daughter and took over the small brewery that Anheuser, a prosperous   had acquired. Also, neither Anheuser nor Busch was the source of the original Budweiser. Ogle says the Bud brand was started by one of Busch’s friends, Carl Conrad. Busch eventually bought Budweiser from Conrad  —   but that happened in the 1880s, long after he had already become a successful brewer. But there’s one thing in the Budweiser ad that rings true to history: the   immigrant hostility that Busch is depicted enduring on the streets. ”Go back home!” a man tells him angrily. While we don’t know whether Busch himself ever walked through such hostile crowds, Ogle says the 1850s were certainly an era marked by ”xenophobic turmoil.” Busch was part of a large wave of German immigrants, including Frederick Miller and Frederick Pabst, who helped build American brewing in the  . The   nation was in the middle of a great debate over what it meant to be an American. And it was seeing a huge influx of immigrants  —   not just from Germany, but Ireland, too. ”Both the Irish and Germans came from cultures where alcohol was a respectable habit,” says Ogle. Many   Americans were worried about how all those newcomers, and their customs, would affect national identity, Ogle says. That’s partly what gave rise to the temperance movement. It wasn’t just about condemning alcohol, it was about defining the moral character of America. ”That was a serious culture clash,” Ogle says. ”And it did fuel a really strong Prohibition movement.” Many Germans who came over set up beer halls in towns with large German enclaves, like St. Louis, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. ”Americans thought of it as disreputable  —   only   people drank,” Ogle says. ”If you went into a tavern, you were going into the seventh circle of hell.” This was the 1840s and ’50s, when America was still debating the great question of slavery, and whether to legalize it outside the South. Ogle says many   whites in the North who organized against the expansion of slavery did so, in part, out of fear that they’d be competing for   jobs. These   whites were   for the same reasons, she says. ”There were pitched battles in the streets where people were saying, ’You don’t belong here. Go home. We don’t want any more immigrants, ’ ” Ogle says. The Republican Party was born in Wisconsin in this climate, she says, to combat the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, but also as a way for German immigrants to stand up for themselves. ”In Milwaukee [the Republican Party] was made up of German immigrants who were determined to protect immigrant rights and who wanted to end slavery,” she says. As for Busch, he became an American citizen and was extremely proud of it, Ogle says. He died before the start of World War I  —   when   sentiment became rampant in the U. S. His wife, Lilly Anheuser Busch, suffered a terrible indignity. Suspected of being a German spy, she was forced to undergo a   exam  —   body cavities included  —   by order of the attorney general on her way back from visiting relatives in Germany. And his family was denounced in newspapers as   their loyalties to the nation openly questioned. One other thing to note: Many of those German immigrants of the   century were essentially refugees. They were fleeing constant warfare in Europe and came to America in search of stability. So while Budweiser’s ad represents a glowing representation of the American dream, the truth is more complicated and, in fact, reflects a history of immigration that reverberates today. ”Right now a little history is valuable for just about everything,” Ogle says."
820,"One of the problems with bats, if you’re a robotics expert, is that they have so many joints. That’s what robotics researchers at the University of Illinois   and Caltech quickly learned when they set out to build a robot version of the flying mammal. ”Bats use more than 40 active and passive joints, [along with] the flexible membranes of their wings,”   Chung of Caltech told Popular Mechanics. ”It’s impractical, or impossible, to incorporate [all 40] of these joints in the robot’s design.” Or as biologist Dan Riskin of the University of Toronto put it to PBS, ”bats are ridiculously stupid in terms of how complex they are.” ”They have a shoulder that can move in all the ways that an insect one can, but then they have an elbow, and a wrist, and five fingers and a thumb that controls part of the leading edge of the wing membrane.” Chung is the lead author on a paper that made the front cover of the latest issue of the journal Science Robotics (Riskin was not part of the study) in which Chung and his team describe their design for a robotic bat that uses onboard electronics to mimic the swerving and diving of the real animal. It’s name is Bat Bot, or B2 for short, and it gets away with just nine joints. ”Arguably, bats have the most sophisticated powered flight mechanism among animals,” the paper states. The researchers wrote that the complexity of bat wings in flight drew them to the animal as a model for flying robots. The magazine IEEE Spectrum has been following   progress on the bat bot for years, and explained this week: ”Bats can do some absolutely amazing things: Besides being able to perch upside down (which is tricky if your initial condition is rightside up and flying) they can actually catch insects in their wings and carry them back home. The researchers mentioned both of these capabilities, saying that they’re specifically working on the   perching thing, but our guess is that catching insects (or anything else) in midair is probably not going to happen soon, especially if the robot is intended to keep flying after it happens. ”But while B2 may not be able to replicate everything that a real bat can do (yet) it’s already helping us to understand how real bats work: You’ll have a lot of trouble trying to convince a real bat to fly the same path 10 times in a row to see how it moves its wings to maneuver, but a robot will quite happily do all of the experiments you could ever want.” This video from Caltech shows how the team tested the robot over an enormous net. In addition to looking cool and helping us understand the secrets of flight, the team argues in its paper that   robots could have advantages over drones powered by rotors. They have soft wings, so the potential for injury might be less, and bat bots could be quieter than whirring rigid drones."
821,"Here’s an abridged list of phrases you might not expect to be spoken in anguish by a chess    announcer: And yet, here was British grandmaster Simon Williams, uttering his astonishment as the women’s chess world champion effectively threw her match in just five baffling moves at the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival. Hou Yifan, a Chinese grandmaster so accomplished she’s earned the nickname ”Queen of Chess,” turned her skills against herself spectacularly in her 10th and final match at the event. Her loss to India’s Lalith Babu was so decisive, in fact, that it begged explanation. After the match, Hou offered one freely: She was ”really, really upset” for the ”unbelievable and weird pairings” that meant seven of her 10 opponents during the event were women. Hou, who currently outpaces the   female player by 68 points, recently left the women’s chess circuit for mixed events where she can compete against men, who fill every spot in the world’s top 100 rankings. ”It would allow me to focus on the top level, on the ’men’s’ field,” Hou told ChessBase magazine of her decision last year. ”I could try to become stronger, to be more efficient, as there would be no obligation to play the women’s tournaments anymore.” When she found herself competing against other female players in the lion’s share of matches at Gibraltar, Hou was frustrated. In her   interview, she says she brought her concerns to the event’s ”chief arbiter” on Tuesday, to no avail. So she decided on a very public display of protest: throwing her final match. ”I just hoped that attention could be coming to the final decisive round,” Hou said. ”And what I also hope [is] that the pairings  —   you know  —   for the future event should be like a 100 percent fair situation.” And she certainly drew attention: Besides the flabbergasted Simon Williams, the festival’s tournament director, Stuart Conquest, called Hou’s game the ”biggest crisis” in the festival’s history, according to The Telegraph. Brian Callaghan, the festival’s organizer, was nonplussed. He says the matchup drawings ”come out of machines,” dismissing allegations of any intentional unfairness. ”These pairings are not made by people,” Callaghan said Thursday. ”I understand: If I was in her shoes, and I suddenly pulled a draw of six girls one after the other, I would say also, ’What is going on here?’ But clearly nothing was going on. It’s coming out of a machine.” Callaghan said Hou is still ”very popular with me and very popular with the tournament,” but also added: ”I’m sorry for Yifan, because I think she let herself down a little bit today.”"
822,"President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have been working to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. And the millions of Americans who have health insurance through the Obamacare marketplaces aren’t the only ones wondering about their fate. Leaders of insurance companies are, too. Sabrina Corlette, a research professor the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University and colleagues interviewed executives at 13 different insurers to get their perspectives in this moment of uncertainty. Their report was published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Urban Institute. All Things Considered’s Audie Cornish talked with Corlette Friday about the findings. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Interview Highlights, On what worries insurers most about repeal and replace  The big issue across every insurance executive’s mind is the uncertainty. Particularly concerning is the potential that two legs of the ACA’s   stool might get knocked out. You have number one, subsidies that help people afford insurance premiums and, number two, a mandate that helps get healthy people to enroll in health care. Congress has threatened to repeal both of those things. And if that happens, insurers are going to need to leave the market, because they won’t be able to make a go of it. On how uncertainty affects insurance plans, First thing to know about insurers in the Obamacare marketplace is that they’re not monolithic. We talk to large national carriers,   nonprofits, local   provider plans, all really coming at this from different perspectives. Some are very committed to staying in the market and serving populations, others not so sure. But across the board they all said we cannot tolerate uncertainty. There comes a certain point where they can’t price the product high enough to account for the uncertain environment they’re in. And they have to make those decisions right now because they’re putting together their [2018] products for review process starting in May. My guess is, when they come out in May we’ll see some pretty big price hikes because the uncertainty they feel in the policy world from Congress and the White House will play out into the premiums that people will ultimately pay. On what provisions of Obamacare need to remain, One thing we heard over and over was the need to maintain some form of incentive for healthy people to sign up for coverage. The Obamacare approach has had a penalty for people who don’t enroll, which has been very controversial in Congress. But insurance companies will tell you they don’t think it was a strong enough incentive. They feel like it needs to stay or replaced with something at least as strong to get people to sign up. On if insurers will fight to keep healthy people in the system, Whether or not they’ll fight for a specific mandate, I’m not sure. But they’ll fight for the balance of healthy and sick. If [that’s not there] if it’s a market that just allows sick people to come in without healthy people, it’s not a workable market. Another thing they could do is say, ’If you’re getting rid of the original mandate you have to allow us to go back to the days when we can deny people insurance if they have a health issue.’ Because you can’t have it both ways. On whether insurance companies want to revert to   times, No, not at all. Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies were in many ways the bad guys. People didn’t like them because they denied coverage to sick people and charged more. Now I think their public image has improved. Everyone gets covered, even with preexisting conditions. I don’t think they want to go back to the days when they were the bad guys. On the other hand, I don’t think they feel that Obamacare was a perfect law. They found plenty to criticize. But my sense is that they’d rather see improvements to basic structure rather than starting back from scratch."
823,"Clergy across the country are sermonizing about events in Washington, D. C. For Rev. Adam Hamilton, that is both a challenge and an obligation. Hamilton founded the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas in 1990, hoping to attract what he describes as thinking Christians with little or no engagement with their faith. The congregation began meeting in the chapel of a funeral home. Today, it’s a   church with a membership of more than 20, 000. It’s the biggest Methodist church in the country, and it has been cited as one of the most influential churches in America. The new sanctuary that’s about to open at the main campus just outside Kansas City hosts the largest single stained glass window in the world. Hamilton tells NPR’s Robert Siegel he didn’t set out to claim that record. But he did set out to build a church that will serve as a house of worship for a century, if not more. ”We’ll baptize 30, 000 babies in here,” he says. ”We’ll give 30, 000 children their   Bibles. This congregation over the next 100 years will give away 50, 000 units of blood, 10 million pounds of food. And over the next 100 years, we’ll give between $4. 5 and $6. 5 billion to ministries outside the walls of our church.” Hamilton is in the midst of a series of sermons he calls ”Unafraid: Living with Courage and Hope.” On Sunday, his focus will be fear related to the direction of our country. He will touch on President Trump’s executive action temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven   countries. ”So part of it’s just dealing with fear,” Hamilton says. ”You know, our fear of President Trump, our fear of the whirlwind of activity  —   so if you tend to be    there’s a great deal of fear there  —   and I want to address that and say, ’We need to be a careful about overreacting, and being people who are stirring up fear.’ ” On Trump’s executive actions on immigration, One of the things that struck me was that President Trump was doing exactly what he said he was going to do when he was running for office. And it was clear to me that a lot of people would feel safer because of this. I didn’t personally feel safer. I think, I felt this adds to a perception of America that might further support the feelings of more radical jihadists who would say well, ”Here America’s showing its true stripes.” . .. But I can understand why some people would feel that way. On the decision to talk about refugees in his sermon, Well, I knew actually as of Friday night (Jan. 27) that I would be saying something, but I chose not to address it in church immediately after that on Sunday because I felt like I didn’t know enough yet. And I had people who were disappointed that I didn’t talk about it in church immediately after that. And part of my thinking was, ”If every time President Trump issues an executive order that I might question on Friday, I change my sermon to preach out about it, I’m going to be preaching about President Trump every Sunday for the next four years.” And our congregation is divided. We have some folks who are Trump supporters. We have folks who were not Trump supporters. The Trump supporters [are] like, ”Please don’t talk politics every Sunday. Don’t bring your personal opinions into the sermon every week.” And other folks are like, ”Why aren’t you speaking out? Why aren’t you saying something?” On what he plans for his next sermon, I will also be speaking specifically about refugees, so I’ll be reminding them of what the Scriptures say about the refugee, the immigrant, the alien in your midst. What does the Bible teach us about how we react to people who are in troubled situations? You know, what does it mean to be concerned for those who can’t speak up for themselves? Then let’s ask the question, how would Jesus define greatness? If we’re really trying to be a nation that is great. On how he feels speaking to a divided congregation  When you have a congregation like ours that’s divided on both sides of the political spectrum and conservative, progressive and a whole lot of people in between, the question is how do I continue to be pastor for all of these people? And how do I help them hear each other? I mean, part of the challenge in the last presidential election for Democrats is they were tone deaf to the concerns of people who were on the right, and lost an election they thought they had in the bag. And I think that’s true in the congregation. That I’ve got to be able to understand why are some people saying, ”Finally, we’ve got a president who’s doing something,” while other people are fearful and saying or angry and saying, ”We have to go protest.” I want to help both sides be able to hear the legitimate and sometimes not necessarily legitimate concerns of the other. My aim is not to see 40 percent of my congregation walk away saying, ”I don’t know if I want to come back.” And I’ve said to pastors across the country, I’ve said, ”It’s easy to irritate people. It’s harder to influence people.” My hope is that I’ve influenced people on both sides to come together and find out, OK what’s reasonable, what makes sense, and then what is in keeping with the Gospel. How does where we go, you know, when we walk out of the church and are thinking about this, influenced by our faith in Christ?"
824,"At lunch hour, the line stretches out the door at Taqueria del Sol on Atlanta’s west side. Inside, the tiny kitchen is a swirl of activity. ”This is my crew,” says   and chef Eddie Hernandez. ”They’re all from Mexico.” The menu is a hybrid of cuisine from his native Monterrey, Mexico, and   Southern cooking, like tangy turnip greens seasoned with red chilies and     peas. ”The food can get us together,” Hernandez says, ”and make us think differently about each other.” Hernandez and his partner, Mike Klank, have been running restaurants together since 1987. They’ve seen presidents come and go. ”I hope President Trump turns out to be better than I expect him to be,” Klank says. ”I hope that he turns out to be more reasonable and centrist than he is.” Klank says there should be a better system for businesses to sponsor immigrants, not more obstacles. The partners describe themselves as conservative economically, but liberal socially. They’re doubtful this administration will bridge those views. ”Every four years we go through the same thing,” Hernandez says. ”A lot of promises and nothing gets done.” Atlanta is a majority Democratic city in Republican Georgia, and it has long fashioned itself the cosmopolitan business capital of the southeast. It is home to major corporations like Delta and   but it is also a center for small business. The city ranks second behind New York among cities with the most   owned companies. And since 2000, metro Atlanta’s Hispanic population has more than doubled. Latino businesses line the busy Buford Highway  —   a main artery that stretches from Atlanta to the suburbs. Eduardo Fernandez is ordering lunch at the food court at Plaza Fiesta, an indoor marketplace that caters to Hispanic shoppers. ”They call it El rinconcito de nuestro pueblo,” he says. ”A little corner of our little town.” Fernandez is an advertising and marketing consultant, and has an online bilingual rock radio station. ”My show is called ’Que Onda,’ ” he says. ”It’s like, ’What’s going on with that?’ ” Sitting near the kids’ carnival area in the mall, Fernandez says he is concerned by some of the executive orders Trump has signed. ”I’m worried about his orders and ideas, and things that he’s implementing,” Fernandez says. ”His attitude.” Fernandez was born in Laredo, Texas, but spent his childhood freely crossing the border to be with family in Mexico. He says Trump is moving recklessly, harming   relations between the two countries. Fernandez is particularly alarmed by what he perceives as an effort to single out certain groups. ”For me that’s evil,” he says. ”You can have an issue with me. You can have an issue with Mr. Jones. But you cannot have an issue with all white people, or all gays, or all Muslims. That’s not Christian.” Fernandez has watched the turmoil over the executive order limiting visitors from seven mostly Muslim countries. He says he doesn’t think Trump thought through the implications of making good on his campaign promises at such a frenetic pace. ”I will give him that,” Fernandez says. ”He’s doing what he promised.” Fernandez says he’s unsure what the new administration will mean for his business, so for the short term he won’t be looking to expand. But some small businesses are banking on Trump’s policies to help them. Michael Flock is the founder and CEO of Flock Specialty Finance, an   company in the     lending market. He’s optimistic Trump will curtail what he calls onerous regulations imposed during the Obama administration. ”We needed some regulation because in this industry of debt collection there are a bunch of cowboys, and we needed some new rules,” Flock says. ”But in America, sometimes we go too far.” He says middle market firms like his have been squeezed, so he welcomes Trump’s promise to roll back the red tape and cut taxes. ”I wasn’t for him initially,” Flock says. ”I’m a     Republican.” Flock’s   office on the perimeter of Atlanta is lined with portraits of Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican reformer. That’s how Flock sees President Trump. ”I think he’s a radical reformer,” he says. ”I think we need major change. And I think it takes somebody outside the government to do that.” Flock says Trump has potential ”if he can stay focused.” He worries Trump’s apparent vanity and penchant for tweeting could prove to be unnecessary distractions. It’s already a distraction for one young entrepreneur. ”I’m pretty much just embarrassed to have him as my president,” says Latasha Kinnard, CEO of Start Young Financial Group. ”I don’t reject him but having him has me be embarrassed.” Kinnard says she used to work in finance for a large corporation, but now has her own business that encourages young black professionals to build wealth. ”I grew up on the south side of Chicago,” she says. ”Seeing people struggle with money was something that was just built into my life, and I wanted to tackle that.” Kinnard says she often votes Democratic, but she doesn’t think either political party serves her interests. Her expectations for the Trump administration are pretty low. ”There is a lot of fear,” Kinnard says. ”Not just nervousness or anxiety, but just flat out fear that Donald Trump isn’t fit to run the country simply because of a lack of empathy for the people who make up this country.” She checks off a litany of worries  —   health care, immigration, the idea that alternative facts have a place in political discourse. But Kinnard says she believes Trump’s presidency can serve as a   call for people to take their civic duties seriously when they see just what’s at stake."
825,"Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the foreign relations committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, is in a hurry to get U. S.  relations back on track. The morning after Rex Tillerson was sworn in as secretary of state, Kosachyov invited two dozen experts on the United States to the Federation Council in downtown Moscow. ”We’re not expecting a road covered with roses in our bilateral relations, though clearly there’s a window of opportunity,” Kosachyov told the academics and former diplomats who packed a   conference room. ”Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he’s ready to build ties with Russia on a new, pragmatic basis.” Relations between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers are at their lowest point since the Cold War ended 25 years ago. The Obama administration imposed sanctions after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014  —   and more recently accused the Kremlin of interfering in the U. S. presidential election. Moscow claims the U. S. and its European allies have been motivated by ”russophobia” and a desire to remove Russia as an independent actor from the world stage. Kosachyov emerged from his   brainstorming session with a list of recommendations on how to approach the Trump administration. Russians largely welcomed the election victory of Donald Trump, who has often spoken of improving relations with Russia. Tillerson’s confirmation came as even more positive news, as the former ExxonMobil CEO built close ties to Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft, and was awarded the country’s Order of Friendship in 2012. ”I definitely do not consider Mr. Tillerson as a   American politician,” Kosachyov told NPR. ”He will not be an easy partner for Russia. But we do not seek easy partners, we seek pragmatic partners, and I believe that we have a chance.” Russian experts view Trump’s victory not as a fluke but as a ”systemic change,” according to Kosachyov. They expect domestic politics also to dominate over foreign policy in western European countries, following elections later this year. Russia should seize the initiative in pushing cooperation in the most promising areas, such as nuclear arms control and fighting international terrorism, Kosachyov said. Increased trade is another priority, though that will be difficult without a loosening of the sanctions regime. On Thursday, the U. S. Treasury Department announced it would allow some companies to do limited business with the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, which fell under sanctions imposed by   Obama in December. The Trump administration says the move was a technical adjustment and does not signify a lifting of sanctions. ”A crisis of confidence is the main aggravating factor in   relations,” Kosachyov said. While he is well aware of bipartisan opposition in Washington to a rapprochement with Russia, Kosachyov said he would reach out to friendly members of Congress during the annual Munich Security Conference in two weeks. Like many Russians, Kosachyov believes the world could have slid into war had Hillary Clinton become president. Many people feared she would have pursued an aggressive policy toward Russia and the Middle East. At least that risk has been eliminated with Trump’s election, he said, and now a summit meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin should be organized as soon as possible. ”If we start to work well together with the U. S. we’ll be able to hold back the Americans from possible mistakes,” Kosachyov said. After all, he said, President Trump may not fully realize the consequences of his proposed actions  —   like moving the U. S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv or recognizing Taiwan as an equal to China."
826,"In the days leading up to today’s announcement of additional U. S. sanctions on Iran, the U. S. and Iran have made claims and   as to whether Iran’s ballistic missile test on Sunday violated a U. N. Security Council resolution and the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers, including the U. S. ”Iran is playing with fire,” President Trump tweeted Friday morning before the sanctions were announced. Trump’s National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, earlier said the missile test was ”in defiance of” U. N. Security Council Resolution 2231 endorsing the Iran nuclear deal. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer called the test an outright ”violation.” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, meanwhile tweeted that Iran is ”unmoved” by U. S. threats and has the right to defend itself. So did Iran violate the agreement or not? Most nonproliferation experts would say Iran certainly defied the spirit of the U. N. resolution, but technically didn’t violate it  —   because it contains no prohibition against such testing, as one of its predecessors, passed in 2010, specifically did. Here’s what the two resolutions say on the subject, with highlighting added: U. N. Security Council Resolution 1929, from 2010, says the Security Council ”decides that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology, and that States shall take all necessary measures to prevent the transfer of technology or technical assistance to Iran related to such activities.” In Resolution 2231, passed in 2015, the Security Council endorsed the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA. It terminated the provisions of the 2010 resolution and added language deep in one of the annexes saying: ”Iran is called upon not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology, until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the Broader Conclusion, whichever is earlier.” As diplomatic terms of art, ”shall not”  —   which appeared in the 2010 resolution  —   represents a clear and enforceable prohibition, whereas being ”called upon” not to do something is more ambiguous. Here’s one way to look at it: When Iran tested ballistic missiles in the fall of 2015, while Resolution 1929 was still in effect, it was doubtless in violation of a Security Council stricture. But when it tested its missile on Sunday, under the new Resolution 2231, Iran was essentially ignoring the Security Council’s advice  —   not violating a directive. Conservative critics of the nuclear agreement argued strongly against the language change, calling it a dangerous   of the international position on Iran’s ballistic missile program. Iran has long maintained that its missile tests don’t violate Security Council resolutions because there are no nuclear warheads involved and Iran’s conventional defenses are its own business. But both the 2010 and 2015 resolutions do warn against testing missiles that ”could be capable” of carrying a nuclear warhead. ”For its part, Iran says it never agreed to missile restrictions in the JCPOA and claims its missile tests do not violate Security Council resolutions because they are not designed to carry nuclear warheads. This is absurd,” former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz argued in The National Review last year. ”Iran’s missile program is widely believed to be a delivery system for nuclear warheads. If Iran were telling the truth, it would be the only nation in history without a   program that nonetheless developed missiles with a range of 2, 000 kilometers or more. Iran is not building   missiles to carry warheads full of dynamite or to fire monkeys into space.” In fact, the Obama administration had argued for keeping in place the stronger prohibitory language of Resolution 1929, but it lost that argument when its negotiating partners wouldn’t back the Americans up. ”When Mr. Obama sought to include a prohibition on ballistic missiles in the Iran deal, or at least extend a previous Security Council resolution banning them, not just Russia and China but even our European allies in the nuclear negotiations refused,” former Obama White House official Philip Gordon explained this week in the New York Times. ”They argued that the ballistic missile ban was put in place in 2010 only to pressure Iran to reach a nuclear deal, and they refused to extend it once that deal had been concluded.” The question remains, what next? In a short briefing paper on Iran’s missile testing, analysts at the Iran Project, a   group including former diplomats say the challenge for President Trump is to ”constrain Iran’s missile testing while maintaining the U. S. and Iranian commitment to the JCPOA, the most assured way to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” The Security Council scheduled ”urgent consultations” on Iran’s missile test earlier this week. Gordon, the former White House official, noted that Iranian presidential elections this spring will likely prompt hardliners to stake out a position of defiance in the missile dispute. The stage would seem to be set for tough rhetoric to escalate, he wrote, including the possibility of terrorist attacks on Americans in the Mideast."
827,"Updated at 2 p. m. ET, The U. S. Treasury Department announced additional sanctions on Iran on Friday, less than a week after a ballistic missile test prompted the Trump administration to accuse Iran of violating an international a weapons agreement. The newly announced sanctions target people and businesses the U. S. government says support Iran’s ballistic missile program and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard   Force, according to a Treasury Department statement. They are in line with previous sanctions, implemented over what   Barack Obama called Iran’s ”violations of human rights, for its support of terrorism and for its ballistic missile program.” The acting director of the Treasury unit in charge of sanctions, John Smith, said the latest sanctions do not violate the international nuclear deal reached with Iran in 2015, which required Iran to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some economic sanctions. A top Treasury Department official tells NPR’s Michele Kelemen that the actions are part of the U. S. efforts to counter Iranian ”malign activity abroad.” The public text of the sanctions lists 12 companies and 13 individuals, blocking assets and prohibiting U. S. citizens from dealing with them. Among the individuals, four are listed as Iranian citizens, two are Lebanese, one is Chinese, and one holds a passport from the island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. It also announced changes to previous, unrelated sanctions on a 14th individual. The businesses are based both inside and outside Iran. According to the Treasury Department, the sanctions target: ”several networks and supporters of Iran’s ballistic missile procurement, including a critical Iranian procurement agent and eight individuals and entities in his   and   network, an Iranian procurement company and its   network, and five individuals and entities that are part of an   procurement network.” Hours before the sanctions were announced, President Trump addressed Iran in a tweet, writing, ”Iran is playing with fire  —   they don’t appreciate how ’kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!” Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted an hour later that ”we will never use our weapons against anyone, except in  .” While U. S. and Iranian officials have both stated that the missile test did not violate the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, the U. S. contends that it did violate a side agreement governing conventional weapons. On Friday, the U. S. State Department released a statement saying that it believed the test was ”inconsistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2231.” That resolution, which replaced an outright prohibition on missile tests, used language calling upon Iran ”not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology,” as The   reported. National Security Adviser Mike Flynn said a day later that former President Barack Obama had gone too easy on Iran, but that ”as of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Flynn also listed the administration’s grievances with Tehran, including its test of a ballistic missile and what he said were attacks by proxy forces in Yemen on U. S. and Middle Eastern ships, as we reported. One of the incidents he appeared to be referring to occurred in October 2016, when U. S. Navy ships off Yemen’s southwestern coast came under missile attacks twice in four days. According to the Pentagon, the missiles came from an area controlled by Houthi forces, who are fighting against the government of Yemen and who the U. S. government says are backed by the Iranian government, which is supplying weapons to the rebel group. But it was unclear who ordered October’s missile launches, as NPR’s Philip Ewing reported. Houthi leaders denied the attacks, and Tehran has denied U. S. accusations that Iran is supporting Houthi forces. Nonetheless, the U. S. carried out airstrikes against what the Pentagon said were radar installations in   areas. In December, Congress extended U. S. sanctions against Iran originally imposed in 1996 until 2026."
828,"In 2000 Andrew Harding became   Africa correspondent for the BBC, based in Nairobi. Soon he was making regular trips to one of the most perilous corners of the continent: Somalia. Wracked by war, famine and   strife since the early 1990s, the country would soon be assailed by a new menace: Al Shabab, a radical Islamist terrorist group. A decade and many trips later, a fortuitous meeting in Mogadishu with Mohamud ”Tarzan” Nur, a   Somali orphan turned   activist, led Harding to his first book, The Mayor of Mogadishu: A Story of Redemption in the Ruins of Somalia. The narrative pieces together Nur’s astonishing biography and follows him when he became mayor in 2010 and tried to restore confidence and bring back investment to the battered Somali capital. (He got his nickname from a teacher at his school who found him hiding   in a tree outside his dorm room when he should have been at breakfast.) Harding is now based in Johannesburg, where he works   for the BBC. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You’re one of a handful of Western correspondents who’ve been in and out of Somalia on a regular basis for the past decade. At what point did you consider writing a book about it? I always thought about this access that I had as being something special and that it might be the source of a book. But when I started to get to know Tarzan, I realized that there was a much better book to be done than an account of my 15 years covering Somalia. Tarzan’s story took over the project. What was it about him that appealed to you? He was this    character, and drama seemed to gather around him. He speaks English and he has a Western veneer, which makes him talk in very accessible style. He said ”yes” to the project without preconditions, and I knew almost immediately that he meant it. He was a man unafraid of speaking to journalists, unafraid of speaking the truth. I realized here is a guy whom I could dig into and I would not be facing death threats, or legal threats. You rapidly establish Tarzan as somebody who plays    with his own biography, and later on suggest that as Mogadishu’s mayor, he was quite corrupt. Did this tarnish the experience of writing about him? Frankly, as somebody trying to write a book rather than an article, I was delighted by his ambiguities, delighted when I realized that there were big question marks about his life. A lot of Somalis have said, ”Why have you written about that scumbag?” I don’t think he is a scumbag. I would much rather write about someone with murky areas and complexities, particularly when I’m trying to write about a country as murky and complex as Somalia. I didn’t want a pure hero. What did Nur do to restore confidence? He became this catalytic figure  —   an enabler  —   someone who could cut through the bureaucracy and the corruption. And foreign governments like Britain could see that. So it was the mayor’s office that oversaw the erection of solar powered street lights  —   which transformed the city. And clearing the accumulated rubbish of 20 years, too. Most journalistic accounts of Somalia focus on the   apocalypse, but you present a detailed portrait of the country during its peaceful,   heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What drew you to that period? I was infinitely more interested in the extraordinary past of Somalia than in the stuff that I already had already reported on a lot. When one digs into the past and understands how optimistic and successful [Somalia] was in the 1960s and 1970s, one starts to care about the place. How difficult was it to report this book in Somalia? What’s been interesting is the way that one discovers how to operate, to report, to survive in Mogadishu. On the streets, you have to work incredibly fast. You keep your movements unpredictable, never stay on the streets for more than a few minutes, listen closely to your security and not spend too much time with people who are likely to be targets. I spent very little time under Tarzan’s protection  —   a few evenings, a few trips around town when he was mayor. Tarzan was a target, and to travel around with him was dangerous. Any close calls? Once I went with Tarzan to settle a dispute with some soldiers who had set up an illegal checkpoint on the edge of town. On the way back, we split from the mayor’s convoy, and minutes later, his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb. The soldiers at the rear of the convoy were killed. When you’re in an armored car the sound outside is muffled, so we didn’t hear about it until we got back to our base. Mogadishu is still a dangerous, highly unstable place. What did Tarzan manage to accomplish during his time as Mayor? His legacy still depends on what happens in the next few years. If Somalia continues with its uneven progress, I think that he’s the guy who set the scene for the return of the diaspora, for the possibility of proper government in Mogadishu and an end to anarchy. But if it collapses again his achievements will mean very little. What was his reaction to the book? I don’t think he has yet finished reading it. He’s not a reader, nor is his wife. I know some passages moved him intensely  —   particularly the stuff about his childhood  —   and his children told me that they discovered so much more about their father. They had no idea their parents had, more or less, eloped. I know there will be elements that he’s unhappy with, but as a politician he will take the fact that he’s had a book written about him as plus. What’s he up to now? He is one of about a dozen candidates for the presidency of Somalia, though his chances are very slim. I think he acknowledges it. By all accounts, this is very corrupt process and he doesn’t have money behind him. "
829,"Oscar season is upon us, and very often, it’s a time when a lot of energy goes into analyzing a few races and a few of the   films as they square off against each other. We’ll be doing that too in a couple of weeks, in our annual Oscars roundup. But first, we wanted to celebrate the season in a different way: by looking at some of the categories that sometimes fly a little under the radar, ours included. First up, we have a segment surveying the five   documentary features: 13th, Ava DuVernay’s examination of race and criminal justice I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck’s marvelous piece based on the work of James Baldwin that Bob Mondello (our fourth chair this week) and I have raved about since September O. J.: Made In America, to which we devoted a full segment earlier Fire At Sea, a deliberate meditation on life on a Sicilian island that often becomes a landing spot for refugees and other migrants and Life Animated, a film about a man with autism who finds avenues of communication in Disney films. All are very much worth watching, and we try to draw some distinctions in style and tone, mostly in service of telling you that . .. well, these are all very much worth watching. Our other segment today takes us into the Foreign Language Film category, where we all watched The Salesman, Iran’s entry into the Oscars this year from director Asghar Farhadi  —   who previously won for A Separation, but who won’t be present to accept this year because of the travel and visa ban that currently doesn’t allow him to enter the United States. As always, we close the show with what’s making us happy this week. Stephen is happy about a comedy about which I’m proud to say he concluded I was right. Glen is happy about having interviewed someone he literally has wanted to talk to since his youth. Bob is happy about the memoirs of a man he’s long admired. And I’m happy about a great, great book and a great, great poem. Find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter: the show, me, Stephen, Glen, Bob, producer Jessica, and producer emeritus and pal for life Mike."
830,"Dionisio Yam Moo stands about      tall, and his skin is weathered from years in the tropical sun. A ”proudly Mayan” farmer, he grows corn, beans and vegetables on a   farm in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The farm is surrounded by dense tropical forest, and crops grow amid fruit trees in thin soil, with the peninsula’s limestone bedrock protruding in places. Yam Moo farms using a traditional, rainfed practice called milpa, which has long involved cutting and burning patches of forest, planting crops for a few years, then letting the   land regenerate for up to 30 years, before cultivating it again. Milpa has enabled generations of farmers like Yam Moo overcome the Yucatán’s poor, thin soil and grow a stunningly diverse set of crops  —   multiple varieties of beans, squash, chili peppers, leafy greens, root vegetables, spices and corn, the plant at the heart of Mayan identity.  In recent years, however, Yam Moo and other Yucatán milperos have struggled to keep their farms alive. Climate change has brought erratic rainfall, making the growing season less predictable. Yam Moo says he has always planted his corn in May. But in 2015 for example, he says the rains didn’t come until August. And then it flooded. He lost most of his crop, he says. Because milpa farming depends entirely on rainfall, which is never fully predictable, ”there has always been a level of uncertainty, and the Maya have dealt with that for millennia,” says José Martínez Reyes, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. ”But with climate change, I think that uncertainty has grown exponentially.” Years of unpredictable rainfall and failed crops pushed Yam Moo to find a solution, and it’s one that could in turn help fight climate change. Along with other farmers in the area, he developed a modified milpa called ”milpa maya mejorada” or ”improved Mayan milpa.” Yam Moo no longer cuts down new forests, but he still grows the same diversity of crops. And he has incorporated into the ancient practice a host of modern techniques that help him farm despite the more unpredictable rains. A recently installed irrigation system, which relies on an   rain water collector (the Yucatán has almost no surface water) ensures that Yam Moo can survive droughts. And he has found that by tilling in compost, chicken manure and other organic additions, he can grow far more crops per hectare. The added nutrients keep the soil healthy and productive, meaning he doesn’t need to clear new ground as often, or perhaps at all. In 2015, after the rains ended in late summer, he replanted corn in a nearby field, arranging seeds in tight rows with the aid of a small garden tiller, and added organic fertilizers to boost yields. Later that year, he planted beans and vegetables. ”As long as you keep feeding the soil, the soil will feed you,” he says. Today, he’s back on his feet, feeding his family with what he grows on his plot. He hopes that his success can be a model for the more than 70, 000 Yucatán milperos who, like him, are facing the punishing effects of climatic changes. Yam Moo’s efforts have gotten some   attention. As part of a project funded by the U. S. Agency for International Development and private donors, the environmental group Nature Conservancy (TNC) is providing technical and financial support to get more farmers to adopt improved milpa. By helping farmers like Yam Moo adapt to the changing climate, TNC hopes to fight climate change, by reducing the deforestation traditionally involved in milpa: the practice is estimated to cause up to 16 percent of the deforestation on the peninsula. At a larger scale, the project aims to help Mexico receive payments from private companies and governments of developed countries to combat climate change. ”We’re addressing drivers of deforestation with     practices that are good for the producer, that are good for the ecosystem, and that mitigate climate change risks,” says Mariana Vélez Laris, a local coordinator for TNC. The organic fertilizers and reduced burning help soil microbes thrive, she says, while sparing forests and the many species that thrive in them. The improved milpa project is still small, with only   milperos in the area participating. But the staff at TNC has big hopes for it  —   they see it as a key tool to reforest much of the Yucatán peninsula. As milperos transition away from    practices, TNC hopes that forests can now regrow and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  As it is, milpa had been on the decline for decades, even before the effects of climate change hit farmers hard. The expansion of cattle ranching and   mechanized agriculture, the Yucatán’s two largest sources of deforestation, has dramatically reduced land available for milpa. Moreover, younger generation of Mexicans have opted for other professions, laments Silvia Teran, an anthropologist at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya (Museum of the Mayan World) in Merída. Many go to work in the tourist resorts of Cancun and Tulum, or the kitchens of San Francisco and Dallas. ”There is almost no connection now between young people and the milpa,” she says. Despite these challenges, milpa has been witnessing a revival in recent years, as tourists and Mexican consumers have started to seek organic, locally grown alternatives to industrial food, says Teran. In the town of Oxkutzcab, milperos sell attractively packaged pepitas, or squash seeds. Others use milpa primarily to feed their families, but sell honey made by the bees that fertilize the crops. A nascent ”back to the land”  movement has begun drawing young people from the city into milpa farming. The tradition’s merits have even been lauded by celebrities like Mark Bittman, and are now being embraced by Mexican state and federal governments that once discouraged the practice. But the revival remains precarious. Farmer Gualberto Casanova says milperos lack money to invest in improved milpa. Historically, milpa required little capital and equipment  —   just a machete or ax to fell trees, and a hoe to loosen the soil for planting. Improved milpa, by contrast, requires fertilizers, garden tillers and irrigation supplies, which most milperos, who are poor, subsistence farmers, can’t afford. ”If we had water, we could produce all year round,” Casanova says. While the Mexican government has provided modest subsidies, the   payments that Yam Moo, Casanova and other milperos hope to receive have yet to materialize. Whatever hopes organizations like TNC might have, improved milpa is not a ”magic bullet,” cautions anthropologist Reyes. He says commercialization schemes promoted by outside groups can backfire, either because the market they are supposed to supply doesn’t exist, or because they create too much competition among producers, undercutting the prices of their goods. For farmers who use milpa primarily for subsistence, however, milpa maya mejorada ”might be the way to go,” he says. ”I see it as a positive initiative.” For Yam Moo, the proof was in his hand as he harvested his crops this past October, which will provide a large fraction of the food his family, which includes his children and grandchildren, needs for the coming year. He hopes his success can convince fellow milperos to take a chance on investing in in this modernized milpa, and in the process, spare valuable forests. ”If this patch is enough for me and my family,” he says, ”why would I go cut down more?” Gabriel Popkin is a freelance journalist based in Maryland. His reporting for this story was supported by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Society for Environmental Journalism."
831,"For some time, the public has known that Donald Trump does a lot of his tweeting himself, from the account @realDonaldTrump, and from an Android smartphone. But many cybersecurity experts believed that would change once Trump took the oath of office, because White   communication devices are much more secured  —   and stripped down  —   than the smartphones the rest of us use. In fact, former President Barack Obama once compared his official White House smartphone to a child’s toy. ”It doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text,” Obama told Jimmy Fallon in 2016. ”The phone doesn’t work. You can’t play your music on it. So, basically, it’s like  —   does your    have one of those play phones?” A few recent reports indicate that President Trump might still be tweeting from his old Android, and he may not even be following all the security protocols he should. Unsecure smartphone, Soon after Trump’s inauguration, an enterprising hacker found that Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account was still tied to the Gmail account of a staffer, a move seen as insecure. (The account now seems to be connected to more official and secure White House email accounts.) And a January article in The New York Times reported that Trump continues to tweet from an ”old, unsecured Android phone.” Several cybersecurity experts told NPR, if that’s the case, it’s not good. ”Donald Trump for the longest time has been using a insecure Android phone that by all reports is so easy to compromise, it would not meet the security requirements of a teenager,” says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. Weaver doesn’t have any   knowledge of the security standards on Trump’s phone. But he says knowing that a sitting president has an insecure Android, ”we must assume that his phone has actively been compromised for a while, and a actively compromised phone is literally a listening device.” Other cybersecurity experts didn’t offer predictions that dire, but half a dozen of them told NPR that if Trump is still using an unsecured Android, even if only to tweet, malware could infiltrate the phone’s camera or microphone, or even use geolocation to tell hackers the president’s whereabouts. Melanie Teplinsky, a privacy expert at American University, says even without those   scenarios, just hacking into Trump’s Twitter account alone could wreak havoc. ”Another concern is that someone tries to influence stock markets or politics through the use of a Twitter account by making false posts,” she says. No comment, NPR reached out the White House for comment on Trump’s tweeting and smartphone use. We asked a few questions: The administration gave no answers to those questions, and no confirmation or denial of all those reports that Trump is using an unsecured device. But deputy White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham tells NPR, ”We don’t comment on security protocols of any kind.” The absence of a clear statement from the White House on the security of Trump’s communications, matched with the continued reports of unsecured smartphone use, has led some to accuse Trump of hypocrisy. ”He and so many during the campaign were so critical of Secretary (Hillary) Clinton for what they felt were inappropriate practices,” says Michael Sulmeyer, director of the Cyber Security Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. ”And it really is the height of hypocrisy to . .. on day one, be doubling down on the exact type of behavior they had no problem riling up the base with.” Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, says: ”If President Trump is carrying around an unsecured Android phone, that’s 1, 000 times worse than using a personal email server.” Seeking solutions, To ensure that President Trump can tweet securely, he’d have to use a smartphone that ”cannot speak on the general Internet,” Weaver says. ”It has to basically cut itself off from the rest of the world to be secure.” But Bill Anderson, CEO of security firm OptioLabs, says there might be another option: Security professionals in the federal government should use this moment to find a way for security and technology to keep up with the   . ”I think the challenge is for the security people that are supporting White House communications to improve their capability to secure the platform,” Anderson told NPR. ”That platform could let him tweet and yet not be at risk. So, they need to catch up with what you can actually do with technology, not just say ’no.’ ” Rubin says, in that regard, Twitter could help. ”If I were Twitter,” he says, ”I would set up a separate, encrypted channel that I would give all of the credentials and the keys to the president to use.” A spokesperson for Twitter said the company doesn’t comment on individual accounts. But Rubin imagines a verification system created by the White House and the company, in which Twitter would confirm each @realDonaldTrump tweet before it was sent. But Rubin points out, that strategy would only secure the president’s Twitter account it would do nothing to change the vulnerabilities of an old Android smartphone."
832,"The streets of Dadaab in northern Kenya are crowded with people and cars. You find refugees selling goats and shaving ice. The biggest refugee camp in the world is basically a mega village. The mostly Somali refugees sell pots and pans and make colorful headscarves on manual sewing machines. In one store, a group of refugees are having an intense conversation. It is, of course, about President Trump. With the stroke of a pen, the new U. S. president threw thousands of lives into disarray when he temporarily suspended refugee resettlements and travel from seven   countries. Here in Dadaab, the U. N. High Commission on Refugees’ office estimates that about 26, 000 of the roughly 280, 000 refugees at the camp have been affected by the new American policy. ”I can’t believe that a   president would resort to targeting people because of their faith,” said Khalif Abdi Nur, 60. Nur and his family were supposed to be resettled in the United States. They had been waiting for nine years and then were told last month to get ready to go. They got tested for tuberculosis, they got treated for parasites, they sold things  —   their house and their shop  —   to buy rolling suitcases, which are something, they thought, every American should have. The Nurs also let themselves start dreaming about Texas, which would be their new home. ”I felt like I could wear a cowboy hat,” Nur said. And even though Texas is known for heat, he imagined a cold place with snow, far away from the arid landscape of Dadaab. His daughter pulls out one of the rolling suitcases. It’s black with a broken handle and stuffed with clothes  —   even a sweater. All those dreams, Nur said, ”only to be left in the dust and sun.” His wife, Hallima Bulle, is sitting just across the room and cuts in. ”I dreamed of an America where we could be normal people,” she said. ”A place where we wouldn’t have to be hand fed by an aid group like children. A place where we could have the chance to make our own fate.” At Dadaab, it feels as though the U. S. refugee ban has stopped all normal life. The offices here for the International Organization for Migration, usually a bustling spot with refugees working through the bureaucracy of getting resettled, are empty. And everyone I spoke to seemed to be at a loss. That seemed true even for Jean Bosco Rushatsi, head of operations at the UNHCR’s office here. He said the U. N. is trying to make arrangements to fly about 200 refugees from Nairobi back to Dadaab. When they left last week, they thought it was for their new homes. Many of them sold everything they owned, and now they’re about to come back to nothing. They’re about to start all over again. Rushatsi said the U. N. will find each of them a piece of land and some building materials  —   twigs, sticks and sheets of plastic  —   to build a home. ”It’s really devastating for some but, you know, they have to face it,” he said. ”That’s unfortunate but there is no alternative solution right away.” Gabriella Waaijman, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s regional director for East Africa, said this is a part of the global trend to ”demonize” refugees. It’s a tragedy, but it’s more than that, she said. It’s a story about one of the richest countries in the world rejecting what she said are its obligations under international law. ”So what are you doing? You’re putting additional pressure on developing countries that are already bearing the biggest burden of the refugee crisis,” Waaijman said. ”Its a very, very selfish position that the United States is taking.” Rushatsi said he’s also worried that there’s more to come. The Trump administration has been talking about cutting U. S. contributions to the U. N. and other multinational organizations. Because of the funding woes, the U. N. has already had to halve the food ration it gives to refugees at Dadaab. If more U. S. funding goes away, he’s not sure what will happen to the camp. Away from the bustle of the market, I meet Carlos Tresfeya. He’s Ethiopian and his wife, Zemzem Siraji, is Somali. They’ve also spent nine years waiting to be resettled in the United States. They were done with their fingerprints and their interviews, and were just waiting for a flight out. Now they don’t know what their fate will be. ”Only God and Trump knows,” Tresfeya said. ”Our hope is just in their hand. . .. First to God, second to Trump.” I ask him if any of this makes him angry. ”What will I bring if I am just angry?” he answered. ”I don’t have any power I’m voiceless.” Tresfeya gets up and walks across the camp, where each house is surrounded by fences made of braided twigs. They look like something a bird would make. Before getting to his house, he passes an evangelical church and an Orthodox one where he worships. He sits on his bed, and slowly all five of his kids come to sit there with him. Tresfeya and his wife, Siraji, are   people. They fell in love at the camp and decided to live together despite their religious differences. Sariji was disowned by her family, and they’re still considered outsiders at the camp. Tresfeya said his kids keep him going. ”For example this guy,” he said, pointing at Fouez, his    son. ”I’m expecting a lot from him. He’s going to do something. He repairs the radio. He sets satellite dishes, repairs mobile [phones. ]” But Tresfeya knows that here in Dadaab, Fouez won’t find success. All five of his children, he said, can’t go to school at the camp because they’re picked on. They have a Christian dad and a Muslim mom, so they’re ostracized. Siraji said that all her family wants is to move to a place that will accept them. But now their only hope, they say, is for President Trump to change his mind."
833,"Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, is under fire after making the false claim that Bowling Green, Ky. was the scene of a massacre carried out by Iraqis. Conway made the claim in an MSNBC interview that aired Thursday night, in which she argued in favor of President Trump’s immigration and refugee ban. In trying to make her case, Conway also accused the media of not covering a massacre on U. S. soil that was perpetrated by terrorists posing as refugees. Friday morning, Conway suggested in a tweet that the claim had been an honest mistake. The city of Bowling Green says it appreciates the clarification, with Mayor Bruce Wilkeson stating, ”I understand during a live interview how one can misspeak.” In the interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Conway defended Trump’s order to freeze the flow of travelers and refugees from seven   countries. The travel ban, Conway said, is ”narrowly proscribed, and also temporary,” and is aimed at making America safer. The senior member of Trump’s staff, who is credited with introducing the concept of ”alternative facts” to America’s discourse, then said: ”I bet, there was very little coverage  —   I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a   ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized  —   and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. I mean, most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.” In this case, as a growing number of people are pointing out, most people don’t know that purported ”new information” because it describes something that did not transpire. Conway’s claim is being ridiculed on Twitter and elsewhere, with fake tributes emerging to honor the nonexistent tragic event. Some of them invoke the hashtag #JeSuisBowlingGreen, playing off of expressions of empathy over actual terrorist attacks that transpired in recent history. The remarks also briefly set off confusion over whether Conway was referring to Bowling Green, Ky. (home of Western Kentucky University) or Bowling Green, Ohio (home of Bowling Green State University) some 400 miles away. Friday morning, the White House adviser tweeted that she was referring to the town in Kentucky, along with a link to an article about Iraqis arrested on terrorism charges in 2011. We’ll note that no Iraqi has carried out a deadly attack in the U. S. since the U. S.  invasion of their country in 2003, though many Iraqis were involved in the insurgency that killed American troops. And as NPR’s Greg Myre has reported, Trump’s list of nations whose citizens are barred from entering the U. S. ”doesn’t include any countries from which radicalized Muslims have actually killed Americans in the U. S. since Sept. 11, 2001.” As criticism poured forth Friday morning, Conway said in a tweet, ”Honest mistakes abound.” That statement highlights a dilemma in today’s America: When public officials become known for promoting inaccuracies  —   and fake news is blamed for misinforming people  —   the task of distinguishing honest mistakes from calculated misstatements becomes more complex. This morning, Conway also complained that an NBC reporter had contacted her about a separate story  —   but hadn’t asked her to clarify her remarks about Bowling Green. ”Not cool, not journalism,” she wrote. In another tweet that soon followed, she wrote, ”Honest mistakes abound.” Setting aside Conway’s claim of a massacre, the more widely accepted version of a known   national security event in Kentucky goes something like this: Two Iraqi men who entered the U. S. as refugees and lived in Bowling Green were arrested in 2011 and charged with supporting a terrorist group. Despite acquiring Stinger missiles, guns and explosives that they believed to be real, neither Waad Alwan nor Mohanad Hammadi planned an attack in Kentucky instead, they tried to send the weapons and money to   in Iraq. And rather than being radicalized in the U. S. both men admitted to being involved in IED attacks on U. S. vehicles in Iraq. At the time, national security experts said the case revealed ”an alarming gap in the screening process” for refugees, as NPR’s Carrie Johnson reported. ”U. S. Homeland Security officials say the Alwan case exposed gaps in the screening process at the start of the Obama administration,” Johnson reported in 2011 (when they were arrested, both men had been in the U. S. for around two years). ”Nowadays, they say, applicants undergo a lot more scrutiny, and their names are run through more terrorist watch lists and other intelligence databases.” In 2013, Alwan and Hammadi were sentenced to lengthy prison sentences  —   a life term for Hammadi and a   term for Alwan. ”Both defendants were closely monitored by federal law enforcement authorities in the months leading up to their arrests,” the Justice Department said. ”Neither was charged with plotting attacks within the United States.” As for Conway’s claim that President Obama declared ”a   ban on the Iraqi refugee program,” a look at the events of 2011 shows that after the terrorism arrests, the administration slowed down but did not halt the process. The White House was criticized that summer for what The New Yorker called an ”excruciatingly slow” process of approving Iraqis’ visas. At the end of the year, the State Department said it had admitted more than 9, 300 Iraqis  —   half the number of the previous year. Part of that slowdown was blamed on tighter security screenings that began at the start of 2011."
834,"Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had many unusual aspects, not the least of which was the huge amount of money it funneled into Trump’s own businesses. And now there’s a new twist: Such payments can continue indefinitely because he’s already declared himself a candidate for   in 2020. Documents filed with the Federal Election Commission show that Trump’s 2016 campaign paid millions of dollars to fly on his aircraft, compensate his relatives for unspecified campaign activities and rent space in Trump properties, including Trump Tower in New York, the Trump golf club in Bedminster, N. J. and Trump’s    resort in Florida. How much money did the campaign pay in total? Politico did the calculations and came up with a figure of $12. 8 million as of Dec. 31, 2016. Such payments are not illegal. Federal law allows campaigns to compensate businesses owned by candidates for any goods and services provided. But the amount of money Trump’s campaign funneled to his own businesses is on a scale rarely if ever seen before, says Norm Eisen, ethics adviser to former President Barack Obama. ”It’s customary for campaigns to provide some reimbursement, but we have never seen anything like this. It merits close scrutiny,” Eisen told NPR. He said the watchdog group he chairs, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is ”poring over the records to make sure the charges are justified and legal.” CREW recently sued Trump alleging that his overseas business interests violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars presidents from accepting payments from foreign governments. Campaigns are supposed to pay ”fair market value” for goods and services they use, but determining what that is can sometimes be difficult, says Larry Noble, general counsel of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. ”Sometimes it causes problems. The question is, what is fair market value? We’ve never seen it on this kind of scale,” he said. Noble notes that last month, Trump took the unusual step of announcing his candidacy for   in 2020. Most presidents wait to do so until after the midterm congressional elections, he said. Because Trump announced so early, he can continue to take in campaign contributions and use some of them to compensate his businesses, Noble said. On the other hand, by announcing early, Trump will also be subject to numerous restrictions on his activities, he said. ”Now that he’s declared he is a candidate, you get to look at his activities to see if in fact he’s doing something as a candidate versus as a president, and if he’s doing it as a candidate, it has to be paid for out of campaign funds that are subject to limits and prohibitions,” Noble said. He notes that presidents often are called upon to speak on behalf of other candidates or attend other political party events. ”When he goes out and gives those speeches, people are going to watch and see whether he talks about his campaign or his candidacy  —   and if he does, it’s a campaign event, and not just a political event for anther candidate or an official government event,” Noble said."
835,"Blood is red to the naked eye. Under a microscope, it depends. This isn’t because it isn’t really red, but rather because its redness is a macroscopic feature. Human blood is red because hemoglobin, which is carried in the blood and functions to transport oxygen, is   and red in color. Octopuses and horseshoe crabs have blue blood. This is because the protein transporting oxygen in their blood, hemocyanin, is actually blue. The blood of a vulcan is green, according to the story anyway, and this is presumably because the stuff that carries oxygen in the vulcan’s blood is green. But our blood is red. It’s bright red when the arteries carry it in its   state throughout the body. And it’s still red, but darker now, when it rushes home to the heart through the veins. I bring this up because I’ve noticed that there are a fair number of people  —   some of the 7th graders my son goes to school with, some teachers, too, who ought to know better, as well as lots of people who have published online  —   who say that blood inside the body is sometimes blue. Blue? Here is some evidence that this isn’t true. When I was 12, I was in an accident and my left wrist was ripped open so that I could see into my arm. Everything was red. Blood was shooting out of my arteries and sloshing out of my veins. And all of it was red. Here’s another piece of evidence. If you get blood drawn, the liquid that comes from your vein into the vacuum sealed container is, plainly, red. We also know why it is red, as already noted. It’s red because of the red blood cells (hemoglobin). Blood does change color somewhat as oxygen is absorbed and replenished. But it doesn’t change from red to blue. It changes from red to dark red. It is true that veins, which are sometimes visible through the skin, may look bluish. Why should this be so? Click here if you want the full story. But the short of it is this: It has to do with the way tissue absorbs, scatters and reflects light. (I think this also explains why your lips look blue when you get cold.) But if you were to open one of your veins, or cut your lip, even when you’re cold, there’d be nothing blue at all about the liquid that would pour forth. Maybe it is the fact that veins look bluish that explains the myth that blood is blue as it flows through the veins? Or could the answer lie elsewhere? By convention arteries are drawn red in textbooks and veins blue. Could it be that people have taken this to be a guide to their actual color? I think this is worth understanding. It’s a politically neutral example of a bit of falsehood that seems resistant to information. At a time when ignorant people openly challenge scientific knowledge about such important matters as the safety of vaccines or the dangers posed by the burning of fossil fuels, it seems worthwhile to try to understand why some bad ideas are so immune to revision. Here’s a hypothesis: The problem is not outright ignorance. You can imagine children  —   who may have never seen an accident, or been cut, or had blood drawn or taken a biology class  —   who might gullibly believe that blood is blue, because someone told them so. Even people who have been cut, or have witnessed an accident scene, or had blood drawn, cleave to the conviction of blood’s sometime blueness. Such conviction and confidence when everything  —   when all the evidence  —   speaks loudly against, can only be the result of some prejudice or bias. But what? Why? A little knowledge, it turns out, can be a dangerous thing. It’s hard to disprove a falsehood when it seems to fit so seamlessly with other true, if poorly understood, propositions. That’s what’s going on here, it would seem. Take a little blood chemistry, exposure to textbooks and the sight of your own naked arms, and you get a perfect ecosystem in which to nourish a manifestly false belief. Thanks to Ulysses Noë for adding to this discussion. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe"
836,"It’s been nearly two decades since the Japanese horror movie Ringu introduced the world to a new kind of specter, a   ghost with stringy black hair and the   movements of a body that looked like its bones had been reversed and rearranged. (For   fans, it’s something akin to Elaine Benes dancing on Seinfeld.) A sudden influx of   flooded genre festivals and indie theaters and a wave of early 2000s Americanizations followed, starting with the 2002 hit The Ring and continuing with films like The Grudge, Dark Water, and One Missed Call. The trendlet had nearly run its course by the time The Ring Two cashed in three years later, and audiences seemed content to leave it at that. Until now, apparently. Nearly 12 years after the sequel, Rings has arrived to answer all the questions audiences can’t possibly remember having asked. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a   revival  —   the genre cycles through its past as frequently as any  —   but Ringu and The Ring are rooted in an era when VHS was the dominant format, and the specific qualities of the cassettes and the images were important to their visceral effect. After all, the hook of The Ring series is that people who watch an unmarked tape have seven spooky days to live before a ghost emerges from a well on the TV screen and drags them into the hereafter. It’s not really a   or streaming sort of idea. Nevertheless, the makers of Rings  —   which is to say none of the directors, screenwriters, or cast members of the previous incarnations  —   try their best to update to Version 2. 0. After an opening stinger on an airplane, where a passenger sweats through the last few minutes of his seven days, the film settles on Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) a college professor who picks up an old VCR from a street vendor. (He’s told that its previous owner died in a plane crash two years earlier.) When Gabriel brings the machine home and hooks it up to his TV, he discovers a mysterious tape inside and decides to check it out, after which he gets the dreaded phone call telling him he has a week to live. From there, the professor makes the format change from VHS to a digital file and he manufactures his own viral sensation as a way of sparing his own life. As each new student watches the video, they become the focus for Samara, the murderous ghost, and so they in turn expose another student to it for temporary protection. (The rules are similar to It Follows, a vastly superior horror film from a couple years ago.) When one of the affected students, Holt (Alex Roe) goes missing, his girlfriend Julia (Matilda Lutz) tracks him down and they venture off together to a mysterious, childless town to understand what happened to Samara and figure out how to lift the curse. Because of the   rule, the big scares are generally limited to the bookends, when Samara finally crawls out of the well and does her grisly business. The first American version of The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, proved extraordinarily effective in making that long second act count, shifting nimbly from a shocker to a chilling gothic mystery, steeped in the cloudy ambience of the Pacific Northwest. Rings pursues the same strategy, with Georgia a frugal substitute for Washington State, and the notion of a childless town with a secret is a potent one, especially when a hulking Vincent D’Onofrio turns up as its most eccentric resident. But Rings cannot make sense of the hodgepodge of old and new mythology, which confuses a Samara origin story that had already been settled in the other entries. Director F. Javier Gutiérrez and his screenwriting team abandon Gabriel and his nefarious operation on campus, but they struggle to fill the time with anything more than exposition and the occasional   to jostle the audience awake. At one point, an umbrella is opened in front of the camera. It’s the biggest shock in the movie."
837,"Of all President Trump’s Cabinet choices, only one currently seems at serious risk of being denied confirmation by the Senate. The confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary is a question mark after two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, announced they plan to vote against her. The Senate cut off debate Friday after a procedural vote. Assuming no other GOP defectors, and no Democrats who cross over to support her, this could place Vice President Pence in the unprecedented position of casting a tiebreaker vote early next week to push the president’s nominee through. Jeff Sessions’ confirmation as attorney general is also being held up so he can vote for DeVos as the senator from Alabama. DeVos is one of several billionaires named to Trump’s Cabinet. She’s not the only one seemingly lacking in background knowledge or qualifications to run a major federal bureaucracy: Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon with no prior governmental experience, has been named to lead the housing agency. Nor, with a record that favors vouchers over public schools, is DeVos the only appointee to have seemingly opposed the agency she is now poised to run: Rick Perry famously said he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy, and Scott Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency more than a dozen times. Yet it is DeVos’ nomination that has spawned massive opposition across the Internet, and from both sides of the aisle. Heidi Hess runs campaigns for CREDO, a mobile phone company with an activist arm that has been backing progressive causes for 30 years. When Trump’s Cabinet picks were announced, CREDO held a strategy meeting and chose a ”top terrible” list of appointees, dubbed the #SwampySeven in reference to his vows to ”drain the swamp.” But, Hess says, nobody has gotten people as enraged as DeVos. Activists made 30, 000 phone calls to Senate offices and smashed CREDO’s record for petition signatures, she said. ”A million and a half is just unprecedented,” she says. ”It’s another scale of magnitude.” So why has DeVos garnered such strong opposition? Sen. Lamar Alexander, one of her biggest proponents in Congress, has written that her opponents are ”grasping at straws” and simply ”resent” her support for choice. Several conservative media outlets have pointed out that Murkowski and Collins have received donations and support from teachers unions. The people who have been organizing against her have a few other theories. Americans like their public schools, Nine out of 10 students in this country attend public school. And national polls consistently show that a majority of Americans, across the aisle, approve of their neighborhood schools. They oppose closing them down, even when they are  . So DeVos’s rhetoric about replacing ”failed” public schools with charters and vouchers may have rubbed many people  —   even Trump supporters  —   the wrong way. ”It’s not just Democrats. There are a lot of Republicans and independents who don’t want DeVos. [They want] public education,” says Zephyr Teachout, a Democratic activist, who has been organizing in opposition to all of Trump’s Cabinet picks. This may be especially true in rural states like Collins’ Maine and Murkowski’s Alaska. School choice is harder to implement in more sparsely populated parts of the country, where children may ride a bus long distances to the local school. ”I have heard from thousands, truly, thousands of Alaskans who have shared their concerns about Mrs. DeVos,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which has received funding from DeVos’ family foundations, sees a different force at work. He says the unions’   organizing power is what’s really being flexed. ”Every red state has an active, engaged network of teachers and allies willing to light up the switchboard.” Even some choice advocates don’t like DeVos’ brand of choice, Some   proponents like Hess, and Eva Moskowitz of the Success Academy charter network, a Democrat, have publicly supported her. But other   backers, including philanthropist Eli Broad and the Democrats for Education Reform, have nevertheless opposed DeVos. ”As important as choice is, that by itself isn’t the answer,” says Shavar Jeffries, the president of DFER. ”A strong commitment to accountability is key.” On that issue, opponents focused on a key exchange in her hearing when Sen. Tim Kaine, D. Va. pressed her as to whether charter, public and private schools should be held to the same accountability standards. ”Well, no,” was her final answer. In addition, says Jeffries, ”Her Michigan record gave pause to a lot of folks.” Many charter schools in Detroit, where DeVos backed a variety of free market choice measures with less oversight than elsewhere, have underperformed public schools. She seemed uniquely unprepared, Many critics cite DeVos’ much criticized performance at her confirmation hearing, videos of which have circulated widely. She has never taught in, worked in or sent her children to a public school, and many opponents believe it showed. She seemed not to understand elements of a major federal education law  —   the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. When Sen. Maggie Hassan,  . H. asked, ”were you unaware when I just asked you about the IDEA that it was a federal law?” DeVos responded, ”I may have confused it.” ”The more people who watched her performance in that hearing, the more they see how   DeVos is to do the mission, the more outraged regular Americans have gotten,” says Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. ”DeVos is the least qualified, the most   and the most hostile to public education of anyone who’s ever had that role.” Is gender at play? DeVos is one of just two female Cabinet appointees. The other, Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, served in a previous administration, making her one of Trump’s most uncontroversial picks. ”It could be the gender thing,” says Hess. ”If it had been Republican senators treating a Democratic nominee the way Al Franken treated her, the gender story would have been much more prominent.” Hess was referring to harsh questions at DeVos’ confirmation hearing from Franken, a Minnesota Democrat. ”I was kind of surprised  —   well, I’m not that surprised  —   that you don’t know this issue,” Franken said at one point when questioning DeVos about methods of evaluating student performance. Thurston Domina, an associate professor of education policy at the University of North Carolina, circulated a letter opposing DeVos’ nomination that was signed by more than 500 education scholars. ”I think there’s a gendered thing,” to how harshly DeVos has been judged, he says. ”She’s no more clueless or ideologically awful than some other appointees, but we have a cultural role for a man who’s sort of a cowboy and comes in.” A woman who looks clueless, he argues, gets no such slack: ”She’s a lady who lunches.”"
838,"President Trump signed two directives on Friday, ordering a review of financial industry regulations known as   and halting implementation of a rule that requires financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. Trump himself made his intentions clear in a meeting with small business owners Monday. ”  is a disaster,” Trump said. ”We’re going to be doing a big number on  .” These executive actions are the start of a Trump administration effort to reverse or revise financial regulations put in place by the Obama administration and seen by Trump and his advisers as onerous and ineffective. Based on the description given by the administration official who briefed reporters, the directives the president is expected to sign Friday won’t immediately do a big number on the law. The directive will instruct the Treasury secretary to meet with the agencies that oversee the law to identify possible changes. ”Americans are going to have better choices and Americans are going to have better products because we’re not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year,” said National Economic Council director Gary Cohn in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Cohn, who was president and COO at the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs before joining the administration, added, ”The banks are going to be able to price product more efficiently and more effectively to consumers.” The president of the nonprofit Wall Street watchdog Better Markets issued a statement blasting Friday’s actions. ”The American people trusted candidate Trump when he said he was going to protect them from Wall Street’s recklessness, but President Trump has betrayed that trust,” Dennis Kelleher’s statement says. ”He is unleashing Wall Street on Main Street, which is exactly what the financial protections of Dodd Frank were put in place to prevent.” Hinting at where the administration might expect the review to lead, the official said that under the Obama administration, ”some of the rules may have even been unconstitutional, creating new agencies that don’t actually protect consumers.” That is an allusion to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the consumer watchdog bureau which Republicans in Congress opposed from its very creation and was the subject of a   fight over its leadership and structure. ”This is not an attempt to undo ” the administration official insisted before going on to explain that some of the work of changing regulations, including the   Volcker Rule to mitigate risks, could be done through personnel, putting   people in charge at agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission. It isn’t clear yet how long the review would take, but the official says every aspect of the law will be considered. A second directive would call on the Department of Labor to defer implementation of an   rule, known as the Fiduciary Rule, requiring financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients in retirement planning. The deadline for implementation was supposed to be April. Echoing arguments of the financial services industry, the Trump administration official said the rule would have unintended consequences if allowed to go forward. The industry says the rule will make it harder for advisers to serve   clients. Backers of the rule say it will prevent advisers from gouging customers by selling them inappropriate,   products. Once the review is complete, the official said, it’s possible the Labor Department could determine the rule is completely unnecessary. This rule has been heavily lobbied and some financial industry organizations had been pushing for the Trump administration to delay it. Key provisions of     passed in 2010, is made up of many provisions across many different regulatory agencies, some of which  —   like the Labor Department’s Fiduciary Rule  —   have yet to be implemented. The intent of the law was to implement comprehensive safeguards to monitor and regulate financial institutions so their potential failures would not pose a risk to the entire economy.   established some key new institutions and rules:"
839,"On the internet, we can be anonymous, hitting up a dating site as ”smooth0perator1” in hopes of a   or subtweeting frenemies under the comfort of an inscrutable avatar. In The Internet, Syd Tha Kyd wanted to be anonymous, or at least not the center of attention. It’s one part defense mechanism and one part shruggie emoticon, downplaying her singer status as just someone in the band instead of someone out front. That equal dynamic has served the RB and soul band well, allowing its players to make some wildly funky and thoughtfully layered music as a unit, especially on 2015’s Ego Death. Dropping the honorary used while DJing and engineering Odd Future, Syd steps out like it ain’t no thing with Fin. She makes her initial reservations about going solo seem more like another project, another product. ”This album is not that deep, but I feel like this is my descent into the depth I want the band to get to,” Syd told The Fader in October. ”For me, this is like an   thing  —   maybe get a song on the radio, maybe make some money, have some new s*** to perform.” But it’s clear from the album’s very first moments  —   a digital clang dropped from a cloud of synths, a robotic sigh still so high from a long hit  —   that Syd can smoke out the quiet storm. While she worked with producers   Rakhi,   and fellow Internet member Steve Lacy on Fin, the beats and the words all are driven by Syd. She has an affinity for the ’90s RB singers who kept their emotions open and voices close, like Aaliyah (see ”Know”) or the ladies in TLC (”Smile More,” ”Nothin’ To Somethin’”)  —   embracing the limitations of their range, but finding the core of the performance via   confidence. Syd herself alternates between a chill drawl and a   head voice, but generally keeps everything  . The slithering ”All About Me” has Syd     in a syrup of braggadocio disguised as group support (”People drowning all around me   So I keep my squad around me”) while the sultry ”Body” slinks a woozy   jam. These are the thematic valleys of Fin: hit up your crew when things get rough, and love on your honey with some respect and tenderness. All things considered, that’s not a bad place to be."
840,"With stories about politics and international affairs dominating the news cycle, it can be easy to miss what’s going on in the world of music. To help with that, NPR Music has a Friday roundup of what was on its radar this week. Of course, even the music industry has had its sights trained on politics musicians and other industry players around the globe responded forcefully this week to President Trump’s executive action on immigration. But a brief,   respite arrived Wednesday with the week’s biggest music news. In two words: Beyoncé. Twins. Jacob Ganz, senior editor at NPR Music, spoke with NPR’s Audie Cornish about that announcement and some other highlights from this week. Listen at the audio link for their full conversation and dive deeper with the links below."
841,"Editor’s note: This story contains references to child pornography that some readers may find disturbing. It’s tempting to think of Facebook as pure entertainment  —   the dumb game you play when your boss looks away, or your date goes to the bathroom. But that’s underestimating how powerful the Facebook empire has become. For some, the app is more important than a driver’s license. People need it to contact colleagues, or even start and build businesses.  It’s hard to know how many people rely on Facebook for work, but NPR interviewed dozens who do. Their stories reveal an unsettling fact: This Silicon Valley giant  —   one that has woven its way into the lives of more than a billion people  —   can be a black box, silent about how it makes decisions. While some have been frustrated about censorship, for a number of users, there is another concern  —   livelihood. Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and author of The Attention Merchants, says it’s as though Facebook were an industrial park. Users started setting up offices in the park, using the roads to travel, treating it like a public utility. But legally, it’s private. So when Facebook shuts off the road that goes to your shop, or puts in a new toll, he says, ”That’s it, you’re done.” Two very different people  —   one is a   in Florida, the other an investigative journalist from Zimbabwe  —   got stopped in their tracks as they were doing their work on Facebook, because of the company’s decisions and refusal to talk,   . That caused them tangible harm. Their stories illustrate how much Facebook controls people’s access to the online world, and how opaque the company is about this power. A fascinating cottage industry, Tim Lawler considers himself a regular American. ”If Bruce Willis and The Rock had a baby, it would look like me,” he says. He doesn’t have a computer science degree from Stanford, yet he managed to make a   salary on Facebook. His job is something you’ve likely never heard of before: He makes and shares memes  —   those dumb, funny pictures you see all over the Internet  —   for money. Lawler previously worked as a manager for   but he lost his job when his store got bought out. He was 40, a tough age to make a career change. He first got on Facebook just for fun. He had a regular account. Then one day he decided to try out a special feature  —   to make something called, simply, a ”page.” Anyone can do it. It takes just a few seconds. Lawler made one in honor of a personal passion: skulls. ”I think that skulls are just a universal symbol of our either mortality or immortality and every person that’s ever been around in this world, past, present or future, has a skull,” he explains. Turns out, it was a stroke of brilliance. Lawler built a base of 350, 000 fans  —   fellow  . And then he started making more pages for more passions, amassing about 4 million ”likes” total. (By comparison, NPR’s Facebook page has 5. 6 million likes. So Lawler is a serious   shop.) His most popular page was called ”Unlawful Humor”  —   an edgy title, but with PG content. One day, a Facebook friend told him she was making money off one of her pages, and he should get in on the business. Here’s how the money part works: Just like Google and Facebook get paid to post advertisements (in your search and your news feed) Lawler gets paid to posts ads too  —   in his Facebook page  —   by a third party, an entity known as an ”affiliate link” company. In the complex world of online advertising, these companies are middlemen between big brands like Home Depot and publishers. It’s a standard practice for businesses on Facebook to post these advertising links. He’ll share a link  —   it could be for a juice company or a news site  —   and every time a fan clicks on that link, he gets less than a penny. But the money adds up. Lawler made anywhere from a couple of hundred dollars a day, to $1, 000. Last year he raked in about $100, 000. (He showed NPR proof of his earnings.) Before it became lucrative, Lawler felt he had a knack for this work because he saw celebrities sharing his memes. In 2010, according to a former senior employee, Facebook had only 100, 000 of these pages. Now, according to two employees, there are roughly 60 million. And they’re a vital part of the corporate strategy. To keep growing, Facebook needs people to do more than set up personal accounts. It needs small businesses to set up digital shop. That brings in more traffic and opens the doors to Facebook mediating (and getting a fee for) financial transactions. If Facebook is the publisher, the most dedicated page owners are the army of reliable writers. They post multiple times an hour. NPR interviewed dozens of people who operate pages. It’s an intriguing world of niche interests. Mikael Giagis started ”The Ultimate 80s” (he loves Molly Ringwald) Cole Larocque started ”Wicked Diesels” and Jason Karpowich did ”Fool Injected  ” (they love their cars) Jess Eagon Cook started ”Mommy Doesn’t Have a Filter Honey” (to help cope with motherhood) John Sweeney had ”102. 7 WSNR” (to promote his Internet radio station). Maureen Camfield, a nurse, started a page for the brokenhearted. It was called ”Broken, Beaten and Scarred But Not Giving Up.” We often hear how the Internet is full of bullies. Camfield says there are so many lonely people online who just want a friend, you can build a real business by being kind. She’d sometimes refer a fan on her page to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, and get a message in return like: ”You helped. You made a difference. I wanted to kill myself that night and I didn’t.” It all comes crashing down, The technology sector gets criticized for killing jobs, for having robots and algorithms replace human labor. These page owners sound like success stories  —   exactly the people Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would want to brag about. While algorithms take over boring, repetitive work, Facebook is making new work that is creative. This is the very promise of technology. But that is not where this story goes. Lawler and the other page owners listed above got shut down. Lawler remembers he was sitting on his couch, posting to his Facebook pages. And all of a sudden, he saw a stream of notifications: ”This page has been unpublished. This page has been unpublished. This page has been unpublished. This page has been unpublished. And I was like, ’Oh my God.’ ”  He remembers the date: Oct. 25. Around the same time, others tell NPR, they received similar, generic messages. They’d violated Facebook’s Terms of Service and their pages are not allowed to operate. The notices did not state what the person did wrong exactly, what the offending posts were, or whether there was a way to rectify the situation (to get the page back). They read like form letters. When Lawler opens his Facebook account, he can still see his old pages (the rest of the world can’t). It makes him sad ”because there’s nothing happening over there. All that’s happening is I’m [losing] likes that I built,” he says. You could say tough luck. Facebook is a free app. People don’t pay, and they’re not entitled to use it. But Lawler and others did pay. Facebook makes money in different ways. The company sticks its own ads on pages  —   meaning the ads other businesses pay Facebook to place. And it charges page owners to ”boost” a post  —   pay $5 to get your post in front of more people. (Facebook pays NPR and other leading news organizations to produce live video streams.) Lawler paid thousands of dollars in ad money. He thought it was a kind of a safety valve. When you advertise, you get a point person, a human at Facebook. Lawler tried reaching that person, and even got a call back  —   which he missed. His emails to Facebook went unanswered. In April 2016, Facebook posted a new rule online stating that users have to get special approval from corporate headquarters to post advertisements independently. Furthermore, Lawler got dozens of notices that his account was sending out spam. Facebook declined to discuss the specifics of any case, citing privacy concerns. Lawler says he didn’t know about this new rule (Facebook didn’t tell him) and the spam notices he got are just little   that disappear in seconds. If he were in bad standing, he figured, someone in the advertising department would have warned him  —   and not let him keep paying to promote his page. Trying to track a child abuser, The difficulty in reaching the company to have access restored doesn’t just affect people who created pages. In Zimbabwe, about 8, 000 miles away from the Florida   there is a user named Sandra Nyaira, an investigative journalist. On June 17, 2016, she received three photographs. ”Horrible, horrible pictures,” she says. They were of two young girls, perhaps 7 years old. They are on a bed, being sexually abused by a man. It’s shot at such an angle that you can see the fear in the girls’ eyes. ”When I received the pictures I was pained,” she says. ”I actually cried because I looked at them and I was like, ’Who does this?’ Obviously these kids were being abused by someone who was very, very close to them.” According to news sources in Zimbabwe, the man took his phone to a repair shop and a clerk saw the photos in the photo gallery. Here in the U. S. if you saw such images, you might go to the police. But in Zimbabwe, Nyaira says, people don’t trust the police to do their jobs. That’s how she wound up with the photos. She’s an   reporter, and she wants to get justice done. Nyaira reached out to a woman in Zimbabwe’s Parliament, a feminist who demanded an investigation and who went on Facebook to talk about the case. In less than 24 hours, Nyaira recalls, they had launched a national discussion. ”So many women in Zimbabwe  —   women activists and ordinary women  —   started following the debate, and speaking with her, responding to a debate on Facebook,” she says. Facebook users contacted Nyaira, to ask how they could help. A fellow journalist said he could tap his sources and get officials he knows involved in the search. So Nyaira decided to share the photos with him on Messenger (Facebook’s private chat tool). That was a big mistake. Almost instantly, Facebook’s computer software deactivated her. She thought to herself, ”Oh no! The bots think I’m distributing child pornography.” She felt mortified. ”Why did you do that? You start blaming yourself, but not for doing anything wrong really for trying to help,” Nyaira says. She needs Facebook for her job. It’s how she communicates with sources and promotes her stories. She told herself: It’ll be OK. I’ll just contact the company and explain. But she realized she couldn’t reach a person at Facebook. There’s no hotline to call. So she filled out a form on the website, which asked her to scan and upload a copy of her passport. She did that and still got a generic rejection. Nyaira became more worried. ”OK, I have sent Facebook my passport information, so what are they going to do with it? Are they going to go to the police without even talking to me about why they have blocked my account?” She feared she could be arrested. In desperation, she turned to one of the most powerful institutions she knows: Harvard University. She used to be a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, and even sat at a luncheon with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg there. Nicco Mele, the center’s director, reached out to a friend at Facebook and basically said: ”Hey, is there anything you can do to help us? I can vouch for Sandra. She is the real deal. She wasn’t doing anything untoward or anything bad.” Mele assumed the matter would get resolved quickly. But that didn’t happen. He reached out to a second friend at Facebook thinking: c’mon. This is silly. And then ”nothing happened,” Mele says. A few weeks after learning of Nyaira’s case, NPR happened to be at Facebook headquarters to interview the head of the Messenger app about an unrelated topic. And at the end, we brought up her case. Without hesitating, Messenger head David Marcus said he’d look into it. ”Of course, and generally those are cases that are really easy to resolve because we have a really good team that looks into these cases and resolves them generally pretty quickly, so I’m shocked that in this specific case it wasn’t done,” he said. ”But of course, I’d be more than happy to help solve that.” Facebook is now in the process of contacting Nyaira directly about her account. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, a man was arrested as the alleged pedophile. As the country talked about it on Facebook, Nyaira  —   whose work helped lead to his capture  —   could not join in. After months of being off the app, she sometimes receives messages from colleagues who wonder why she has disappeared and whether she has left the news industry. In different emerging markets  —   like India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe  —   Facebook leaders make the case that the social network is a tool that helps local economics grow. Nyaira says if Facebook is marketing itself as a vital service, not just a recreational habit, it owes it to users to have local call centers  —   as other multinationals do. But it’s unclear how much Facebook is willing to invest financially in reliable customer service. Consider the numbers. Facebook is worth about $387 billion, and it has about 16, 000 employees. Meanwhile, Comcast, which is worth about $180 billion, has 126, 000 employees  —   so less than half the market cap, but nearly eight times the workforce. Comcast is not exactly the gold standard, but it does have a way for a human customer to reach a human customer representative. Blocking the roads, A few years ago, a joke started floating around in geek circles about Facebook. It went: You have to use Facebook, out of biological necessity, because if you don’t use it, you don’t make friends. If you don’t make friends, you don’t date. And if you don’t date, you don’t get to reproduce. That is not the reality, yet. But the insight  —   that Facebook is far more powerful than we think, and than the company lets on  —   stands. Ashkan Soltani is a privacy researcher and software engineer (who has also won a Pulitzer Prize and served at the Federal Trade Commission under the Obama administration). He thinks Facebook leaders downplay the company’s power. While they broadcast their user numbers, they don’t disclose how much people rely on Facebook. If the company revealed data showing Facebook is the primary mechanism by which people communicate online, Soltani says, ”that would be a very precarious thing for them to say, particularly given competition law and all the responsibilities with it.” Many people fear technology is destroying jobs, not creating them. This year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a New Year’s resolution on his page: He’s going to tour Middle America  —   visit the 30 states he hasn’t visited yet  —   and talk to real people about their concerns. Columbia’s Tim Wu, when asked what he would say to the CEO on tour, poses these questions: ”What are you doing for the economic development of Middle America? What can you offer them other than a chance to see their friends’ kids and make ad revenue off people’s children? He can do better. He can do better.” He’s asking not just about individual cases, but about how Facebook  —   one of the 10 most valuable companies on Earth  —   sees its role in promoting commerce and creating opportunities for others.  A few months ago, onstage at Stanford University, Zuckerberg got asked pretty much the same thing by former President Barack Obama. Zuckerberg did not talk about Facebook’s role. Instead, he defined the word ”entrepreneurship.” ”You know the most effective entrepreneurs who I’ve met care deeply about some mission and some change that they’re trying to create. And often they don’t even start because they’re trying to create a company,” he said. Of course, lots of people do want to create a company, earn a living and use Facebook to help them do it. Zuckerberg will have many more opportunities to explain to them how  —   even if  —   Facebook can help as he tours the U. S. NPR requested an interview with him, to discuss the situation of users who rely on Facebook for work. The company declined. NPR’s Aarti Shahani has started a page on Facebook for people to share concerns about the platform. It’s called Tell Zuck. If you use Facebook for work, and find you’re unable to reach the company, tell her your story at www. facebook. ."
842,"When we asked listeners to write commercials for the little,    joys that enhance our lives, we noticed something interesting. There were a few themes that came up often  —   but then, there were also a few contributions that genuinely took us by surprise. They were commercials for things and experiences that literally none of our 2, 000 other ad writers brought up. But they resonated just the same. A day after we announced five of our favorites  —   and released the audio versions that aired on All Things Considered  —   we can’t help returning to the golden trove of Ads for Nicer Living for just one more post. Consider these the honorable mentions: a celebration of some of the great entries that caught our eye  —   the ads that, quite literally, were one of a kind. From Melissa Morgan of Fremont, Calif. The lush touch of luxury at your fingertips. Perfectly designed to sumptuously caress every curve and soften the edges of even the hardest surface. Anciently evolved, yet modernly minimalist. Experience moss, the     Persian carpets of the plant kingdom. With a legacy of understated elegance which has outlasted millennia, moss adds a subtle touch of chic to every occasion. Filled with   opulence and the classic look of emeralds, the cracks in your sidewalk have never looked better. Moss: nevermore a drab slab. From Jaclyn Schillinger of New York City, Oh no! The toasterStill on. The breadStill in. Toasted? !Ohhhhhhhhh yes. BURNT TOASTFa la la la la la laBURNT TOASTFa la la la la la laThe mistake just teasesbecause its CRUNCH just pleases . ..And that never ceasesto amaaaaaze me. BURNT TOASTFa la la la la la la, Scrumptious! Delicious! Delightful! The beauty of the imperfection. Leave that toaster on a smidge too long andtry it for yourself today. From Rose Szabo of Richmond, Va. This public service announcement reminds you that it’s time to talk to the person about the thing. Got a minor complaint that’s growing because of how long it’s gone on? Wanting to ask an important question about your future? Curious whether someone you love feels the same way as you? If you know it’s important to you, and you know something needs to be said, now is the time to say it. Talk to the person about the thing. Be kind, be specific, and be quick about it. Life is short. Talk to the person about the thing. From Stephen Lee Thompson of Chicago, Life can be so complex. Work! Family! Friends? Who can keep up? Well, thank goodness! Things just got much simpler when Your Friend Called to Cancel the Plans You Already Forgot About. Brought to you by Disorganization and Positive Reinforcement, Your Friend Called to Cancel the Plans You Already Forgot About has more than 100 years of satisfied customers . .. All the way back to your  ! **Sounds of a telegraph**   Woman: What does it say, Harold?   Man: Why! The Joneses can’t make it tonight.   Woman: BULLY! We’re not even dressed. Your Friend Called to Cancel the Plans You Already Forgot About! **Sigh** Also from the makers of Your Friend Called to Cancel the Plans You Already Forgot About, try: Lucky Guess and That Was a Close One. Disorganization and Positive Reinforcement: You can trust us . .. because it happened that one time. From Don Greenfield of Wynnewood, Pa. **Door slams** Him: Hi, I’m back! Her: (lifeless): Hey. ..Him: Boy, you sound really down  —   is everything OK? Her: I dunno, I’ve just been droopy all day. Him: I know that feeling. But I know just what you need. Try listening to the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream! Her: Mendelwho? What’s a Scherzo? Him: Don’t worry about any of that  —   just listen to it! Her: Well, I guess it can’t hurt. Him: Come on, try it . .. **Music begins** Him: There, I see a little smile on your face already. **More music** Him (humming to the music):       . ..Her (starting to giggle): Hey, stop that! Him (continuing to hum):      ! Together:      ! **Both begin laughing** Her (through the laughter): This stuff is great! He: Works for me every time! **More music and laughter** Narrator: Felix Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: raising spirits since 1842!"
843,"Updated at 4:13 a. m. ET Sunday, President Trump’s travel ban remains suspended, after the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit denied a Justice Department request to stay the suspension of President Trump’s order. The court asked opponents of the ban to respond to the Trump administration’s appeal by Sunday at 11:59 p. m. PT the court asked the Justice Department to respond by Monday at 3 p. m. PT. The denial comes a few hours after the Trump administration filed an emergency motion requesting an ”immediate administrative stay” to block the Feb. 3 ruling in Washington state that temporarily suspended Trump’s immigration ban. In a court filing, the Department of Justice argued that the court’s nationwide blocking of Trump’s order was ”vastly overbroad” and should be stayed pending the administration’s appeal. It said the court’s injunction ”  the President’s national security judgment.” Earlier Saturday, the Department of Justice filed a notice to appeal the court ruling. The notice and request were filed to the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the Feb. 3 ruling by Judge James Robart in Washington state. The original story continues below, On Friday night, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily halted the enforcement of President Trump’s executive order on immigration. By Saturday, federal officials had announced they would be complying with the ruling, and airlines said they would resume boarding travelers covered under the ban. The Department of Homeland Security ”has suspended any and all actions implementing the affected sections of the Executive Order,” a department spokeswoman said in a statement. Accordingly, department officials are no longer flagging travelers simply because they are from the seven   countries temporarily barred by Trump’s order. Meanwhile, a State Department spokesperson tells NPR that officials with the department are also adhering to the decision. The department has provisionally revoked somewhere between 60, 000 and 100, 000 individuals’ visas, according to different accounts under Saturday’s announcement, the State Department says that move has been reversed  —   and that ”individuals with visas that were not physically cancelled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid.” Those whose visas were cancelled using a physical stamp have to apply for a new visa at a U. S. embassy or consulate. The State Department said it is working closely with DHS and legal teams on complying with Judge James Robart’s decision, which suspends the nationwide enforcement of Trump’s order while a case brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota is heard in court. That decision also blocks the implementation of the executive order’s provisions related to refugee admissions, a State Department spokesperson said. The department is now restarting the paperwork process for refugees to come to the U. S. Trump, for his part, tweeted a broadside Saturday morning against Judge Robart. ”When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot  come in  out, especially for reasons of safety . security   big trouble!” Trump tweeted. In a subsequent tweet, Trump derided Robart as a ”  judge,” whose decision ”is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Robart, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, is the federal judge presiding over the U. S. District Court in western Washington state. In a statement released Friday, the White House also called Robart’s stay an ”outrageous order.” Later, as NPR’s Rebecca Hersher noted, the statement was soon changed to remove the word ”outrageous.” But the thrust of the message remained the same: The White House said the Justice Department will challenge the judge’s decision. In the meantime, airlines have quickly responded to the court order. Qatar Airways, which services many of the predominantly Middle Eastern countries barred by Trump, announced that it had been directed by U. S. Customs and Border Protection to board nationals with valid documents from Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The airline also noted: ”All refugees seeking admission presenting a valid, unexpired U. S. visa or Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) card (Green Card) will be permitted to travel to the United States and will be processed accordingly upon arrival.” But Qatar Airways wasn’t the only airline to release such an announcement Saturday. Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, announced that on the basis of the federal court ruling it would also permit the affected travelers to fly to the U. S. ”However,” Lufthansa was careful to note, ”short notice changes to the immigration regulations may occur at any time. The final decision regarding immigration lies with the US authorities.” In Cairo, airport authorities received a notification Saturday from U. S. officials that they should also halt the enforcement of Trump’s travel ban. And Reuters reports that Emirates and Etihad Airways said Saturday they would do so, as well. Meanwhile, in the U. S. multiple media outlets report that CBP spoke with U. S. airlines on a conference call Friday, informing them that after the federal judge’s ruling that it was ”back to business as usual.” CNN adds: ”The government was in the process of reinstating visas, the [airline] executive said, adding that airlines would start removing travel alerts from their websites and getting messages out to customers to notify them of the change.” On Friday, NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported that there have been differing accounts of how many visas, exactly, have been revoked since the executive order: ”The State Department said [Friday] ’roughly 60, 000 individuals’ visas were provisionally revoked’ as a result of Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order barring refugees from seven countries. ”That number is considerably lower than the number given by a Justice Department attorney, who said today in federal court in Virginia that 100, 000 visas were revoked as a result of the order, as Carmel Delshad of NPR station WAMU reported.” Beyond the case brought by the states of Minnesota and Washington, three other states  —   Massachusetts, New York and Virginia  —   have also sued the federal government over Trump’s executive order."
844,"Judge James L. Robart did not have to actually rule on the legality of President Trump’s executive order barring people from seven countries from entering the United States. In granting a temporary restraining order, the judge essentially had to decide that: In other words, he decided there was more harm letting the ban continue than there was blocking it until the full case could be heard. But Robart certainly tipped his hand on whether he thought the ban was justified. He questioned Department of Justice lawyer Michelle Bennett, who was representing the Trump administration, asking, ”How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals from those seven countries since  ?” The Sept. 11 attack was one of the rationales behind the executive order, according to the Trump administration. ”I don’t know the specific details of attacks or planned attacks,” said Bennett, who is from the DOJ’s Civil Division. ”The answer to that is none, as best I can tell,” said the judge. ”The rationale was not only ” Bennett said. ”It was to protect the United States from the potential for terrorism.” Congress gives the president wide latitude in foreign affairs, which includes granting visas. ”The court doesn’t get to look behind those determinations,” she added. But the judge answered: ”I’m also asked to look and determine if the executive order is rationally based. And rationally based, to some extent, means I have to find it grounded in fact instead of fiction.” Temporary restraining orders generally last up to 14 days. They can be extended, but the idea is to hold a full hearing on an injunction instead. Of course, a higher court can overturn the restraining order in the meantime. Who is the judge? Robart has a history of saying what he thinks. He was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2003 and confirmed unanimously in a   vote by the Senate in June 2004. Before that, he was a lawyer in private practice in Seattle. He has worked with   youth in that city and, before becoming a judge, represented refugees from Southeast Asia. Last year, Robart presided over a case alleging excessive force by Seattle police brought by the Obama administration’s Justice Department. During a hearing, he used FBI statistics to note that police use of deadly force in cities in the U. S. involved 41 percent of black people, despite their being only 20 percent of the population living in those cities. Robart took a breath and said, ”Black lives matter.”"
845,"It’s only the second week of the Trump administration, but there has been a continued tension with facts. In his first week, the president boasted about his inaugural crowds and doubled down on false claims that there were millions of illegal voters who swayed the results of the popular vote. This week, the White House pushed back on claims about the immigration and travel ban the president signed an adviser used a Kentucky massacre that never occurred to make an argument the press secretary thundered over ( )”identical” National Security Councils and the president referred to refugees as ”illegal immigrants” and kept touting the size of his electoral win, including support from black voters and Latinos.  1. ”It really is a massive success story in terms of implementation on every single level.”  —   senior administration official Sunday on the   ban and its implementation, Scenes at major international U. S. airports in the U. S. showed the implementation of the order rocky. There was confusion about whether it applied to green card holders and U. S. legal residents. A    boy was detained for hours. More than a dozen congressional Republicans broke ranks and criticized the rollout of the order, even Trump allies. ”We all share a desire to protect the American people, but this executive order has been poorly implemented, especially with respect to   holders,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker,  . said in a statement. Some agencies or officials who would be tasked with implementing it weren’t briefed with sufficient time before the order was signed. Trump defended that in a tweet saying he didn’t want to give bad dudes a heads up: 2. ”These seven countries, what about the 46   countries that are not included. Right there, it totally undercuts this nonsense that this is a Muslim ban.”  —   White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Fox News Sunday, It’s true that the words Muslim or Christian never appear in the executive order. And it’s true that it doesn’t ban all Muslims around the world. But the order does effectively ban Muslims from seven   countries and prioritizes Christians (and conceivably other religious minorities). Trump himself in December 2015 called for ”a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Trump supporter and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said on Fox News on Sunday that Trump originally wanted a Muslim ban but asked how to do it legally so it became about dangerous countries instead of religion. ”When he first announced it,” Giuliani said, ”he said, ’Muslim ban.’ He called me up, he said, ’Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it  —   legally.’ ” Trump himself stressed in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Christians would get special priority. The countries on the list are not just   they are all almost entirely Muslim, as the Boston Globe’s Matt Viser pointed out: 3. ”My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months. The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”  —   President Trump, in a statement on Facebook defending his policy, The Trump administration defended its choice of the seven countries by pointing out that the Obama administration had identified them as ”countries of concern,” but unlike Trump’s order, Obama’s did not bar people from entering the U. S. The Obama change stemmed from two Iraqis who were arrested in Kentucky (more on that later in the week). Their fingerprints were found in Iraq on an improvised explosive device targeting Americans. That caused the Obama administration to slow down the process of admitting Iraqis, but it never stopped it. 4. ”I mean New York Times has called me wrong from the beginning. They actually apologized to their readers. They lost a lot of subscriptions because  —   not because the readers even like me. They say ’how inaccurate could you be?’ ”  —   Trump, in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network on Sunday, Trump has made similar claims about the Times ”apologizing” before, but such claims continue to not be true. As we recently wrote in a fact check about a Trump tweet: ”New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Dean Baquet did write a letter to readers after the surprising election conclusion examining the paper’s coverage. In the note, they acknowledged that ’after such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?’ And a column from the paper’s public editor (or ombudsman) Liz Spayd, pointed out problems with its   vertical that predicted that Hillary Clinton had an 80 percent chance of winning the election. She also argued that the paper’s reporters could have done a better job of tapping into ’the sentiments of Trump supporters.’ ” However, neither of those pieces constitutes an apology. 5. ”And we did better with the Latino community. . .. Better than Romney, better than just about for a long way.”  —   Trump to CBN, Sunday, Trump received 28 percent of the Latino vote, according to 2016 exit poll data compiled by CNN. Romney received 27 percent of the Latino vote in 2012. The margin of error on each of those polls is plus or minus 3 percentage points, according to Edison Research, the organization that conducted the polls. As far as performing better with Hispanics than past candidates, that’s not really true, either. John McCain received 31 percent of the Latino vote in 2008, and in 2004, George W. Bush received 44 percent of the Latino vote  —   a figure that is often pointed to as a   mark for Republicans with that demographic. 6. ”And the   I got 84 percent of that vote. And they voted in big numbers.”  —   Trump to CBN, Sunday, It’s not clear where Trump got this number. It’s true that   tend to be more conservative than other Latino voters. But at least in the state with by far the most   the Trump share of the vote wasn’t nearly this high. According to the Pew Research Center, just over half (54 percent) of   in Florida  —   home to   of all   eligible voters  —   voted for Trump. In fact,   voters have grown less Republican over the years. According to Pew, nearly   of   were Republican or   as of 2002. As of 2013, it was just 47 percent. NPR has reached out to the White House for a source on this figure but did not receive a response. 7. The president tweeted blame at Delta Airlines on Monday. But while Delta did experience an outage that affected many flights on the ground, that problem was reported on Sunday night. Those delays began well after protests started breaking out at airports across the country on Saturday in response to Trump’s executive order on refugees, which was issued on Friday. 8. ”The Principals Committee is merely the NSC minus the president. The idea is that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the DNI are being downgraded or removed is utter nonsense.”  —   Spicer on Monday, The Principals Committee under George W. Bush, whom Spicer referenced in his briefing, indeed did not specifically include the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the director of national intelligence (or, at the time, the director of central intelligence, as the DNI did not exist yet). Rather, the Principals Committee said that the DCI and chairman would ”attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise” were going to be discussed, as NPR’s Domenico Montanaro pointed out in a fact check this week. However, the DNI and chairman were regular members under the Obama administration, according to one February 2009 memo. Here is the text of that list: ”The NSC Principals Committee ( ) will continue to be the senior interagency forum for consideration of policy issues affecting national security, as it has been since 1989. The National Security Advisor shall serve as Chair, and its regular members will be the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations, the Chief of Staff to the President, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The latest action from the White House is clearly different, moving the DNI and chairman back to attendees only at certain meetings: ”The PC shall have as its regular attendees the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff, the Assistant to the President and Chief Strategist, the National Security Advisor, and the Homeland Security Advisor. The Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed. The Counsel to the President, the Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget may attend all PC meetings.” In addition, Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, is now a regular attendee of the Principals Committee. That is one big way in which Trump’s NSC really is not like Obama’s or Bush’s. 9. ”He’s aware of what people have been saying. But I think, by and large, he’s been praised for it.”  —   Spicer at Monday’s press briefing, referring to the White House Holocaust Remembrance Statement that left out any mention of the Jewish people, Only white nationalists were celebrating the carefully parsed statement, with controversial   leader Richard Spencer praising it as the ”  of the Holocaust.” According to Politico, the White House even nixed a State Department statement that did mention Jewish victims. White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks defended the wording of the original statement, noting that while 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, 5 million others were also killed, including ”priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.” That is true, but the express purpose of the Holocaust was to exterminate the Jewish people, and minimizing that has been the goal of Holocaust deniers, white nationalists and  . The Holocaust Memorial Museum criticized the statement, noting that ”Millions of other innocent civilians were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but the elimination of Jews was central to Nazi policy.” The Republican Jewish Coalition (which is heavily backed by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson) also called out the wording, saying, ”The lack of a direct statement about the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was an unfortunate omission. History unambiguously shows the purpose of the Nazis’ final solution was the extermination of the Jews of Europe. We hope, going forward, he conveys those feelings when speaking about the Holocaust.” 10. ”It’s not a Muslim ban. It’s not a travel ban. It’s a vetting system to keep America safe.”  —   Spicer briefing, Tuesday, Several administration officials  —   including Spicer  —   called this a travel ban, as this CNN video shows. President Trump himself tweeted that it was a ban, though Spicer claimed that was because ”he’s using he words that the media is using.” In a tweet one day after Spicer tried to make this factually inaccurate defense, Trump again called it a ban. 11. ”If you remember I wasn’t going to do well with the   community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting  —   and I won’t go into details  —   but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years.”  —   Trump remarks at an African American History Month listening session, Wednesday, Trump received 8 percent of the   vote in 2016, compared with the 6 percent received by Mitt Romney in 2012 and the 4 percent received by McCain in 2008. So he registered better numbers with   than the past two Republican candidates. However, George W. Bush received the support of 11 percent of   in 2004 and 9 percent in 2000. So Trump isn’t right here. Given margins of error, Trump performed roughly as well as the last handful of Republican candidates with   voters  —   perhaps better than Obama’s opponents did, but nothing out of the ordinary. 12. Trump tweeted of ”thousands of illegal immigrants” that the Obama administration agreed to take in from Australia. But, as we explained over at our Tweet annotator, they are neither ”thousands” nor ”illegal immigrants.” There are about 1, 250 people, who are seeking asylum  —   refugees who have fled their home countries seeking safety  —   many of whom are children. NPR’s   blog has more. 13. ”It’s hard to ever call something a complete success, when you have the loss of life or people injured, but I think when you look at the totality of what was gained to prevent the future loss of life . .. it is a successful operation by all standards.”  —   Spicer on Thursday, That is starkly different from the way the New York Times described it the day before. ”As it turned out,” Eric Schmitt and David Sanger wrote, ”almost everything that could go wrong did.” CENTCOM said the U. S. recovered information helpful to counterterrorism analysts. Spicer said the operation yielded valuable intelligence about   in the Arabian Peninsula. But NPR’s Alice Fordham and Tom Bowman reported that ”local witnesses disputed that, saying the special operations troops never entered any buildings to take any computers or documents.” NPR: ”The U. S. military has opened an investigation, and U. S. military officials tell NPR that civilians were indeed among the victims. Taken together, claims and counterclaims from the U. S. military and local residents described a chaotic operation, one that drew sharp criticism from Yemeni officials who usually support the U. S. The aftermath of the raid shows the potential dangers if the U. S. military relaxes its current restrictions about using force and protecting civilians, which President Trump has asked the Pentagon to review.” The Times: ”The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious   firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations  —   which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct  —   that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. . .. ”[T]he mission’s casualties raise doubts about the months of detailed planning that went into the operation during the Obama administration and whether the right questions were raised before its approval. Typically, the president’s advisers lay out the risks, but Pentagon officials declined to characterize any discussions with Mr. Trump.” 14. ”I bet, there was very little coverage  —   I bet it’s   information to people that President Obama had a   ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized  —   and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. I mean, most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”  —   Conway on MSNBC’s Hardball, Thursday. There was no ”Bowling Green massacre” at all, and Conway has acknowledged she misspoke. She asked for ”grace” for the mistake. Conway was referring to the two Iraqi refugees referenced in Point 3. But neither had planned or executed an attack in Kentucky. Conway’s further assertion that President Obama had a   ban on Iraqi refugees is also false. The White House slowed down the approval process but did not halt it altogether. (In her tweet, she also notes something repeatedly used by Trump and others in the administration  —   a mistake a Time reporter made, reporting that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. He quickly corrected the mistake.) NPR’s Sarah McCammon and Domenico Montanaro contributed to this report. "
846,"The unrest in Ferguson, Mo. following the death of Michael Brown in summer 2015 drew renewed scrutiny to police violence and revealed just how little the public knew about its pervasiveness. At first, there were widespread calls to address what officers looked like since Brown was   and the officer who shot him is white. The dominant theory was that if police departments better reflected the racial makeup of the communities they served, incidents of police violence would decrease. Maybe, the thinking was, another result would be less friction between officers and the public. This rationale seemed intuitive, and Ferguson offered fertile ground for testing the theory. In 2015, two in three residents in the city of 21, 000 were black, but only three officers in the   force were. This disparity appeared as a tangible underlying factor that may have contributed to Brown’s death. In the years since, a somewhat clearer picture about who is killed in police encounters has emerged thanks to reporting by the Washington Post, The Guardian, and Mapping Police Violence project. Today, data overwhelmingly confirm that black people are involved in and are victims of   killings at greater proportions than any other racial group in the country. But even as more research explores the role of race in police violence, the findings have been inconclusive and sometimes contradictory. A new study that will be published in the next edition of the Public Administration Review will complicate that body of research even more. ”What we find is evidence that [having] more black police officers probably doesn’t offer a direct solution to this problem,” Sean   a political scientist at Indiana University and one of the study’s authors, said. Indeed, the researchers concluded that as the ratio of black officers in police departments rose  —   up to a certain threshold  —   so did the number of fatal encounters between officers and black residents. ”Any small group will sometimes be the strongest proponents of [the larger organization’s] norms and values, and people will sometimes see that as the mechanism to be seen as legitimate,”   said. The tipping point appears to be 25 percent. When black officers reach that ratio in the force, the rate of fatal   incidents levels off. The study also found that once a police department became about 40 percent black, the trendline flipped  —   the more black officers a department has after that point, the less likely the incidence of fatal encounters with black people. But the study suggests that what departments really need isn’t just to simply add more black officers, but to reach a critical mass of black officers. In fact, so many black officers that they would be overrepresented relative to the local black population. (Very few local police departments reached that   mark. The researchers looked at the 100 largest cities in the country, and only 15 had police forces with that proportion of black officers.) So, why would adding black officers to the ranks drive up the number of fatal incidents? One reason,   said, is that black officers might be tougher on black citizens because they are especially invested in stopping crime in black neighborhoods. But he also said that in institutions where someone belongs to a distinct minority, they are often more likely to adhere to the cultures of the organization to prove they belong.   said that despite the study’s findings, there are other reasons that a police department may want to increase the number of black officers on the force. But the findings raised an unsettling question: might a city like Ferguson, in attempting to diversify its police force, actually unintentionally foster conditions that lead to more violent interactions between black people and the police? That question gained steam after events in Ferguson in part because of lack of data. ”We have bad numbers on policing, but you can get somewhat decent numbers on [local] demographics,” Phillip Atiba Goff, director of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College in New York, said. But Goff also said the logic behind that correlation isn’t interrogated enough. ”I think the assumption is that racism can’t exist in black people, and so if we have more black police, we’re just going to have different results.” The work of quantifying the racial gradients that may impact police violence will likely keep researches like   breaking down numbers for many years to come."
847,"The Trump administration says it is suspending all refugee admissions to the United States until it can come up with a plan for ”extreme vetting.” So what could that mean? Refugees are already subjected to multiple interviews and a security vetting by nine U. S. law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies that check their backgrounds, social media activity and the reasons they fled their countries. The process usually takes 18 months or more, according to resettlement agencies. But some of those who helped form President Trump’s policies on refugees are upfront in saying this is not actually about stricter security screening. It’s about something else. ”It means a kind of ideological screening to keep out people who hate a free society even if they are not violent,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that supports tighter controls on immigration. Krikorian met with Trump during the campaign and backs the president’s executive order as a ”corrective” to the vetting system in place during the Obama years.  President Trump signed an executive order suspending the State Department’s refugee assistance program for 120 days until ”extreme” vetting can be put in place. In an interview with NPR, Krikorian said he backs an ideological test that poses questions for refugees in the vetting process including, in his words, ”Do you think it’s okay to kill apostates? Do you think it’s okay to throw gays off of buildings? Or if Islam’s Prophet Muhammad is insulted, there should be a punishment?” If a refugee says yes to any of these questions, says Krikorian, ”Then we don’t want you here.” Trump’s executive order on immigration appears to refer to these views by declaring the United States should keep out those with ”hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles” and ”those who would place violent ideologies over American law.” This is all of intense concern for refugee advocates. The most pressing refugee need today is among Syrians  —   some 5 million have fled the country’s civil war. The vast majority are Muslim. ”It’s clearly ” says Muna Jondy, a Michigan immigration lawyer of Syrian descent who’s been fielding frantic calls from refugee families in the U. S. whose relatives are now barred from joining them. She points out the refugee screening process already targets those with extreme Islamist views via   vetting, which checks for links to radical Islamist groups.  But the president appears to echo opinions of a web of supporters who have warned about the wider ”dangers” of Islam and more recently have called for rigorous ideological vetting. His national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has called fear of Islam ”rational” and equates Islam with a political ideology. One of the most outspoken of these supporters is Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Policy Studies and a leading   advocate. Human rights groups have described Gaffney as a conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe, but his views have gained traction in the Trump administration. Trump cited his work during his campaign. In recent interview with NPR, Gaffney laid out his view that Islam is a national security threat not only because of violent jihadists, but because of what he sees as ”this stealthy, subversive kind of jihad” practiced by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaffney claims the Brotherhood’s stealth aim is to impose sharia, or Islamic law, in the U. S. Gaffney supports an ideological test for refugees to ”ensure they are not creating this sharia agenda, that they are not going to part of the Muslim Brotherhood or part of the networks that engage in radicalization.” In a broad sense, tests of attitudes aren’t unprecedented. Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, notes that an ideological test for newcomers is ”deeply embedded” in U. S. history. The U. S. barred anarchists in 1903. During the Cold War, she says, ”It was people who believed in communism. It’s still in our law.” But Meissner points out these ideological tests have not had the desired outcome, because over time, the tests ”have proven to be poorly equipped to actually predict what people are going to do.” And it gets more complex when the beliefs straddle the line between politics and religion. Meissner compares Trump supporters’ fear of sharia law and their view that it’s at odds with the U. S. system with the fears and debates surrounding the candidacy of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Kennedy was Catholic and his detractors feared that if elected, the American president would be taking orders from the Pope. ”Then, JFK made his   statement about his personal faith and his responsibility to the civil system,” Meissner says. For Muslim activists, the idea of a test targeting their beliefs is alarming. Wilfredo A. Ruiz, a Muslim convert and spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, says invasive and subjective questioning about religious beliefs already takes place at airports by border patrol agents. ”The questions are now more specific,” he says. ”Are you Sunni or Shiite? Are you acquainted with Wahhabism? Do you have a Quran in your luggage?” Ruiz says he’s filed dozens of complaints in the past few weeks with the Department of Homeland Security for what he calls intrusive questioning of Muslim travelers. His clients often comply, he says, handing over their passwords to cell phones and social media because refusing would result in a long wait and missed flights. ”People need to know this is going on,” he says, noting that civil liberties groups are working together, sending squads of lawyers to airports in support of passengers detained for questioning. ”They no longer see it as a Muslim cause,” he says. ”Jews, Hispanics,    —   everyone is asking, who’s next?”"
848,"In today’s   media climate, who has time to wait for the Super Bowl to actually see the commercials? There are a few advertisers who will make us wait until the Big Game to see their wares  —   Snickers plans a live commercial with Adam Driver which will be Must See TV whether it works or not. Weeks ago, many advertisers started posting online teasers, previews and actual commercials airing in Sunday’s game. (Beermaker   reportedly held a ”media briefing” on its ads strategy with journalists last month). Makes sense. These companies are paying up to $5 million for 30 seconds of advertising time to the Fox network for space in a game that is often the   TV event of the year. With that much at stake, a media strategy that doesn’t include some   day viewing seems like a missed opportunity. Just like with TV shows, ads that move audiences can tell us a lot about what values inspire or alarm us. And those notions can change on a dime  —   I’m betting   never expected its inspiring story about the immigration struggles of founder Adolphus Busch to be seen as a dig at President Donald Trump. But it’s tough to watch scenes in its ad titled ”Born the Hard Way,” where Busch initially faces angry Americans telling him, ”you’re not wanted here. .. go back home,” without thinking of Trump’s executive order on immigration and the fiery debate it has kicked off. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting Super Bowl commercials coming Sunday  —   including a few that are compelling for reasons their creators likely never intended. Bud Light: Ghost Spuds. The Weird But Kinda Works award goes to Budweiser for its ad featuring the ghost of its former Bud Light mascot, the party dog Spuds MacKenzie, voiced by actor Carl Weathers. At first, it’s odd to be reminded that the dog which actually played the original Spuds in late 1980s ads is no longer with us. But watching the ”ghost” lead a schlubby guy to realize the value of friendship through beer is kinda entertaining  —   and pretty much the spirit of a lot of Super Bowl revelry. Audi: Daughter. As the father of three daughters, I was all in for this ad featuring a young girl beating several boys to win a downhill cart race while her dad voices fears about how sexism will affect her, asking, ”do I tell her. .. she will automatically be valued as less than every man she meets?” By the time the screen announces ”Audi of America is committed to equal pay for equal work,” I’m drying my eyes and thinking about a vehicle upgrade. Ford: Go Further. Complaints about commercialism may seem quaint these days. But it’s still jarring to see Ford use Nina Simone’s rendition of the civil rights anthem ”I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” to illustrate scenes where people are frustrated by being stuck in traffic or locked out of the house. When Simone sang about wanting to ”break all the chains holding me,” I don’t think she meant sidestepping traffic  .   USA: Easy Driver. One notch down the commercialism disappointment scale, we find the   ad featuring Peter Fonda. Stories about Baby Boomers selling out are nothing new. But it’s still odd to see a guy who once embodied ’60s counter culture in Easy Rider star in a commercial with hordes of bikers acting like knuckleheads until they are struck dumb by the sight of a relatively   Fonda, peeling out of a parking lot in a $350, 000   Roadster. Insult to injury: the commercial was directed by Fargo’s   filmmakers, Joel and Ethan Coen. Honda: Yearbooks. Lots of celebrities are doing lots of interesting ads (it seems like New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski pops up in every other commercial). But my award for Best Use of a Big Name goes to this ad, which animates old, mostly embarrassing high school yearbook photos of celebrities like Robert Redford, Amy Adams and Viola Davis to tell viewers dreams really do come true. Even for guys geeky enough to try rocking the pornstar moustache Steve Carrell sports in his photo (”You think any of these folks believed that I’d make it?” he asks. Surely not.) Squarespace: Who is JohnMalkovich. com? I’m always telling journalism students to get ownership of their name as a URL for their websites soon as possible. So it was a tickle to see John Malkovich in this ad begging a fisherman to let him have his own name back. Extra points to Malkovich for always being willing to poke fun at his own eccentric image. Febreeze: Halftime #BathroomBreak. We all know what happens in bathrooms across the country between the halftime whistle and halftime show. Do we really need a TV commercial to remind us some air freshener may be needed? 84 Lumber: The Journey Begins. This   ad features a   mother and her young daughter enduring loads of hardships  —   jumping on trains, walking long distances, crossing rushing streams  —   to reach their destination. The company has said Fox rejected the original version of the ad, which included images of a border wall similar to the one President Trump has promised to erect between Mexico and the U. S. Now 84 Lumber’s website promises it will feature the full ad at halftime, with ”content deemed too controversial for TV.” The   version which will air on Fox Sunday certainly humanizes people who are too often reduced to stereotypes in today’s immigration debates. I don’t know how much lumber this ad will sell, but it will surely earn loads of attention."
849,"Earlier this week, Sen. Marco Rubio,  . complained that he was in the dark about the Trump administration’s restrictive new policies affecting immigrants, refugees and other travelers from seven   countries. Rubio said he had been flooded with questions about cruise liners and airport travel, but didn’t have many answers: ”In fact my staff was told the State Department, as of today, was ordered not to talk to Congress about this issue.” ”That cannot be a permanent position,” said Rubio. ”We expect answers here fairly soon, because we have constituents calling.” The Trump White House has taken such direct, adversarial aim at the news media that it may obscure a more fundamental concern of transparency advocates: whether the administration is constricting the flow of reliable information to the public. For the record, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the department had been in contact with lawmakers and would ”provide information and assistance as we are able.” Left unsaid: The White House shared little information with officials at State, Homeland Security and other departments and agencies. White House press secretary Sean Spicer did not reply to a request for comment about the administration’s approach about distributing information. Rubio’s constituents and the broader public were left without the information they needed to function. Officials in the United States and abroad had travelers detained without disclosing where they were being held, leaving loved ones, colleagues and even lawyers in the dark. Sen. Cory Booker,  . J. said a federal customs official hung up the phone on him. The bedlam over immigration  —   which triggered lawsuits, and on Friday night a federal judge’s stay  —   is a case study in how a failed flow of information affects how society functions and judges its government. Even some officials sympathetic to the impulses leading to Trump’s immigration policy, such as Rubio, say the way it was handled will affect its results. ”I think he’s going to try to persuade the public overtly that they’re better off ignorant.” On the campaign trail, Trump was a dogged advocate for accountability and disclosure. Where were Hillary Clinton’s speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street financiers, he asked? Why had she used private email servers instead of ones maintained by the government? What had Clinton done as secretary of state for her foundation’s donors? Once elected, Trump has shown little inclination to embrace transparency for his own administration. ”I think we’re going to be seeing some real     moves here,” said Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism and former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. ”It’ll be more along the lines of the president’s standing up at a rally somewhere and saying, ’Who needs this information? It’s the evil media that wants to know this information, you don’t need it. No!’ And I think he’s going to try to persuade the public, overtly, that they’re better off ignorant.” Indeed, last month Trump told reporters at a press conference in Manhattan that journalists are the only people who care about his tax returns  —   though he previously had promised to disclose those forms once federal authorities are done auditing them. (Trump has not released any documentation proving he is in fact being audited, for that matter, and IRS officials, who do not publicly confirm specific audits, say there is no requirement he keep his returns confidential during an audit.) In recent weeks, top aides have said Trump will not release his tax records at all, saying reporters instead should look at the   federal disclosure forms that were released during the campaign. Shuttering or scrubbing online channels, During this week’s outcry over immigration, the delay in putting out the specific terms of the new policy led to mass confusion at airports around the world. No one was clear on the policy’s implications  —   or even, initially, on its language. Transparency advocates point to other warning signs as well. Trump toughened ethics rules for White House staffers, yet he ditched a rule from the Obama years that posted the names of all staffers who received exemptions from ethics requirements. In addition, in the first days of the new administration, some government agencies were directed to stop using social media channels. Others changed or dropped web pages, even those conveying scientific information some of their tweets and posts were seen as taking digs at the new president for such positions as his rejection of established science on climate change, for example. Each presidential transition triggers a centralization of public relations messaging, but this development raised flags with transparency advocates. ”The administration continues to be in what feels like campaign mode,” says Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, ”not only in terms of how they’re communicating with the press and the public but also assaulting the press and denying information to the public.” Don’t like the data? Legislate it away. Howard’s advocacy group takes the position that a country’s government functions most honestly and effectively when its citizens know precisely what’s going on. Howard’s concerns for the digital age boil down to a list like this: Howard noted that one bill proposed in the U. S. House of Representatives would shut down gathering information on housing discrimination. Other proposals circulating inside the administration could limit what research would be funded to monitor climate change. ”That kind of   of government information has the potential to take away our ability to create shared facts about what’s changing in our society, and to have an informed public debate about what should be done,” Howard said. Secrecy as security, The flow of information to the public often seesaws back and forth between presidencies. In recent decades, Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama pursued more expansive definitions of freedom of information Republican George W. Bush restricted it. Yet even as Obama made more databases digitally available, reporters say agencies during his tenure often jealously guarded their information. Trump appears to be putting his thumb back on the scale, Dalglish said. ”This feels to me a lot like the atmosphere we were facing immediately after ” Dalglish said. ”There was just a much bigger move toward pushing secrecy in the name of security.” At an event at the Sundance Festival, New York Times investigative reporter James Risen also pointed to the priority placed on national security by the George W. Bush administration after the September 2001 terror attacks. Prosecutors during the Bush years, and then especially under Obama, pursued leaks cases in ways that discouraged sources from sharing information with news organizations. A record number of reporters found themselves in court facing legal jeopardy. ”It can be overwhelming to be a citizen and try to digest and interpret all of this [information] on your own,” Dalglish said. ”But we expect our citizens to go to the ballot box and make decisions about how we’re going to govern ourselves and how we’re going to treat each other in this society. ”If we don’t have access to timely, quality,   information,” she said, ”we will not have the ability to go to the polls and make those decisions.”"
850,"Helen was 82. She’d survived both breast cancer and outlived her husband. One summer day she began bleeding from her colon and was admitted to the hospital. We assumed the worst  —   another cancer. But after she endured a series of scans and being poked with scopes, we figured out that she had an abnormal jumble of blood vessels called an arteriovenous malformation in the wall of her colon. The finding surprised us, but the solution was clear: Surgery to remove that part of her colon should stop the bleeding once and for all. The operation went well. But afterward Helen’s lungs filled with fluid from congestive heart failure. Then she caught pneumonia and had to be put on a ventilator in the intensive care unit. Her medical problems and our treatments had simply stressed her aging organs beyond their capability. On morning rounds I took inventory: Helen had a breathing tube in her throat connected to the ventilator a large IV in her neck a wire inserted into her wrist artery to measure her blood pressure a surgical wound drain and a bladder catheter to collect her urine. Helen was tethered to our ICU, with no clear sign of when or even if she would leave. Helen’s only daughter was distraught —  both about her mother’s condition and because she had never discussed what her mother would want in such a situation. Helen was living out the fate of millions of Americans who don’t clearly state their medical wishes with an advance directive. Only about a quarter of American adults have an advance directive, according to a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. I found myself wishing we could just stop our   press on Helen. The humane thing to do, it seemed to me, would be to stop aggressive medical treatment and let nature take its course. After nearly two weeks of intensive care with no improvement in her condition, Helen’s daughter instructed us to stop the mechanical ventilator. She died an hour later. Stories like Helen’s occur in ICUs all over the country every day, unfortunately. Often these situations are flashpoints of tension between the hopes and expectations of families and the realities seen by the medical team. But it doesn’t have to be this way. If we lessen the stigma around death as an unmentionable topic by forcing ourselves to talk to our loved ones about what we want at the end of life, we can vastly diminish the amount of energy and suffering that come with trying to prolong life when nature tells us otherwise. Many of us in the medical profession who have seen the futility of cases like Helen’s take steps to avoid spending our dying days in a hospital that way (or in a hospital at all). As Dr. Ken Murray wrote in a 2011 essay, doctors die differently, often forgoing invasive and expensive treatment. This approach is different than the one taken by most Americans, but shouldn’t be, he argued. We know that Medicare typically spends a lot on people near the end of life. Medicare spending on inpatient hospital services in 2014 was seven times higher for people who died (’decedents’) that year than those who survived. I’ll admit that this is a bit of a tautology, because people sick enough to die from chronic illnesses and complications related to aging are much more likely to make ample use of their health insurance. But in my view, the crux of the problem is the wide mismatch between what people say they want (to die at home) and where they wind up (still dying mostly in hospitals and nursing homes). As a result too many American deaths are still overly medicalized, robbing us of our chance at a peaceful passage. The trend is moving in the right direction, however, as more of us express our care goals and die at home or in hospice. One strategy is to imagine a point in your life when fighting to stay alive would be counterproductive. Would it be when you had advanced dementia and couldn’t recognize your family? What if you lost your ability to feed yourself? Work backward from there, and remember that when it comes to medical care, less is often more. At that key point, your directive could limit your health care to seeking comfort rather than an attempted cure. You’ll have to be decisive about foregoing   treatment, because of the inertia of the health care system and reluctance from our loved ones. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, famously offered this viewpoint in a 2014 article titled, ”Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Emanuel’s argument led to pushback. Many people, like my parents, were offended at the idea of giving up on life at 75. But that’s not what Emanuel was actually arguing. He didn’t write the story’s headline, which more accurately would have been something like, ”Why I Plan to Stop Screening Tests at Age 75 Because They’re More Likely to Hurt Me Than Help Me.” I checked with Emanuel, now 59, to see if he’d had any change of opinion. ”The article reflects my view,” he replied by email. ”I am stopping . .. colonoscopies and other screening tests at age 75. I am stopping statins and other medications where the rationale is to extend my life.” He said he’s not trying to provoke. ”It is my view. It is provocative only because other people find it so.” Having cared for many patients like Helen, who wind up in a vortex of intense medical care, I find what Murray and Emanuel have suggested to be highly appealing. That said, it’s important for those of us looking to   death to remember that is our choice. Many people opt instead to do everything to stave off death. The message is simple: Think deeply about what you want beforehand. Then tell your family. Share it with your doctor. We truly want to honor your wishes. John Henning Schumann is an internal medicine doctor and serves as president of the University of Oklahoma’s Tulsa campus. He also hosts Studio Tulsa: Medical Monday on KWGS Public Radio Tulsa. You can follow him on Twitter: @GlassHospital."
851,"In the kitchen of a vacation rental in southern California, family pictures form a collage on the refrigerator. On closer inspection the photos are of multiple families, and many of the women in the photos are sitting together around the kitchen table nearby. The photos are from their weddings or pictures of children. This is a typical, makeshift family scrapbook at an American Widow Project retreat. During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the women seeking help from the group were young, with husbands who had been killed in combat. Today the widows contacting the organization are older, and their husbands aren’t dying abroad  —   they’re dying on American soil. ”I have to say, I haven’t genuinely laughed as much as I’ve laughed with these ladies, and shared things that . .. that I know that they understand,” says Erin Murzyn. At 43 years old, Murzyn wondered if she would be the oldest widow, and on the first day of the retreat she was nervous. ”A lot of widows, military widows are young,” Murzyn says. ”[I thought] am I going to be the only suicide widow? Like, is everyone else going to be KIA?” She wasn’t the oldest or the only widow whose husband killed himself, rather than being killed in action. Group facilitator Erin Dructor says she started noticing a trend a couple years ago when the majority of women contacting the nonprofit reported they had lost their husbands to suicide or terminal illness. ”Each event is about 70 percent   [widows],” she says. Dructor got involved with the American Widow Project a decade ago after her husband, Army Sgt. Blake Stephens, was killed in Iraq. Back then, she says, the women’s stories often began the same way: With two uniformed men in the driveway or on the porch. ”Now, it’s almost like the widows are finding their husbands, or family members are finding their husbands,” Dructor says. In Murzyn’s case it was her brother who told her that her husband, retired Marine Master Sgt. Russell Murzyn, had committed suicide. He was 44. ”He did leave a letter and he put in the letter that his head hurt so bad,” Murzyn says. ”And he didn’t feel he could be fixed.” Russell had served two tours in Iraq and was being treated by the VA when he died. His widow says she didn’t realized how bad things had become  —   that he was a wonderful new father and kept his feelings inside to protect those he loved. ”Russell was that Marine that other Marines looked up to,” Murzyn says. ”He was the guy that they went to with problems.” Like Murzyn,    Jenny Much is attending her first American Widow Project retreat. ”I was pretty tore up one night and I  —   just crying, sobbing, or whatever  —   and I went online searching for military widow communities,” Much says. Her husband, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jason Much died of brain cancer in July. He was 44. When he was diagnosed she asked him ”Sweetie, what do you want to do? If we have a year, what do you want to do? Do you want to travel the world?” ” ’He’s like ’Really?  —   I’ve been all over the world. I want to stay home and watch football,’ ” she says. For more than two decades, Jenny Much was a Navy wife. Two months after her husband died she moved out of her house, bought an RV and drove across the country visiting friends in the military community. But she soon realized she was not a part of the   world anymore. Now, the women of the American Widow Project are her adopted military family. ”The inspiration I get hearing their stories  —   and they can talk about their late husbands and laugh, and tell stories, and cry, and that’s helping me.” Much says. ”I have hope. That’s the word  —   I have hope.” And hope is what Much is taking with her from this retreat. After a few months in the RV, she’s now thinking it might be time to put down roots  —   and start looking for a new home."
852,"The latest, remarkable misstep of a Cabinet nominee who has misstepped plenty came in answer to a simple question: ”Why do you think their performance is so poor?” asked Senator Patty Murray,  . in a written question to Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Education Department. ”Their” refers to virtual schools, of which DeVos has been an outspoken champion. The ”poor” refers to a large body of research  —   study after study after study  —   that raises serious questions about the quality and efficacy of schools that attempt to educate   students through the computer, without traditional access to teachers or classrooms. In response, DeVos wrote: ”High quality virtual charter schools provide valuable options to families, particularly those who live in rural areas where    schools might not have the capacity to provide the range of courses or other educational experiences for students. Because of this, we must be careful not to brand an entire category of schools as failing students.” Then comes the misstep, first detailed by Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas in this opinion piece for The Hechinger Report, followed by Ben Herold reporting for Education Week. ”The following virtual academies have   cohort graduation rates at or above 90 percent,” DeVos wrote, listing some apparent success stories: ”Idaho Virtual Academy (IDV A): 90 percent, Nevada Virtual Academy (NVV A): 100 percent, Ohio Virtual Academy (OHV A): 92 percent, Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy (OVCA): 91 percent, Texas Virtual Academy (TXVA): 96 percent, Utah Virtual Academy (UTV A): 96 percent, Wisconsin Virtual Academy (WIV A): 96 percent” There’s just one problem with these numbers, Pallas points out. They’re wrong. The Nevada Virtual Academy, for example. Its graduation rate for the class of 2015 wasn’t 100 percent. It was 63 percent, according to Nevada’s own school report card. Ohio Virtual Academy’s 92 percent graduation rate? Try 53 percent. Utah Virtual Academy’s 96 percent rate? Cut it in half. You get the point. Where did DeVos get these inflated numbers? Questions to the Trump administration went unanswered, but they appear to have been lifted verbatim from this report by K12 Inc. the   company behind the online schools listed. DeVos herself was once an investor. It would not be the first of her answers to senators that appear to have been borrowed without citation. K12 Inc. has already responded to the controversy, explaining that its numbers are ”the graduation rate of continuously enrolled high school students  —   those who enrolled in ninth grade and remained enrolled until twelfth grade. This is not the federal graduation rate and our report makes that clear.” If it’s not the federal graduation rate, as DeVos suggested it is, what is it? ”It’s a fictitious rate,” says Russell Rumberger, professor emeritus of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ”It ignores almost all of the students who transfer out or drop out.” As K12 Inc. acknowledges, the rate it published only accounts for students who persisted, remaining enrolled for four years. The federal rate, on the other hand  —   known as the   cohort graduation rate  —   requires schools to account for all students who transfer or drop out. In short, DeVos’ numbers implied that few students had dropped out of these virtual schools when the actual rates, reported by states, suggest otherwise. ”I think this was a mistake,” says Michael Petrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a   education think tank. ”It’s impossible to argue that most online charter schools are   because most are performing abysmally.” Petrilli should know. He once worked for K12 Inc. and, under his leadership, Fordham has studied Ohio’s virtual charter schools extensively. It’s not just Ohio, either. Herold was also part of a sweeping Education Week investigation of cyber charters nationwide titled ”Rewarding Failure.” K12 Inc. chooses not to use the   federal graduation rate because, the company argues, it isn’t an accurate measure of success for many virtual schools. ”High numbers of   students and high mobility rates adversely impact the   graduation cohort rate for online schools,” according to that 2016 K12 Inc. report. That’s a reasonable argument and worth debating. Virtual schools often cater to vulnerable students  —   kids who transfer repeatedly or may not intend to stay for four years. ”I agree that the   cohort graduation rate is limited for schools that enroll   kids,” says Rumberger. ”Imagine students who walk in the door reading at a   level. It’s much more challenging to get that student to graduate in four years, and I don’t think schools should have to.” DeVos, however, did not make that argument in her written response to Sen. Murray’s question. She did something else entirely. Instead, DeVos built an argument for virtual charter schools on language apparently taken  —   without citation  —   from a report written by a   company with a huge stake in the industry. In the process, DeVos either knowingly or unwittingly mischaracterized the official graduation rates of virtual schools, making them look more successful than they are and making online learning, in general, look like a reliable pathway to student success when research suggests it is anything but. Clarification: This post has been updated to make clearer who first reported details of DeVos’ virtual charter school mistake."
853,"Mike McCloskey, who runs one of the biggest dairy operations in America, is driving down a road in Puerto Rico in an unusually reflective mood. ”This is a full   story, right?” he muses. ”I was raised here, had such a fantastic childhood.” He ticks off other way stations in his life: Mexico, California, New Mexico, and Indiana. Along the way, McCloskey built an empire of milk. Now, the dairy business has brought him back home again. McCloskey came to Puerto Rico when he was 7 years old. He was born in Pittsburgh, but his mother was Puerto Rican. She moved back home with all six of her children when her husband died. ”I remember very clearly arriving to Puerto Rico, meeting this huge family,” he says. His mother had nine siblings. There were dozens of cousins. For young Mike, it was like ”arriving in paradise.” One uncle, a veterinarian, made a huge impression. He’d bring Mike and other cousins along on his truck, visiting farms. ”A day out with him was full of adventures,” McCloskey says. He felt comfortable with farm animals right away. ”Not only was I comfortable, somehow at that young age I just got interested in food production,” he says. It launched Mike McCloskey’s journey. He became a veterinarian, working with dairy farmers, in Mexico, after his mother got   to a Mexican businessman. Then he moved to the U. S. for a veterinary residence at the University of California, Davis. In California, he met his wife Sue. Before long, they were in the dairy business for themselves. They bought a whole series of dairy herds, each one bigger than the last. The first was 300 cows. Today, they own a herd of fifteen thousand cows at Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana. At the same time, McCloskey pushed the boundaries of milk quality, reducing levels of bacteria in milk far below what federal standards required. ”We believed that the consumer really cared about that,” he says. He did it by keeping cows healthier, and by chilling the milk immediately after it comes from the cows. He also had a secret advantage. In recent decades, most   dairy farms have come to rely on workers from Mexico. And McCloskey, effortlessly bilingual, felt at home with his workers. He says his time in Mexico helped too. ”Working as a veterinarian in Mexico, I lived up in the hills,” he says. ”I lived in the ejidos [communally owned village farms]. I knew everything about them, just talking with them and asking where they’re from. I could identify deeply with them. And they’re very loyal people.” With easier communication between owner and workers, McCloskey’s farms ran more smoothly. Cows got better care. The McCloskeys reached a turning point in 1994. They were running a big farm in New Mexico, and Mike got into a fight with the cooperative that bought and processed their milk. He wanted the whole   to adopt the same methods he was using to produce cleaner,   milk. ”They wanted nothing to do with it,” he says. ”No interest. They saw no value in it.” There was a meeting at which the coop leaders basically told McCloskey to mind his own business. ”I was there when he came home,” Sue McCloskey recalls. ”We got out a map and we drew a circle 400 miles around our farm.” They started calling farmers and retailers within that circle, looking for partners, thinking that ”there have got to be vendors and buyers out there who are looking for quality, who are looking for transparency, and who are looking for something that they can talk to their consumers about,” says Sue McCloskey. They created their own milk cooperative, called Select Milk Producers. Today, it’s one of the   dairy cooperatives in the country, and one of the  . Dairy insiders call it the most aggressive   in the industry. It sells $2 billion worth of dairy products a year. It’s   of one of the largest cheese plants in the world   Southwest Cheese, in eastern New Mexico. It’s set up a joint venture with the   Company, called fairlife, that sells a kind of reformulated milk with higher protein and calcium. Sue McCloskey came up with that idea at their kitchen table. I ask McCloskey what drives him to move from place to place, trying new things? ”I don’t know,” he says. ”You just look at this and think, ’I can do this better.” Sue McCloskey doesn’t have any better explanation. ”You’ve got to think that there’s just something internal, that you’re just not happy unless you’re moving things around,” she says. Now, Mike McCloskey has come up with a new idea, a new dream that’s brought him back to Puerto Rico, to an abandoned sugar cane plantation right beside a beach where he played as a boy. He takes me there. It’s beautiful. McCloskey looks more relaxed than he has all day. ”We used to walk this beach when we were seven, eight, nine years old, with the local fishermen. We’d do   here. We used to fish here,” he says. McCloskey and his cousin Manuel Perez, who’s also a veterinarian, take me on a drive though part of the property. Eventually, they plan to plant a new kind of pasture here, with nutritious grasses, adapted to the tropics, that scientists developed in Brazil. Right now though, part of the land is overgrown with tough, fibrous, tropical grasses, six feet tall. Other parts are   because the old drainage ditches are clogged. ”We couldn’t even get in here initially, McCloskey tells me. ”This was incredible down here. It was all flooded. You couldn’t get around.” McCloskey and Perez and a small band of employees are working to clear the land and rebuild the drains. Then they will bring in cattle   a new genetic type that produces lots of milk, but can also tolerate tropical heat and insect pests. They want to prove that a dairy can be just as efficient in the tropics as in Indiana. ”We believe that the right breed [of dairy cow] and the right pasture can really revolutionize milk production in the tropics,” McCloskey says. ”Not only in Puerto Rico! We’re looking at this as a possibility for great changes all through the tropics.” It’s a daunting challenge, he admits. But it’s nothing new for him and Sue, doing things that haven’t been done before. And it would be especially sweet, he says, doing it here. ”I have a great love for the island, and its people, and my family here. And to end up doing that exact thing that I’ve loved doing for the last 50 years one more time here is quite exciting.” It unites two different kinds of dreams. There’s the classic American dream of moving on to something bigger and better. But there’s also an older, more personal dream, of coming back home."
854,"The day my dad first got Snapchat, he couldn’t figure out how to send photos. And when he approached me later that day, asking if I had gotten his snap, my siblings and I discovered he’d been sending all his photos to Team Snapchat, expecting them to do the rerouting. We all laughed about the fact that he just didn’t get it. But my dad doesn’t seem to be the only one. ”Every time I try to use it, I feel like my father must have felt when I was 9 years old and challenged him to a game of Sonic the Hedgehog,” Will Oremos, Slate’s senior technology writer, wrote in 2015. Last year, The Wall Street Journal published a story, How to Use Snapchat, in which writer Joanna Stern, then 31, lamented: ”Snapchat makes me feel old.” And Bloomberg’s profiled Snapchat in a piece called ”How Snapchat Built A Business By Confusing Olds.” Older users shouldn’t feel bad. Maybe Snapchat just wasn’t intended for them. After all, they’re not in Snapchat’s target audience. On Thursday, NPR’s Alina Selyukh wrote that Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, was hoping to raise at least $3 billion by going public. In its filing for an initial public offering, the company says people 18 to 24 are the largest age group among Snapchat’s 158 million daily active users. And on its website, the company says that ”on any given day, Snapchat reaches 41% of all 18 to 34   in the United States.” Among all the financial data in the filing, Snapchat provided a set of detailed instructions about how to use the app. It includes diagrams of Snapchat’s different pages and walks through the purposes of each page with clear directions on how to perform certain actions, like making a Snap. ”Making a Snap is simple,” it says in the camera section. ”Users either tap the Camera button to take a photo, or hold the Camera button to record a video up to ten seconds long.” Showing people how to use the app could come in handy if Snap hopes to broaden its user base. Snapchat makes almost all of its money through advertising. But, Bloomberg reports, Generation Z and millennial audiences tended to dislike and ignore ads: ”If over time advertisers find targeting young people through the social platforms less efficient than going after adults, Facebook, with its diversified platforms, will absorb any negative effects. Snapchat will find it far harder.” And with Snapchat’s growth rate slowing, Wired says analysts have ”expressed concerns about how large Snapchat’s user base can grow.” In order to become a better investment opportunity, Snapchat may have to broaden its audience. In this case, the instructions might be necessary for the app in attracting an age group that, without direction, finds it difficult to use. After all, it’s not a younger audience that needs to be told ”making a Snap is simple.” They already know it is. Cecilia Mazanec is the NPR digital news intern."
855,"Johnstown, Pa. is famous for a few things: a big flood in the 1880s that killed many of its residents, having been a robust steel and coal town, and more recently, suffering from a rapidly declining population. The town is nestled in a river valley of the Allegheny mountains of Western Pennsylvania. Cambria County, home to Johnstown, chose Barack Obama during the 2008 election, but went heavily for Donald Trump in 2016. Michael McGough was born and raised in the area and says President Trump scares him, especially after seeing what he’s done his first two weeks in office. McGough is a retired county worker and a registered Democrat who generally votes the way the town used to. ”This has always been a very heavy Democratic area. It was for a long time. And then the coal mines slowly started going under,” he says. Now most of his friends and neighbors vote Republican. McGough thinks overall the city is in better shape than it was when he was a kid, even as jobs have been lost and people have left. Back then, he says, you could see a haze over the city and a fine dust on the cars in the morning from the industrial pollution in town. He’s worried what could be ahead for Johnstown, and the planet, with a climate skeptic in the White House. And there are still remnants of that prosperous, yet sully, city. Along the edge of the Conemaugh River sits a vast, mostly abandoned, steel mill called Gautier. At one point, decades ago, Gautier employed 11, 000 people. Today it has just about one hundred employees. Back then, operations at the mill were so consistent the lights were always on. There were no switches to turn them off. Jackie Kulback has been the company’s CFO for a decade. Before then she worked at an air compressor company which she says shipped its jobs to Reynosa, Mexico, after NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement  ” which President Trump opposes. ”I saw people’s lives change, and not for the good,” she says. Many economists say that automation has cost far more industrial jobs than trade deals, but the bottom line here is an unemployment rate higher than the national average, and wages that are lower. She says she saw the need for change under the Obama administration and that moved her to get active in politics. Now she’s the chair of the Republican party here and campaigned hard to get President Trump into office. So far she’s been impressed with him. ”Jobs trump everything,” she says. Though she can’t say for certain that the President’s economic prescriptions will work, she’s willing to give them a try. As for Trump’s travel ban, keeping out people from seven majority Muslim nations, she points out that the Flight 93 Memorial is very close to Johnstown. ”That hit close to home” she says, acknowledging that even though the   hijackers were from countries outside the ban, she feels the need to further secure U. S. borders. Alan Cashaw is the head of the local NAACP and helps to run a modest store near the steel mill called Greater Prospect Store. Cashaw says his expectations weren’t high for President Trump and so far the new president has met those low expectations. When it comes to race relations in Johnstown, Cashaw says he thinks the change in the White House has emboldened some people to commit racist acts. A couple of weeks ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. day, someone drove around town carrying an effigy of a hanged Dr. King in the back of a pickup truck. A sign on the back of the vehicle also read, ”In Loving Memory of James Earl Ray,” the man who assassinated King. To Cashaw, there’s a silver lining to that cloud. A long dormant   coalition has been energized and is reacting. Despite his disappointment with Trump, he says he knows the country will survive. ”We’re the country.” Carolyn Sharp works the cashier at a Lebanese restaurant, owned by an immigrant in town. She voted for Trump. ”I feel like maybe somebody who has a little more power and has a big mouth can actually get some words across,” she says. And she approves of the president’s early steps to keep some people out of the United States, even though she comes from an immigrant family herself. She’s Serbian. ”My grandma had 14 brothers and sisters and her parents came over here, and they’re on the wall in New York on Ellis Island.” It’s clear she feels those contradictions. She says she read on Facebook about a local man whose brother was kept out of the country by the president’s travel ban and it bothers her. But like others here, she’ll give the new president time."
856,"On her latest album Sing It Now: Songs of Faith and Hope, country veteran Reba McEntire went through hundreds of songs from her history, picking and choosing the ones that touched her heart the most. One of them is the iconic worship tune ”Jesus Loves Me,” which, in a way, was the first song McEntire was ever paid to perform. ”I was in Cheyenne, Wyo. with my family. We were staying at the Frontier Hotel, and back then they didn’t have televisions in the room, so everyone would congregate down in the lobby,” she says. ”They got my older brother Pake to go up and sing a song to entertain everybody. He sang ’You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog.’ One of the cowboys gave him a quarter, and I thought, ’Whoo, I want in on that!’ So I got up there and sang ’Jesus Loves Me’ . .. and I got a nickel.” While McEntire has come a long way from earning a nickel per show, her creative relationships with family and Christianity are as strong as ever. ”I Got the Lord on My Side,” a song from the new album, even features a   credit from McEntire’s own mother. ”The band and I had listened to what we had just recorded and we were making some changes,” she explains. ”Momma said, ’Can I make a suggestion?’ I said, ’Well sure, what?’ She said, ’Instead of saying on the second verse, ’I’m so happy,’ why don’t you say, ’Oh you’re happy, you’ve got the lord on your side?’ And I said ’Dangit, why didn’t I think of that? ’” Hear the rest of Reba McEntire’s interview with NPR’s Scott Simon at the audio link."
857,"After three quarters, this game looked for all the world like a rout by the Atlanta Falcons. They were up  . Their quarterback Matt Ryan, who just won the regular season MVP on Saturday night, was playing like an unstoppable Super Bowl MVP, too. Then, something unbelievable happened: The New England Patriots came back. The heroics of quarterback Tom Brady, the suddenly stiffened spine of the Patriots defense and one catch by Julian Edelman that defied both gravity and belief  —   by some incalculable logic, they combined to bring New England to a tie that few people would have thought imaginable just 15 minutes before. They scored 25 unanswered points to send the game into the first overtime in Super Bowl history. And after the Patriots won the coin toss to receive the first possession, their efficient march down the field toward yet another score seemed almost an afterthought. The Patriots won  . It was a game that etched Brady’s place in football history. If he and his coach, Bill Belichick, were not already considered the best   at their respective roles, it certainly won’t be difficult to make an argument for that now. Sunday’s win marks the pair’s fifth Super Bowl win together. We were here right along with you all night,   the big game and  —   because we’re NPR  —   writing a little poetry while we were at it. Click here to head straight to the live blog below. Last year, we covered the game almost entirely in haiku. This year, our colleagues at WBUR had some more of their own  —   and we invited you to do the same using the hashtag #SuperBowlHaiku. We retweeted some of our favorites as the night went along. But before we got started, we fulfilled a little promise. When we wrapped up last time around, we posed a question: ”Next time, limericks?” Well, here’s the ditty with which we marked the start of the game. (Don’t mind the slant rhyme.) Sure, by now the Pats are all old hands  —  But can Falcons at last reward fans? Ryan’s shown he can sling, Brady’s got all the rings . ..Still, both keep interrupting the ads. Scroll down for a glimpse of the historic game as it unfolded  —   plus a few more limericks while we were at it. Update at 10:15 p. m. ET, Just like that, what looked like a rout has given way to what may be the greatest comeback in New England Patriots history. Tom Brady marched just about the whole length of the field to set up a goaline carry for James White, which the running back punched into the end zone to bring their deficit to just two points. (Along the way, wide receiver Julian Edelman made a breathtaking catch on a ball he trapped against a defenders leg  —   a play that kept the drive alive.) And the Patriots converted another   try to knot the game up at 28. For those keeping note at home, that makes for a flabbergasting 25 unanswered points for the Patriots. Welcome to the first overtime in Super Bowl history, ladies and gentlemen. Update at 9:45 p. m. ET, Is that a glimmer of hope we detect? New England’s defense forced a huge turnover,   Atlanta’s Matt Ryan to take over the ball in Falcons territory. With just a couple efficient    throws, Tom Brady’s Patriots spanned the short field easily. But what’s perhaps more important: They also converted their   try after the score, bringing themselves to within eight points of the Falcons  —   in other words, just one score away, potentially. Interesting note, as we eye the dwindling time on the clock: There has never been a Super Bowl that has gone into overtime. Might we see that streak broken tonight? Update at 9:23 p. m. ET: Intermission No. 3, Three quarters down, just one more to go. A stalemate in the third leaves the Patriots hoping for a miracle. ’Twas a tale of two quarters in one:A Falcons touchdown leaves Pats fans stunnedPats take one to the bankJust before their kick shanked . ..Suppose it’s a bit better than none. Update at 9:10 p. m. ET, Sometimes, simply nothing goes your way. The Patriots cobbled together a scoring drive  —   their first touchdown of the game  —   only to see their kicker, Stephen Gostkowski doink the ball off the upright, missing the point after. NPR’s Tom Goldman notes Pats fans in the stands   and shaking their heads at the same time. Still, it’s reason to hope: a score of   looks a whole lot better than just  . And it’s difficult to count Tom Brady out of any game, no matter how steep the road ahead appears. Update at 8:58 p. m. ET, Patriots fans, avert your eyes. After New England stalled on its opening drive of the half, Atlanta wasted no time in making them pay. A long strike to wide receiver Taylor Gabriel was the marquee play on a drive that proceeded like clockwork. Blink, and you just might have missed the Falcons pick their way toward the end zone to make it  . Though for some New England fans, covering their eyes may very well be advisable at this point. Update at 8:49 p. m. ET, It was a crucial moment to reclaim some momentum off the bat at the start of the first half  —   but the Patriots didn’t do much with their prime field position. After inching forward just a little, New England ended its drive with yet another punt. First and 10, Atlanta. Update from Otis Hart of NPR Music: Dispatch From The Halftime Show, Otis fills us in on Lady Gaga’s performance: ”The Super Bowl 51 halftime show started above NRG Stadium’s open roof, where Lady Gaga began her   medley with two songs even more popular than ’Poker Face.’ The pop star born this way  —   Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta  —   stood against the Houston skyline and sang excerpts from ’God Bless America’ and ’This Land Is Your Land.’ ”The   beginning, which also included a quote from the Pledge of Allegiance, was hinted at during a press conference on Thursday when Lady Gaga said she wanted to try unite America by focusing on inclusiveness and equality. To help drive home the message, the studio wizards at the Super Bowl swirled an assortment of drones depicting blue and red stars in the background before finally forming the American flag. ”That’s when Gaga jumped. Attached to two cables and in a silver, sparking outfit, she descended from the roof to the top of a metal pyre, and the real show began. Gaga ran through most of her big hits  —   ’Poker Face,’ ’Born This Way,’ ’Telephone,’ ’Just Dance,’ ’Bad Romance’  —   while racing up and down an assortment of stairwells. She left politics on the roof, even stating before the beginning of her recent single, ’Million Reasons,’ that ’we’re here to make you feel good.’ (She also   a quick hello to her parents.) ”She ended the performance after ’Bad Romance’ by dropping her mic and catching a   football as she jumped off camera. There were no ’Left Shark’ moments this year  —   just a solid spectacle.” Update at 8:35 p. m. ET, NPR’s Tom Goldman asked Patriots fan Mark Hartnett, a Boston native, for his reaction to the first half. Tom says it took Hartnett a full five seconds to respond, before finally saying simply: ”Dumbfounded.” Hartnett’s face was expertly painted  —   half red, half blue, separated by a black line down the middle. And he was frank with Tom about the facepaint. ”It’s going to dissolve pretty easily with my salty tears later.” Update at 8:05 p. m. ET: Intermission No. 2, Well, that sure changed fast. Knotted at zero to begin the second quarter, the Falcons and Patriots immediately took separate directions. A   field goal put the Pats on the board before halftime  —   but that’s not likely to assuage their worried fans. The deficit remains daunting at  . Another break, another little limerick to sum things up: Once a drought? So much for that saga. Forgive a misstep from this blogger. Ryan is on a tear  —  A Patriot’s nightmare. Now halftime: Here comes Lady GaGa. Update at 7:50 p. m. ET, What was a promising Patriots drive unraveled remarkably quickly, as a pressured Tom Brady threw into double coverage  —   and ended up watching Falcons defensive back Robert Alford take his pass 82 yards in the opposite direction for a touchdown. The   puts Atlanta up   and leaves the Patriots on the ropes. Prior to that drive, the Patriots were staring up at a steep challenge to come back after that interception, they may be just doing their best to avoid a rout. ”The shock was palpable,” NPR’s Tom Goldman says from the stands in Houston: utter joy from Falcons fans, while the New England faithful fell to silence. Update at 7:36 p. m. ET, Make that  . Atlanta’s offense is looking all but unstoppable at this point. Julio Jones, once again, shed defenders left and right on that drive  —   even making one   catch on the sideline with grace worthy of a ballet dancer. Then, the moment the Patriots try to   him . .. Matt Ryan makes them pay with a long touchdown toss to tight end Austin Hooper. At the moment, it’s looking like the big question is less which team will win, and more which Falcon most deserves the MVP  —   Ryan or Jones? Of course, there’s a whole lot of football left to play. Update at 7:22 p. m. ET, Fresh off a turnover forced by rookie Deion Jones, Atlanta marched down the field on a few huge gains, notching the first touchdown of the game. It’s   Falcons’ advantage. Matt Ryan and his   No. 1 receiver, Julio Jones, gashed the Patriots defense on two big throws, leaving Devonta Freeman to add another jewel to his increasingly gaudy stat line. Freeman waltzed into the endzone untouched. Meanwhile, LeGarrette Blount, the Patriots running back who coughed up the football to set up the Falcons’ scoring drive, is left to reflect on a rare mistake: He had been   for 16 games straight before the  . Update at 7:07 p. m. ET: Intermission No. 1, One quarter down, and we’re still  . Why not mark the moment with another limerick? It’s supposed to be a big shootout? You’d be forgiven for having doubtsA couple successesNot too many messesBut so far, a big ol’ scoring drought. Update at 6:50 p. m. ET, One unsuccessful drive each, but the Patriots have emerged the worse for the exchange. A big run from Falcons running back Devonta Freeman gave Atlanta an advantage in field position, backing Tom Brady and co. up against their own end zone. But the Patriots have begun chipping back toward center field on the strength of a few big throws. This is expected to be an issue all game for the Falcons, whose defense is not nearly as strong as its weapons on the offensive side of the ball. Update at 6:30 p. m. ET, Well before fans and players packed the stadium in Houston, Pope Francis released a message for all the millions who would be watching the game. ”Great sporting events like today’s Super Bowl are highly symbolic, showing that it is possible to build a culture of encounter and a world of peace. ”By participating in sport, we are able to go beyond our own  . And in a healthy way  —   we learn to sacrifice to grow in fidelity and respect the rules. ”May this year’s Super Bowl be a sign of peace, friendship and solidarity to the world.” Update at 6:22 p. m. ET, NPR’s Tom Goldman is at the game, and he says one thing stands out immediately: ”It’s a PATRIOTS CROWD!” Attempts at starting up a   chant in the crowd have been petering out  —   only to bow beneath the loud roar of Pats fans in Houston’s NRG Stadium, Tom notes."
858,"Finally, today, they will play football. The Atlanta Falcons take on the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 51. After an NFL season of sagging TV ratings, it’s expected today’s game, in Houston, will do what Super Bowls always do  —   turn 60 minutes of football into a national holiday. Everything about the Super Bowl is supersized: from the money it generates to the buildup in the host city. Super Bowl week is a kaleidoscope of massive crowds, celebrity sightings and huge events. But for journalists, it can also be a collection of small, incongruous moments  —   that somehow fit together. There’s the nuclear code. There are state secrets. And then there’s the Super Bowl game plan. Of the three, the game plan may be the most difficult to penetrate. Especially when dealing with New England head coach Bill Belichick. Normally   with the sports media, Belichick’s lips reach maximum tension when the Super Bowl rolls around . .. and this is his record seventh appearance. Here’s a snippet from Friday’s pool report after Patriots’ practice: ” ’Everybody’s got a job to do,’ Belichick said. ’Nobody can do anybody else’s job. We all have to do what we each have to do.’ ” Thanks coach. During a media availability with the Falcons, in their first Super Bowl since 1999 and only their second ever, I figured the newbies might go where Belichick wouldn’t. I chose my prey carefully, singling out defensive back Brian Poole, a mere child at 24. ”This is the last [media availability] before the game on Sunday,” I said. ”I’m going to give you a chance to reveal your strategy for stopping Tom Brady.” ”I can’t give you the strategy,” Poole answered. ”Can you get close?” ”No, I can’t do that.” I tried an end run. ”OK, can you tell me, in general, what you do against a guy like Brady? We’re talking about probably the greatest quarterback ever.” ”You just stick to doing what you do,” Poole said. ”Don’t try to do too much. Stick to the plan. Focus on you. Your team, your game plan. Just execute.” ”Uh Brian? That’s very vague,” I said. ”You didn’t give me any details.” ”Exactly.” Good for Brian Poole. He did his job. I, like everyone else, will figure out the game plans, during the game. At least Brian Poole wasn’t sitting at a table. When teams meet the media, as the Falcons did at the Memorial City Mall ice arena, there’s a hierarchy. Usually the head coach and quarterback or another star player hold a short press conference. About 10 other top players appear on risers  —   Poole was on one  —   and most of them attract a pack of reporters. The rest of the players are at tables. And a lot of them spend the time, nearly an hour, on their phones, reading newspapers, chatting with each other. The fact that no one’s interviewing them doesn’t reflect a lack of importance to the team. But in the   NFL, a punter doesn’t rate with a wide receiver. And a table ain’t a riser. Patrick DiMarco was a table guy. As I sit down to talk to him, DiMarco folds his newspaper and extends his hand. He’s in his fourth year with the Falcons, and has the quintessential   job. He’s a fullback. That’s the player who lines up in the backfield between the quarterback and running back. ”Just go out there and clear holes,” he says, describing his duties. ”Clear holes,   and when your number is called, make a play, catch the ball, make somebody miss. Drop your shoulder and bring that physical presence to the game.” When you see a running back electrify a crowd with a touchdown run, it’s sometimes a fullback who made the block that helped send the running back on his way. The cheers are for the player who scored. That’s OK with DiMarco. ”Our success is due to the success of the guys behind us,” he says. ”So having guys like [Falcons running backs] Devonta [Freeman] and Tevin [Coleman] behind us, you know they make us look good.” DiMarco and his fellow fullbacks are cut from the same cloth as offensive linemen  —   players satisfied with doing the grunt work. DiMarco says it creates a camaraderie around the league. The cheers they might not get from the crowd? They give to each other. ”I think there are only 24, 25 fullbacks in the NFL [out of 32 teams] he says. ”After games, we seek out each other and say ’Hey dude, so happy to see you. Good luck the rest of the year. You’ve been playing awesome.’ ” As the Super Bowl approached, DiMarco says the images in his head weren’t of confetti fluttering down from the stadium rafters or hoisting the Lombardi Trophy. They were of the work ahead, the process he hopes will lead to the trophy. They were, typically, images of himself clearing paths to victory. When Patrick DiMarco goes to work Sunday at Houston’s NRG Stadium, Kimberly Archie will be in the stands watching. And cheering. And trying to forget how the sport left a hole in her life. Archie’s son, Paul Bright, died in 2014 at the age of 24. He was in a motorcycle accident. But Kimberly Archie says her son died from football. Paul started playing as a    in Pop Warner  —   youth football  —   and he played into his freshman year in high school. After he died, his mother was suspicious about his erratic behavior leading up to the accident. She’d become knowledgable about   brain injury after working with plaintiffs in a massive lawsuit that was recently settled between retired NFL players and the league. Archie asked researchers at Boston University to study her son’s brain. It showed he had Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, the brain disease depicted in the film Concussion. The discovery led Archie to   a lawsuit last year against Pop Warner. Archie was at a Super Bowl party Saturday hosted by legendary sports agent Leigh Steinberg. It was his 30th annual Super Bowl bash  —   and like almost all of the previous occasions, the drinks and finger food were mixed with social consciousness. An hour before the party’s scheduled start time, there was a panel discussion on brain trauma in football and the military. Steinberg first advocated for concussion awareness back in the 1980s, long before the issue became   news. At the party, he talked about the ”crisis of confidence” he had, signing young men to play a game that had the potential to damage their brains. He reconciled his feelings by pushing for more knowledge about the subject. Kimberly Archie was not on the panel, but she spoke afterwards about her son. ”He played eight years of Pop Warner,” she said, ”and only one year of high school. In fact, he only played three plays in one high school game. It was a real  . You don’t have to have a concussion, you don’t have to play in high school, college or the NFL, to be exposed to   brain damage that can kill you.” The Pop Warner youth football organization has taken steps in recent years to limit contact in practice and outlawed particularly dangerous blocking and tackling drills. Archie said that beyond the lawsuit, her efforts to improve youth sports safety are gaining momentum. She said they’re being fueled by mothers who’ve had similar experiences. ”There’s nothing like a mom who’s buried her child,” she said. ”You’re not going to shut them up. You can threaten them, whatever. It’s not going to matter.” As she spoke, at the party, giant video screens in another room showed heroic, slow motion footage of the Falcons and Patriots. Archie pointed to one of the screens. ”I promised my son I’d take him to a Super Bowl,” she said, ”which I never got the chance to do. So [my daughter and I] are going now. We’re going to go to the game and be a part of the experience and try to look beyond the brain damage. . .. It’s a   thing.”"
859,"In case you haven’t heard, a few dozen guys are planning to play a football game in Houston on Sunday. It’s kind of a big deal. Such a big deal, in fact, that by the time the Atlanta Falcons line up opposite the New England Patriots for Super Bowl LI, you may already have Tom Brady’s name seared into your psyche  —   not to mention a fair share of   commercials. Between the story lines, the betting lines and even the lines of scrimmage, it’s easy to see why the big game might leave your head spinning. That’s why we’re here. Check out a few numbers  —   I swear it’s just a few!  —   that may give you a better sense of what’s at stake Sunday. They may also give you some plum trivia to toss around with a knowing smirk among friends at a viewing party. At any rate, all this counting will be excellent practice for the   bean dip you may be downing later in the day. The number of Super Bowls the Atlanta Falcons have won in the more than 50 years the organization has been around. In fact, it has been nearly two decades since the Falcons even made an appearance in the championship. Back in 1999, Denver Broncos great John Elway was still playing  —   though he would retire after beating the Falcons for his second, and final, championship ring as a player. For context, ABC News also helpfully reminds us that the last time the Falcons were in the Super Bowl, fears of Y2K were still a thing. When coach Bill Belichick and co. step onto the field Sunday night, their organization will be breaking a record: New England has appeared in nine Super Bowls, the most for a single team in NFL history. They’ve still got a little ways to go before they match the record for most Super Bowls won, however. The Pittsburgh Steelers own those heights, with six wins  . Belichick and his future Hall of Fame quarterback, Tom Brady, have appeared in a breathtaking seven Super Bowls together since 2002, so perhaps they’re not as far off as it appears. But there’s a downside to all of those appearances: If they lose on Sunday, they’ll be tied with the Broncos for most losses in Super Bowl history, at five. That’s the   set by SpotsLine on how many points both teams will score, combined. CBS Sports points out that number is the highest ever for a Super Bowl. Ladies and gentlemen, strap in: This means we may very well be in for a shootout. This is a weird one, dredged up by ESPN Stats  Information. It’s the number of games that Patriots running back Dion Lewis has played with the team in the past two seasons. They didn’t lose any of them. OK, this one may be cheating  —   but it’s still worth noting. As you may recall, the NFL had a little fling with good   Arabic numerals at the big game last year, dubbing it Super Bowl 50. It was the first time since the NFL began using Roman numerals in 1971 that the league decided to dabble in Arabic digits. But why, exactly? Turns out the league wasn’t all that comfortable leaving that L all alone  —   and they realized that discomfort 10 years earlier. ”When we developed the Super Bowl XL logo, that was the first time we looked at the letter ’L,’ ” Jaime Weston, the leagues vice president of brand and creative, told ESPN last year. ”Up until that point, we had only worked with X’s, V’s and I’s. And, at that moment, that’s when we started to wonder what will happen when we get to 50?” Add an I, though, and all is well once more with Roman numerals."
860,"A federal appeals court denied President Trump’s attempt to restore his travel ban on refugees and visa holders from seven   countries Sunday morning, sending people scrambling to board planes while it is legal once again for them to enter the country. The court set a timeline for the next developments, while also denying the immediate stay Trump asked for as part of his appeal against a Seattle judge’s ruling that suspended the president’s travel ban on Friday. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has asked those opposed to the ban to file their opposition to Trump’s appeal by 3 a. m. ET Monday (11:59 p. m. PT Sunday) and for the Justice Department, representing Trump’s administration, to reply to that by 6 p. m. ET Monday. For now, however, previously approved refugees and green card holders from the seven countries listed in the ban are able once again to enter the U. S. William Lacey Swing, the director general of the United Nations International Organization for Migration, told NPR his agency is hoping to resettle between 1, 800 and 2, 000 refugees who had already been approved prior to the ban. ”It’s quite complex now,” Swing told NPR’s Lulu   on Sunday. ”But you can be sure from our side that we’re going to do everything possible to get them on those flights, to take advantage of this window of opportunity . .. unless of course, the courts change things once more.” Refugees, visa holders begin boarding flights, Airport officials in Cairo say a total of 33 U. S.  migrants from Yemen, Syria and Iraq have boarded flights on their way to the United States, according to The Associated Press. The 33 hadn’t previously been turned away, but were migrants rushing to take advantage of the window offered by the Sunday ruling. Ahmed   an accountant from Damascus with two daughters, a    and a    told NPR they were driving to the airport in Amman last week from the northern Jordanian city of Irbid when they received a call telling them their flight was canceled. The IOM called again Sunday asking if he would be willing to leave for the U. S. on Monday. ”I told them of course, I’m ready,” Durah said. ”I sold everything and our bags are still packed.” By Sunday afternoon, the family was booked on a flight scheduled to leave Monday morning. He said his wife’s uncle in Atlanta had rented a house for them there and paid the rent six months in advance. It was less clear whether the IOM in Lebanon was starting to reschedule flights for refugees. Amin Khayat had been scheduled to leave on Friday for Detroit with his wife, five children and his    mother, who has cancer. ”They stopped her chemotherapy because we were traveling and then when the flight was canceled, the hospital said it was sorry but it couldn’t restart it,” Khayat told NPR by phone from Beirut. Khayat is an electronics repairman from Damascus and said he had given up their rented apartment and taken the children out of school. He said he tried calling the IOM on Sunday, but since it was a weekend, he couldn’t reach anyone. Iraqis accepted for resettlement under a special program for military interpreters and employees of U. S. companies in Iraq were told earlier in the week they were cleared to leave. ”The embassy called me and said it was OK for me and others like me to travel,” said Fuad Sharif Suleman, an Iraqi Kurd deported back to Iraq last week from Cairo while he and his family were en route to New York. Reached by telephone just before he boarded the plane in Irbil early Saturday, Suleman said his children  —   ages 19, 17 and 10  —   were a little bit nervous but excited about their new home in Nashville, Tenn. Suleman said there had been an outpouring of support in the U. S. after he was sent back to Iraq. ”I had friends in Nashville, but now I have a lot more,” he told NPR. President Trump and his administration’s response, Trump hasn’t said anything publicly Sunday about the federal court’s decision to deny his stay request. He penned a flurry of tweets Saturday, however, aimed at Seattle Judge James L. Robart and his original decision to temporarily lift the travel ban while a case brought by the states of Washington and Minnesota is heard. The tweet illustrates a key difference in opinion between Trump and his supporters, and the people working to vet and place refugees in America. Swing, the director general of the IOM, said it’s hard for him to imagine a stricter vetting process than the one already in place prior to the ban. The refugees he is hoping to relocate to the U. S. while the travel ban is lifted have already made it through that process. ”You have eight U. S. government agencies who are vetting them,” said Swing. ”They are looking at six different security databases, they’re doing five different background checks. They have three separate   interviews, and then two   reviews of all that. ”So far, the problem has been that since   the security has been so strict that you’re talking about at least 18 months until you can travel.” The White House obviously sees it differently. In a statement on Friday, Trump’s administration announced its intention to appeal the decision to lift the ban, adding, ”The president’s order is intended to protect the homeland and he has the constitutional authority and responsibility to protect the American people.” More than a dozen legal challenges have been filed against the ban around the country, according to The Washington Post, and just one judge, U. S. District Judge Nathan Gorton, has indicated he was willing to let Trump’s order stand. Reporters asked Trump about the appeal outside his private    resort in Florida, on Saturday night. ”We’ll win,” he said, and briefly paused. ”For the safety of our country, we’ll win.” You can find the court documents related to the Trump administration’s appeal and the original decision to temporarily lift the ban here."
861,"A baby hippopotamus, born prematurely at the Cincinnati Zoo, has struggled to stand, eat, gain weight and breathe. But on Sunday morning, the zoo announced ”encouraging news from hippo headquarters.” Baby hippo Fiona, now in stable condition, has taken her first wobbly steps. Fiona was born at the zoo on Jan. 24, six weeks early. She weighed 29 pounds, when baby hippos are normally   pounds, the zoo says. She was too weak to stand and couldn’t nurse on her own. The zoo has provided    intensive care to keep her alive. On Tuesday, when the zoo gave the hippo her name, they warned that she was ”not out of the woods yet.” But ”every baby needs a name,” they said. The zoo explained that Fiona was being nursed close enough to mom Bibi and dad Henry that they could all hear and smell each other. The baby hippo has spent time in a pool, first with noodles to support her weight and then standing on her own. She was   with a combination of her mother’s milk and formula, as zoo staff worked to teach her how to nurse on her own. She struggled with a poor suckling response. ”She still has a long way to go before she’ll be strong enough to be reunited with her mom,” curator of mammals Christa Gorsuch said in the update on Tuesday. ”She needs to learn how to nurse on her own, walk, swim and get a lot bigger.” The little hippo’s fight to survive caught the eye of another team of caregivers. On Thursday, the zoo announced it had received ”a package from the preemie team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital that included signed superhero capes, a   baby book, a stuffed hippo, a beautiful note and much more.”"
862,"On display at the ”Photography and Discovery” exhibit at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. is a photo of two men dressed in traditional Arab garb in a carpeted room (above). They’re smoking a pipe. It’s a beautiful photo, but it’s not from the Middle East. It was shot in a studio in London by photographer Roger Fenton. The men in the photo are white Europeans, dressed up and posing as Arabs. The whole thing is staged  —   as are several of the exhibit’s images. The photos were taken in the 19th and early 20th centuries, roughly the first 75 years of photography. This was also a time of rising European colonial power. European empires needed justification for subjugating vast swaths of earth, and photography could frame the Arab and Asian world in a way that supported the empire, says Ali Behdad, a professor of literature at UCLA and author of Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East. Take the photo of the pyramids at Giza, shot by prominent   photographer Francis Frith. The pyramids are in the background, and the surrounding sands are desolate save for two picnickers and a pack animal. The terrain is majestic and the pyramids tall and timeless, if crumbling slightly. Like the photo of the pipe smokers, this photo was staged. The picnickers are members of Frith’s photography crew, as the museum label notes. And the people of Giza  —   the third largest city in Egypt  —   are nowhere to be seen. ”It’s to make it seem this place is a historical ruin that needs to be fixed up by Europeans or appropriated by them,” Behdad says. The British occupied Egypt 20 years after the photo was taken. Because of the camera’s eyewitness quality, people believed that what they saw was true, says Luke Gartlan, a professor of art history at the University of St. Andrews. The museum takes care to explain the story behind the images, says Jay Clarke, the exhibit curator. Labels beside the exhibited photographs identify when white men engaged in brown face, and the photos of crowded France beside a barren Burma add to the idea that some countries were barely populated. ”The exhibition certainly does present a Eurocentric view,” Clarke says. ”We only recently began to collect works by   artists.” The idea of using photos to make a political statement, meanwhile, continues to this day. In the Middle East, Behdad says, news and contemporary photography often depicts Arabs as ”terrorists, people who oppress their women. That perpetuates the kinds of policies of exclusion that we see in Europe, Holland, France and the United States now. It’s about image. It’s about perception.” But in recent years, there has been more and more photographic and video documentation from people in developing countries. Video blogs from locals in besieged Aleppo flew across the world through news coverage and social media, for example. ”Our history has always been written by people other than us, specifically in photo,” says Sima Diab, a   photojournalist based in Cairo. ”In the last six to 10 years, however tough it’s been, [news and life in the Middle East] has been documented extensively by locals.” That’s a far cry from the days when two white Europeans could pose as Arabs in a London studio. But whether this new wave of photos will have the same influence as the images of the past is still an open question."
863,"President Trump’s first two weeks in office have been a sprint, not the start of a marathon. If the rapid pace and, sometimes, hourly developments of executive orders, news, controversies and more have left you exhausted, you’re not alone. If you’re finding it hard to remember just everything that’s transpired too, we’re here for that as well. Here’s a quick recap of the highlights  —   and lowlights  —   of the first 14 days of Trump’s nascent presidency. On his first full day as president, Trump went to the CIA to try to mend fences with the intelligence agency he repeatedly maligned during the campaign and the transition. (He blamed the media for creating the feud, but his own tweets disprove that.) While standing before a memorial at the agency, he argued over the crowd size at his inauguration, making false assertions that run counter to aerial photos of the event and NPR’s own reporters on the ground. He also claimed it stopped raining during his inaugural address, when it did not. Hours later, new press secretary Sean Spicer made his first appearance in the White House briefing room to double down on those falsehoods about crowd size. He cited wrong numbers for Metro usage in D. C. and also falsely said that floor coverings used for the first time on the National Mall made photos show where there were gaps, when in fact such coverings had been used before. After delivering his fiery broadside, Spicer left without taking any questions. While all that was happening, the Women’s March on Washington protesting Trump and his policies toward women drew thousands and thousands of people  —   and the   Metro ridership day ever, second only to President Obama’s first inauguration. Protests weren’t just limited to D. C. though  —   similar events happened across the country that also drew massive crowds. And the protests even went worldwide, happening on all seven continents. The White House should have been in cleanup mode after Saturday’s first rocky day in office, but instead on the Sunday shows spokespersons doubled down on false claims about crowd size and more. Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway argued on NBC’s Meet the Press that Spicer had simply provided ”alternative facts” when making his arguments  —   a moniker that looks primed to persist throughout the Trump administration. The biggest news happened when Trump met that evening with both Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, reviving his unfounded claims that there were between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes cast in the 2016 election that caused him to lose the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton. This would continue to be an issue for the rest of the week (more on this below). Trump also signed an executive order reinstating the ”Mexico City” policy, a global gag rule prohibiting international nongovernmental organizations that provide or talk about abortion services from receiving federal funding. He also signaled his intent to withdraw from the   Partnership trade agreement and instituted a federal hiring freeze except for the military. Spicer had his second outing with the press, still in a largely defensive crouch. He blamed the press for trying to ”undercut the tremendous support” for Trump and doubled down on his insistence that Trump’s was the   inauguration ever, though given difficulty in counting streaming numbers, that’s hard to back up. Ethics experts filed a lawsuit in court alleging that the president was in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution because of his overseas businesses, Spicer repeated Trump’s unfounded assertions that there was widespread voter fraud during the U. S. elections but provided no further proof of why the president believed that. Trump approved construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which had both been stopped during the Obama administration amid outcry from environmental groups. Other executive orders directed the Commerce Department to review how federal regulations might be impeding U. S. manufacturers. Trump signed two executive orders keeping one of his top campaign promises, ordering the U. S. government to begin construction of a wall along the Southern border with Mexico. He asserted that while the U. S. government would have to front the money, Mexico would pay it back. (Mexican leaders have said they will not.) Trump also directed the Homeland Security and Justice departments to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities. In his first interview as president, Trump doubled down (tripled down?) on his unproven belief that there were millions of illegal voters. ”You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states. They’re registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion,” he told ABC’s David Muir. Studies Trump cited offer no proof of such voter fraud. And he also incorrectly claimed it was illegal to be registered in two states it’s not illegal unless someone votes in two states, because often voter rolls are not quickly updated. In fact, it turned out some Trump aides and family members were registered in multiple states. Trump traveled to Philadelphia to address the GOP congressional retreat, where he delivered a relatively   speech promising Obamacare repeal and to crack down on violent crime, and touting his executive actions on immigration and trade. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto canceled a planned trip to the U. S. amid Trump’s continued assertion that his country would repay the U. S. for the border wall. One possibility to recoup the investment from Mexico that the White House floated was a 20 percent import tax, which, as NPR’s Scott Horsley reported, ”would effectively saddle U. S. consumers with a significant portion of the wall’s cost, estimated at $15 billion or more.” Trump gave his second interview, to a friendly source, Fox News’ Sean Hannity. He again boasted of his crowd sizes during his inauguration and talked about the (still unproven) allegations that there were millions of illegal votes cast in November. He also told Hannity he continues to believe waterboarding works and talked about bringing it back, though it is outlawed in the U. S. as torture. His new defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, has said he does not believe waterboarding is effective and has reiterated it is illegal, as have top GOP congressional leaders such as Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump signed an executive order blocking travelers from seven countries, all of which are    —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   from entering the U. S. for 90 days. New refugee admissions are suspended for 120 days, while Syrian refugees are banned indefinitely. There was confusion at airports whether or not the ban includes those with valid U. S. visas, green cards or people from those countries who are permanent residents. Protests began at airports as travelers were detained. Trump hosted his first foreign leader at the White House  —   British Prime Minister Theresa May. She pushed for a future trade deal with the U. S. The two held a joint news conference, where May said Trump had reaffirmed his support for NATO  —   though he has questioned whether the U. S. should be in the alliance in the past. The annual   event called by its proponents the March for Life drew thousands more demonstrators to the National Mall. Vice President Pence and Conway both spoke. Protests continued at airports across the country amid confusion over Trump’s travel ban. Immigration attorneys began offering their services pro bono. Late on Saturday, a federal judge issued a stay on the deportations of valid visa holders after they have landed in the U. S. in response to an ACLU lawsuit. Trump reshuffled the National Security Council, elevating controversial chief strategist Steve Bannon to be a permanent member of the Principals Committee, giving him equal billing with other   officials. The director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are typically permanent members, will now only attend when pertinent issues are being discussed. Trump called several foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also had a tense call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, though details would not be reported until later in the week. The president told Turnbull it was ”the worst call by far” that he (Trump) had had that day, and the two clashed on the Obama administration’s deal to accept refugees from the country. Trump signed several executive orders  —   an ethics order banning administration appointees from ever lobbying foreign governments and from federal lobbying for five years after they leave office. He also directed the administration to develop a ”comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS.” A U. S. Navy SEAL was killed during a raid in Yemen targeting   militants, the first military casualty of Trump’s administration. Later in the week, questions were raised over how the operation  —   which also is believed to have killed several civilians  —   was carried out. Protests continued at airports over the Trump administration’s travel ban. Acting Attorney General Sally Yates (a holdover from the Obama administration) announced she would direct Justice Department lawyers not to defend Trump’s travel ban. Hours later, the president fired her, naming Dana Boente, the top federal prosecutor in suburban Virginia, as the interim attorney general until nominee Jeff Sessions is confirmed by the Senate. More Republicans continued to speak out against Trump’s travel ban, voicing concern over its implementation. Former President Barack Obama broke his silence since leaving office, saying through a spokesman that ”American values are at stake.” Trump signed an executive order that says for every regulation the executive branch proposes, two others must be repealed. Trump nominated federal appeals court Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. The evening ceremony in the White House’s East Room was arranged for suspense, which gave it the aura of a reality TV show in some ways. Conservatives praised his pick, which was a major campaign issue after Senate Republicans refused to take up former President Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, for much of 2016. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn made a surprise appearance at the daily press briefing to announce that the Trump administration was putting Iran ”on notice” after the country conducted a ballistic missile test. Trump and daughter Ivanka traveled to Dover Air Force Base for the return to the U. S. of the remains of Navy SEAL William ”Ryan” Owens, who was killed over the weekend in the Yemen raid. The AP reported that during a call with Mexican President Nieto last week, Trump threatened to send in the U. S. military to stop the ”bad hombres down there.” Mexico denied the remarks. Celebrity Apprentice creator Mark Burnett introduced Trump at the annual National Prayer Breakfast. During his remarks, Trump called out the low ratings of the NBC reality show he once hosted and criticized the new host, action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. ”And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings, OK,” the president said. Trump also pledged at the breakfast to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits   groups, including religious ones, from wading into politics. A federal judge in Seattle temporarily halted Trump’s executive order on immigration and travel from some   countries. The order is effective nationwide. New sanctions were announced against Iran, following up on the administration’s earlier threat against the country. Trump signed two executive orders directing the review of the   financial regulations and halting implementation of another federal rule that mandates financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients. Airlines resumed allowing travelers once affected by Trump’s travel ban to come to the U. S. Trump, who was at his    resort in Palm Beach, Fla. for the weekend, tweeted, ”The opinion of this   judge, which essentially takes   away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Because of the ”terrible decision,” he later added on Twitter, ”many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country.”"
864,"President Donald Trump tweeted on Monday that the chaos in airports over the weekend was Delta Airlines’ fault —  along with protesters and ”the tears of Senator [Chuck] Schumer.” He sent those tweets a little after 7 a. m. By 9:30 a. m. Delta Airlines’ stock was down 1. 6 percent. Meanwhile, an algorithm was raking in money from those tweets. T3, an advertising company in Austin, Texas, built the ”Trump and Dump Bot” to analyze Trump’s tweets and play the stock market when he says something bad about a company. They donate the money they make to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Here’s how the bot works, according to T3 president Ben Gaddis. First, Trump tweets, and the bot checks to see if Trump is tweeting about a   company. The bot does a ”sentiment analysis” of the tweet, looking for words like ”big problems” and ”caused by.” Then it gives the tweet a sentiment ranking. For Trump’s tweet about imposing a border tax on Toyota’s plant in Mexico, the ranking was 17. 9 percent —  very low, according to Gaddis. If the sentiment ranking is low enough, the bot heads to   as fast as possible and borrows stock in the company Trump is tweeting about. This all happens in less than a second. The bot then sells its   stock before the company’s shares tank. Then, when the stock is down, it buys back those shares at a cheaper price. When Delta Airlines stock dropped, the ”Trump and Dump Bot” made a 4. 47 percent profit. Still confused? Here’s a video T3 made to explain it. T3 is currently the only company talking about using a bot in this way, but Gaddis thinks other companies are doing or trying to do something similar. Gaddis doesn’t think profiting off a company’s   with President Trump is bad —  especially when the profits are donated. ”President Trump tweets something negative, we save a puppy,” Gaddis said. ”That’s something I think everybody can get behind.”"
865,"Republicans want to eliminate one of the nation’s newest national monuments. Former President Barack Obama created the 1. 3   Bears Ears National Monument in Utah just days before he left office. At the center of the brewing legal fight is a relatively obscure federal law called the Antiquities Act that dates back to President Teddy Roosevelt, who famously used it early and often. It was meant to protect ancient artifacts and ruins that at the time were being pilfered from western lands. It also allows for a president to protect these sites and the lands around them as national monuments, without going through Congress. ”Under the Antiquities Act, there is no ability of having any input,” says Rep. Rob Bishop,  . Bishop, who chairs the powerful House Committee on Natural Resources, has emerged as one of the act’s biggest critics. ”No one ever gets to have a say, you don’t work out things in advance,” Bishop says. ”It has to be a gotcha moment where the president unveils something unilaterally.” Bishop wants the Trump administration to also act by executive order, and either shrink Bears Ears or nullify it altogether. Bears Ears connects a huge protected corridor that links several monuments that ultimately bring you to the Grand Canyon. The land is also considered sacred to Native American tribes. ”It is the wrong size,” Bishop says. ”It does not take into account the various uses that the land can do.” That’s the big rub for Bishop. A national monument designation generally means new development  —   like oil and gas drilling, expansion of cattle grazing  —   is off limits. Only the existing leases that are grandfathered in can be developed. What Bishop is talking about doing, overturning a national monument of this size, has never been done before. Only a handful of smaller historical monuments have been shut down or transferred over to state management. The law here is murky, according to University of Colorado law professor Mark Squillace, an expert on the Antiquities Act. ”The way that the Antiquities Act is structured, it essentially authorizes the president to proclaim, but not to modify or revoke, national monuments,” Squillace says. Under the act, only Congress can revoke a national monument outright. But Squillace isn’t sure the Utah congressional delegation has the votes. ”It turns out that the designation of national monuments is very popular with the public,” he says. It’s not yet clear what the new administration’s move will be on Bears Ears, if there’s one at all. During his Senate confirmation hearing, the president’s nominee for interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, told lawmakers that the Antiquities Act doesn’t authorize a president to rescind a monument. ”Legally, it’s untested,” Zinke said, adding that he thought the public has generally benefited from a lot of national monuments. Economic studies have shown rural towns around them often see increases in tourism and recreation business. But Bishop isn’t buying it in Utah. ”In the name of saying we’re doing something for everyone, you actually hurt people, especially those who live in that particular area,” Bishop says. San Juan County, home to Bears Ears, is often the poorest county in Utah. Bishop wants more local control of federal public land. He’s also one of the biggest supporters in Congress of the idea that most all federal public land should be turned over to states to own and manage. An analysis by the Center of Responsive Politics however found that he gets more campaign donations from outside his home state than any other lawmaker in the House, much of that coming from energy and agribusiness. One thing is clear: the fight over the future of the Bears Ears National Monument extends far beyond Utah. At the Utah state capitol last week, Cynthia Wilson of the Navajo Nation protested the state Legislature’s passage of a resolution condemning Bears Ears. ”As indigenous people, this is nothing new to us, we have always been attacked over our ancestral lands,” Wilson told KUER. ”We’re going to keep defending this monument.” Many tribes are pledging to mobilize from around the country and get to Utah to fight for the protection of Bears Ears, if needed."
866,"   Yazan   sits on the floor next to a kerosene heater playing with a phone app that sings the alphabet in English. The first grader recites the letters in an Arabic accent certain to quickly disappear if he and his family, Syrian refugees, make it to the United States. After two years of waiting and background checks,  ’s parents and their three young children were accepted for U. S. resettlement and were due to fly this past week to New York. When they were told their trip had been canceled because of the Trump administration’s ban on Syrian arrivals, they had already sold all the   furniture they had painstakingly accumulated in two years in Jordan. They had packed their clothes and an album of photos from their home in Aleppo, Syria into big black duffle bags to start their new life. The father, Rafiq   a high school geography teacher in Syria, had pored over the itinerary  —   Amman to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Chicago and Chicago to New York. And then to Syracuse in upstate New York. ”I looked it up on Google maps and I read that it’s an industrial city. . .. I was told there was lots of work there,”   says. ”It doesn’t matter if it’s the kind of work I did at home. I will do anything.” The   are among hundreds of Syrian refugees in Jordan accepted for resettlement in the United States who have been left stranded  —   at least for now  —   by the travel ban. Rafiq and his wife Ghada Dibo were among the last Syrian refugees allowed into Jordan two years ago before it closed its borders to the refugees next door. The small country has taken in more than a million refugees  —   more than half of them Syrian. When the fighting worsened in Aleppo, the couple left home with two young children, traveling through the desert at night to evade checkpoints to reach safety. Their youngest child, a bubbly    girl, was born in Jordan. They ended up in the industrial city of Zarqa. Most refugees aren’t allowed to work in Jordan.   runs the risk of being arrested by picking up occasional work in construction to pay their rent. ”I don’t feel secure here,” he says. ”I am always afraid of the possibility of being deported back to Syria. We are always watching what we say. Even on Facebook we make sure not to write anything critical.”   34, says he has never met an American. Asked what he knows about the country that was to be their new home, he says: ”We know there is democracy and freedom. My friends who are there say you feel like you are a human being  —   a citizen. You have rights. No one can oppress you. Even the children have rights.”   has taken an English course offered by a Japanese organization in Amman and believes he’d learn the language quickly. It would be easy for the children, he says. As Yazan listens to the alphabet and numbers, his 4 and a    little sister Media goes to sit next to him and sings along. The   apartment with paint peeling off the concrete walls is empty except for a single kerosene heater and the television that   was able to buy back. Neighbors have lent them foam mattresses to sleep on the floor. ”The kids have been saying, ’in America we’ll do this, in America we’ll do that,’ ” says their mother. Media was particularly excited at the thought of having her own room. Yazan wants to be a policeman. His parents say he started stuttering after being frightened by the sound of jets in Syria and he still doesn’t talk much. Ghada Dibo says she didn’t know what to tell the children about why they weren’t going. ”My daughter asked, ’Mama where are our things, why don’t we have them? Why aren’t we going to America?’ and then she started to cry,” she says. Dibo says she herself broke down and cried. ”I feel like a huge disaster has happened to us. . .. We can’t afford to replace the things we sold and we have been left with nothing. No one is explaining anything to us.” The day after the travel ban was rolled back by a U. S. court, the family had not been notified of any new travel date. Over the weekend, they received a call from an aid agency to see if they could travel on Monday, but they haven’t confirmed that they’re traveling.   says he had heard that Canada had offered to take in the Syrian refugees who were to be resettled in the United States. ”Maybe they will let us go to another country  —   to Europe or Canada,” he says."
867,"The scientific community has been roiled by the Trump travel ban. Like tens of thousands of residents of the seven   countries, scientists have been stranded  —   cut off from their labs, worried they won’t be able to attend upcoming conferences. And even though the ban has been temporarily reversed by a court order, they are uncertain about what the future holds  —   and the implications for their work. Consider the case of Ph. D. candidate Hanan Isweiri. She left her lab at Colorado State University to fly home to Libya after the death of her father. She was expected back in Colorado 10 days ago. But on her return trip to the U. S. she was stopped while trying to catch a connecting flight in Jordan. When she reached the gate, she and her    son, Tameem, were told they couldn’t board the plane due to the new U. S. travel restrictions. Hanan has a valid   visa, and her son is a United States citizen. When she called officials at Colorado State University, they told her to stay put. ”They asked me to not go anywhere until they got this exception, or something, for me,” Isweiri told NPR last Thursday. A lot has changed since then. Following the court order to reverse the ban, the State Department and other agencies began accepting visas like Isweiri’s. Late Saturday night, she made it back into the U. S. Even with the temporary relief, the ban has hurt the scientific community, says Rush Holt, a physicist and a former member of Congress who now heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His organization will hold its annual meeting, in Boston, later this month, and the uncertainty is taking its toll. ”The head of the world academy of sciences, which is headquartered in Trieste, Italy, sent a letter saying he is canceling his plans because he is Sudanese and didn’t expect to be able to travel,” Holt explains. He says the freedom to communicate and collaborate with people around the world are fundamental principles for science. ”If you want science to thrive  —   and you’d better want science to thrive, because that benefits society in so many ways  —   you really have to defend these principles,” Holt says. Even scientists from the seven targeted countries who are still in the United States have been negatively affected. Maryam Zahedian, a grad student in chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington, is originally from Iran. She worries this is the start of something terrible. ”All this news, it just makes us so nervous, I cannot even focus for like 30 minutes,” Zahedian says. ”Doing my research, I will go back and check the news, check the Facebook to see if there is any new thing. I don’t want to stay longer here if it’s going to be like this.” It’s too early to say whether the ban will return. Opponents say it’s unconstitutional. President Trump has vowed to see it reinstated. In the meantime, scientists, and many others, feel left in limbo."
868,"The dynamic, sometimes evil and always enthralling Victor Newman has been a mainstay of CBS’ daytime soap The Young and the Restless. The character is played by actor Eric Braeden, who is marking his 37th year on the show. Braeden also has a new memoir out called I’ll Be Damned. In it, he shares stories from his career and his childhood in   War II Germany. He tells NPR’s Lulu   ”I was born in 1941 in a town called Kiel on the Baltic Sea. And that was a center for [the] building of warships and submarines, and hence it was obviously a target of Allied bombers.” On his father, who died when Braeden was 12, He belonged to the [Nazi] Party and he was mayor of the town that I grew up in, which was outside of Kiel. And as far as I knew, [he was] a very loving figure. Never saw him in uniform. I just was devastated when he died. On how he learned about the Nazi era and the Holocaust, I found out in   here in Los Angeles. . .. [There] was a movie theater and they played a documentary called Mein Kampf, a Swedish documentary. And I went because I was kind of homesick I said, ”Oh, that’s a German title.” I honestly had not grown up knowing anything about Mein Kampf or really the Nazi era, except that Germany had lost the war. My early impressions were of English tanks coming through the village and arresting my father. So that was arguably the most shocking and, I would say, epiphanous moment in my young life, and awakened an enormous interest in history and politics. On why he hadn’t learned about the Holocaust sooner, The second world war was not discussed in German history classes until the ’60s, and I left in ’59. And in the middle ’60s they began to really become aware, in Germany, of the dreadful stuff that happened in concentration camps. Before then, it was not discussed. I don’t remember discussing it, except once when I was a teenager. I walked home from school with a schoolmate and he said  —   I was about 14, I think, 15  —   and he said, ”I gotta tell you a secret.” I said, ”Oh? What is it?” He says, ”I’m Jewish.” And I didn’t quite know what to do with that. So I went home to my mother  —   my father had been dead by then about two or three years. I said, ”So and so . .. said that he was Jewish. What does that mean?” And she just made a big sigh, and she says, ”Oh, what one did to the white Jews is unforgiveable.” By that I assume she meant the German Jews. That is the extant of my conversation about that subject matter until much later. On moving to the U. S. in 1959 and how he ended up in Los Angeles, First, I dissected cadavers at the John Sealy Hospital in Galveston, Texas, where a cousin of mine, a German cousin of mine, was a doctor. Then I ventured from that to Montana. I was a cowboy on a ranch outside of Missoula. Then I took that river trip [down the Salmon River] in Idaho with a promise that we would make a documentary film and with that film we would come to California. And I said, ”I’m in,” nevermind it was called ”The River of No Return” for a reason. So that’s how, by Greyhound bus, I then . .. came to Los Angeles I think in the fall of ’60. On why he’s stayed with The Young and the Restless for so long, The reason I stayed was after about five years, I think, four years, I became increasingly disgruntled with playing this rather   character. And then Bill Bell, the head writer, came up with a storyline for me that I played on a Christmas Eve show with my   wife, Nikki, played beautifully by Melody Thomas Scott still. And she sort of asks this mystery character, Victor Newman, about his childhood and about Christmas. And he has reluctant feelings about Christmas and then finally kind of breaks down and tells her that he grew up in an orphanage where he was left at the age of 7 by a destitute mother who had been left by a drunken father. And once I played that scene, I walked into my dressing room and I said, ”Now I’m staying,” because it opened up a huge world of possibilities."
869,"It took a car bomb to get the funds to renovate Egypt’s Museum of Islamic Art, but three years later, a restored museum with modern galleries has reopened to showcase the museum’s historic treasures. The 2014 explosion outside police headquarters near the   museum in downtown Cairo heavily damaged the stone and wood façade and smashed 179 priceless objects. ”We cried so much when we first saw it, because really, what you see standing here was all in pieces on the floor,” says Shahinda Karim, a professor of Islamic art at the American University in Cairo. The exhibits reflect the culture of an Islamic world that, at its height more than 1, 000 years ago, stretched across Central Asia, the Middle East and north Africa to continental Europe. Cairo was one of its capitals. Inside the renovated museum, dark gray walls, marble floors and new lighting highlight gleaming glass display cases and towering architectural pieces  —   including intricate wooden panels with repeating patterns of interlocking geometric shapes. As she leads a tour through the museum, Karim points out the silver work on a huge 18th century mosque door engraved with the name of the Jewish silversmith.   incense burners embellished with diamonds sparkle in display cases. But the real treasures are pieces displaying craftsmanship that reached its height in the capitals of the Muslim empires. There are   Persian carpets so finely woven they are almost   and exquisite miniature paintings of palace life that illustrated ancient manuscripts. There’s also an engraved astrolabe  —   one of the first devices used to navigate by the stars. At the opening ceremony on Jan. 19, Egypt’s antiquities minister, Khaled   called the reopened museum a victory over terrorism. Sufi dancers dressed in billowing white robes whirled to religious chants and the music of drums, tambourines and reed flutes. The U. S. government provided funds to help restore the museum façade, while the United Arab Emirates paid for the   museum renovation. With 4, 400 pieces on display and more than 5, 000 more in storage, the museum houses among the largest and widest ranging collections of Islamic art in the world. ”The bombing damaged 179 masterpieces of Islamic art,” says museum director Ahmed Shoukri, standing next to an    Syrian glass bottle glued back together. He says museum staff managed to repair all but 10 of the pieces. The exhibits illustrate a shift from figurative art to an emphasis on calligraphy and geometric and floral designs that is the hallmark of Islamic art after the 9th century. While some conservative Gulf Arab countries consider depictions of people or animals blasphemous under Islam, Karim says the Quran does not ban figurative art. ”There is nothing in the Quran that says you cannot have [a] figurative representative. It says you cannot have idols,” she explains. ”If I pray to that statue, it’s an idol. If I don’t, it’s art.” Karim, who is Egyptian, believes the museum will show people a different side of the religion. ”I think the reopening of the museum is extremely important because there’s been so much negative propaganda” about Islam, she says. ”I think it will show people that this was one of the most advanced cultures  —   and how better to see it than through art?” The exhibits also illustrate skills that declined with the industrial age and waning empires, when craftsmen could no longer spend months on a single piece. ”Today, how long can an artist work on one piece?” she says. ”Before it was the sultans paying for these pieces. Who is going to pay for this now?”"
870,"For animals lovers, adopting a cat or dog is easier than ever these days. There are now countless websites through which one can adopt one of these cute, furry creatures. Unfortunately, however, while many of these animals find caring homes, scores of them still end up in shelters, where they are often put to sleep. This trend is changing in Richmond, Va. Five years ago, more than a third of the animals that came to Richmond’s   animal shelter were put down. Today, the shelter is boasting record high adoptions  —   nearly 90 percent. Christie Chipps Peters is the director of Richmond’s Animal Care And Control department, and she told NPR’s Lulu   the secret to their success in keeping animals alive and finding them loving owners. On how she brought down the euthanasia rate by 40 percent within her first year at Richmond’s Animal Care And Control  We had some changes to make. We made a few quite quickly. I would say the first two things that we did right off the bat, is we sort of put a stake in the ground and said, ”We’re not euthanizing any animals for space and we’re going to do everything we possibly can to allow people to come and take them so that they get to leave the shelter alive. Another thing that we did immediately was that we extended the hours that our shelter was open. You know, for working families, being open from 1 p. m. to 5 p. m. does not accommodate animals leaving alive. In addition, people prior to my arrival could just show up at the animal shelter and expect their animal to be taken from them. . .. We put in place a very structured program to try and help people keep their animals. Since we are the only open admission shelter in the city of Richmond, that means that we take care of every single animal that is in need. So if our officers are out and we have to seize 40 dogs, we need to make 40 cages at the shelter available. And previously, that would just mean that 40 animals would lose their lives. Now, we would put a post on Facebook and say, ”We’ve taken 40 animals, we need to find 40 of our dogs that are in house, foster homes. Can you please help?” On whether social media has transformed how they get the word out about animals in need of a home,  It has completely transformed our operations and I’m hopeful that others would jump on the bandwagon. In the past, animal control agencies and open admission agencies have sort of put a cloak over the unpleasant side of our jobs. And while that is, unfortunately, a very real part of our job, the reality is if you’re able to share your story and tell the truth and allow the public to see completely your operations and how you’re doing things, and ask for help, the response has been incredible.  On whether they got any pushback for being so open about the status of animals in house  We have. It was interesting, because you know, I said, we’re just going to tell the truth and put it out there and we had a couple people that had messaged back, ”I’m sorry to see that there is even one animal euthanized.” And while we do understand that, it’s not the reality of the job that we do. We are an open admission center, so our officers are taking in animals who have really harmed other people or they’ve killed other pets. And these are not animals that could be put back into the community for safety concern. And, or animals that are so badly abused, or badly injured that we are unable to fix them. For those animals that come in that you know, are breathing their last breath as they’re being carried into our shelter, the kindest thing that we can do is to perform euthanasia. So I think that it just provides us a platform for every person that says, ”Uh, I don’t like to see the ugly side of your job,” it gives us an opportunity to explain the truth of the matter."
871,"The Department of Justice has filed a brief with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, responding to a legal challenge to President Trump’s executive order on immigration. The court is set to hear oral arguments by phone on Tuesday at 6 p. m. ET, in the next critical legal test of whether the president’s decision to ban travel by people from seven   countries and halt refugee resettlement in the U. S. will be upheld. In their brief, Justice Department lawyers write that the executive order is ”a lawful exercise of the President’s authority over the entry of aliens into the United States and the admission of refugees.” Last Friday, Judge James Robart, a federal judge on the U. S. District Court for the Western District of Washington state, imposed a nationwide temporary restraining order against the order. That decision effectively blocked the implementation of the travel ban, and now the Justice Department is seeking to reinstate it. On Saturday, the 9th Circuit denied the Justice Department’s request to stay the suspension and allow enforcement of the ban to continue. Lawyers for Washington state had argued that the executive order hurt residents and businesses in Washington, along with students and faculty in the state university system. The state also argued the ban is unconstitutional because it discriminates against Muslims. The White House has countered that the executive order does not mention any faith group by name and that the president has broad powers when it comes to national security and immigration. In its brief, the Justice Department also argues that Robart’s decision in the district court was ”vastly overbroad, extending far beyond the State’s legal claims to encompass numerous applications of the Order that the State does not even attempt to argue are unlawful.” Trump took aim at Robart over the weekend on Twitter, diminishing him as a ”  judge” whose decision ”is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Robart was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate."
872,"Senate Democrats held an   session Monday night into Tuesday morning in a   effort to try to stop President Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, from being confirmed. Among those who took to the floor was Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who said it was ”difficult to imagine a worse choice to head the Department of Education.” ”Betsy DeVos doesn’t believe in public schools,” Warren said. ”Her only knowledge of student loans seems to come from her own financial investments connected to debt collectors who hound people struggling with student loans, and, despite being a billionaire, she wants the chance to keep making money on shady investments while she runs the Department of Education.” During DeVos’ confirmation hearing, Warren pushed the nominee on how she would ”protect against waste, fraud and abuse,” citing Trump University, a   organization that was at the center of a $25 million settlement agreement in November. Right now, DeVos just barely has enough votes to get confirmed. Two Republican senators  —   Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins from Maine  —   both announced last week they won’t support her nomination. That means there’s a   split right now, with Vice President Pence expected to break the tie with a vote slated for Tuesday afternoon. The tactic from Democrats can’t stop a vote from happening Cabinet members are no longer subjected to a   threshold to end debate. Instead they’re hoping the overnight rally of sorts will give members of the public more time to call in and pressure their representatives to rethink their position. ”I know for a fact there are other Republicans who are feeling the heat and could come around,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Monday afternoon on the Senate floor. DeVos has become one of Trump’s most controversial nominees, eliciting strong public backlash and prompting thousands of phone calls, letters and emails from voters urging senators to oppose her nomination. A major GOP donor and former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, DeVos has no previous experience in public education, though she has been a longtime champion of of school choice and vouchers. She also had a rough confirmation hearing last month that seemed to expose her weaknesses and inexperience. She was tripped up when asked about accountability standards and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Those missteps were even lampooned on Saturday Night Live over the weekend. The delay in voting on DeVos has also had a domino effect on another of Trump’s nominees. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the president’s pick for attorney general, is still needed to cast a critical vote in DeVos’ favor. So his confirmation vote can’t be held until the education nominee is moved through. The Senate is also primed to vote this week on Georgia Rep. Tom Price’s nomination to run the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as Steven Mnuchin for secretary of the Treasury. Democrats don’t have the votes to stop either one, but they have been exhausting the maximum amount of time on the floor to debate nominees, stretching the process for each one out over a couple of days. GOP leaders have threatened to keep the Senate in session into the weekend to get all of those nominees confirmed this week."
873,"Suddenly, people are more in favor of the Affordable Care Act than are against it. For the first time, more people believe Obamacare is a good idea than think it is a bad idea, as a recent NBC   Street Journal poll showed. Another poll from Fox News shows a similar pattern, as the New York Times’ Margot   and Haeyoun Park pointed out in a story Wednesday. ”  Poll shows   love for Obamacare,” blared a CNN headline the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. There are a few reasons the balance might be tipping: It may be that growing participation in Obamacare has slowly tipped polls. It may be that Democrats’ messaging that millions might lose coverage is sinking in. But a particularly compelling theory could mix in with either or both of these: relative deprivation. Relative deprivation describes being deprived of something a person feels entitled to. For example, they used to have it, expected to have it, or see that others have it. The theory helps explain this political moment of anger in America  —   whether it’s the rise in popularity of Obamacare (in part because many on the left who didn’t think it went far enough see the law threatened) why people are marching in the streets to protest the new president and even why Trump won in the first place. Relative deprivation is the primary force driving political rebellion, as political scientist Theodore Gurr theorized in his 1970 book Why Men Rebel. That gap  —   between what people think they should get and what they think they will realistically get  —   creates discontent, he writes, and that discontent ”is the basic, instigating condition for participants in collective violence.” When   advocate Saru Jayaraman told the Washington Post about the pain workers feel when they lose existing benefits, she was talking about this type of discontent. ”Very few restaurant workers before the ACA had anything at all,” she says. ”When you have [insurance] then you start to deal and treat things that have been a problem for a very long time. When you cut it off, it’s almost worse” than never having insurance at all. The newfound acceptance of Obamacare isn’t quite ”collective violence,” of course. But it is a remarkable change of heart around a   policy. The Times’   and Park point out that the demographics of who, exactly, is upset about the potential for repeal say a lot about why they are upset. Support for the law has grown across many subgroups, but the largest movements appear to be in   groups. Those people may not have loved Obamacare, but they worry more about its repeal. Suddenly, the fear of losing Obamacare has grown big enough to trump ambivalence about the law. Relative deprivation was a major strategy for Trump, It’s maybe not the most   of theories  —   threaten to take something away from people that they think should be theirs, and they get mad. But it is an elegant explanation for so much of the turmoil of the current political climate, when many groups seem to fear they could be losing out on what they once had. Emily Kalah Gade invoked the idea of relative deprivation this week at the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, explaining why she thinks the Women’s March had such strong appeal: People took to the streets on Saturday not because of new issues, but because values and protections they thought they could safely rely upon were under threat. The sense of impending loss of power has been simmering for years among particular demographics. For example, some white men  —   especially those who have lost economic clout  —   have felt this way for years, as sociologist Michael Kimmel observed in his 2013 book Angry White Men.  ”Revolutions are made not by those with ’nothing left to lose,’. .. but precisely by those with something to lose  —   and a fear that they are, in fact, about to lose it,” he wrote. Again, that book was written in 2013, two years before Trump ran for the presidency. But Kimmel argues that idea plays a big part in explaining how Trump won the presidency in the first place. Trump again and again drew attention to disappearing   jobs in auto factories and coal mines, saying that with his help, America could regain those lost opportunities. ”These guys, their fathers, their grandfathers, their   they all made a bet. The bet was, ’If I take this job in heavy industry, in the steel mill, auto factory, I can buy a house I can support a family,’” Kimmel told NPR in late 2016. ”These guys, they made the same bet that their fathers and grandfathers made, and they lost the bet,” as they watched those mills and factories close, he continued. Indeed, Trump’s entire campaign was about bringing back a theoretical, fading, ”great” America. Relative deprivation is also behind the recent protests, Now that Trump has won, entire other classes of people feel threatened and are taking to the streets, as Gade points out. Many at the Women’s March, for example, voiced a fear that women might lose the ability to obtain abortions, as well as a more amorphous fear of losing respect and social standing they have gained over time. Many women felt a real threat in the fact that America chose a president who had, at one point, bragged about groping and kissing women. Likewise, many immigrants and Muslims are speaking out against Trump’s executive action banning travel from seven   countries, and many also turned out at protests against the ban. This is not to say that people protest only for their own personal good. It’s entirely true that many, many people in the streets are protesting on behalf of others. Many   and   are out protesting the ban on travel from   countries, for example, and plenty of men showed up for women’s marches worldwide  —   because their moral foundation of what they believe America is supposed to be is being threatened. It’s also worth observing that the protests aren’t just about women and immigrants many have also been about ( ) Democratic politics. The recent protester cries of, ”Do your job!” at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were the cries of liberals begging sympathetic legislators to seize whatever meager power they still have. The left isn’t 100 percent unified, but the power of relative deprivation has helped more or less bridge what was one of the bitterest political divides  —   between many Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters. After Democrats lost a presidential election (plus some Senate and House races) that almost every forecaster saw as a likely win, the divided party suddenly seemed to come together, as one organizer of the women’s march told CNN. ”We have already proven that Hillary and Bernie Sanders supporters can work together against fascism, xenophobia and racism,” said Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York. Nothing unites, it seems, like the sense of vulnerability that comes from a blistering defeat. Who can wield it better? Relative deprivation is all about two things: expectations and whether they can be met. And all politicians play the expectations game  —   they make promises, then try to deliver on them. However, much of Trump’s political success is arguably because he plays this game so well and so heavily. He continually tells people that they are unjustly ignored (America’s ”forgotten men and women”) or missing out on what they once had (”All of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore”). It was a campaign built on the narrative of being an outsider, punching up at the people in power (nevermind that he’s a billionaire himself). Now, he’s in power, and the question is whether Trump can deliver on expectations. He has had an   first two weeks with his travel ban, promise to build a wall and rollback of regulations. He even has made moves to show that he’s bringing back a handful of those lost   jobs. But four years is a long time. If some of those who supported him don’t see their own personal economic prospects improve, they could jump ship. The same goes for the suddenly   Obamacare: Trump at one point raised expectations that he would make sure there was ”insurance for everybody” (though his fellow Republicans worked to tamp that down afterward). Now, he and his party have to deliver, one way or another, or they could face the anger of a country whose expectations have changed since the law was passed."
874,"First, we had a candidate and a campaign like no other, then an election and transition like no other. We should have expected President Trump’s first two weeks in office to be just as dizzying as they have been. Yet Trump lovers and haters alike have stood by, mouths agape. Editorialists have worn out the words ”whirlwind” and ”firehose,” just as they had recently burned through ”unprecedented.” What has flummoxed official Washington about President Trump more than anything else is his almost manic determination to do things he said he would do  —   and to do as many of them as possible all at once and right now. In almost any daylight period of his first fortnight, he has signed at least one executive order upending some element of national policy, indulged in at least one personal feud, disputed at least one news story as it was widely reported and vented his emotions in at least one Twitter outburst. Flying off to Florida for his first ”working weekend,” he left the nation’s capital, and the nation itself, panting for breath. Trump is now the focal point not only of national political events, but of national attention, period. When was the last time football was so overshadowed in the media the week before the Super Bowl? Even on the day of the Super Bowl, Trump was making news by defending Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Fox News and by taking to Twitter to blame a judge ”and the court system” if there is another terrorist attack in the U. S. Trump drives the conversation more constantly than any president before him, with his deeds by day and his tweets at dawn. He does it with his most significant action to date  —   nominating Neil Gorsuch to the U. S. Supreme Court  —   and a day later he does it by using the National Prayer Breakfast to make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice. With Gorsuch, Trump made the one move most certain to unite and delight his voters in his first days in office. If all goes well, Gorsuch should be confirmed and on the bench by late April  —   in time to be the crown on Trump’s first 100 days. But if the behavior of the first fortnight is any indication, by then we will all be talking about something else, or several somethings else, that the man once known as ”The Donald” has done. ”New sheriff in town” goes global, Lest we forget one of his earliest and most famous pledges, the new president wasted no time issuing an order initiating work on a wall on the border with Mexico. He also threatened to impose a 20 percent border tax that would, he said, force Mexico to pay for the wall. The Mexican president then canceled a planned visit to Washington. Trump later called him and said the U. S. would send troops if Mexico could not handle its own ”bad hombres.” The new president also made good on promises to pull out of the   Partnership, a trade deal that has been in the works for years, substituting talk of a special trade relationship with Great Britain. He made it clear that any previous agreements by the U. S. would be subject to review. One such agreement struck by the Obama administration apparently riled up the new president during his first conversation with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The U. S. had told Turnbull it would take 1, 250 refugees off his hands this year, a deal Trump denounced as ”dumb” in the truncated and tumultuous phone call. Australia has been the most consistent backer of U. S. policy on the world stage for the past century. In other highlights, the president’s first flurry of foreign outreach reportedly included a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a call the White House said was not recorded. In their Super Bowl Sunday interview, Fox host Bill O’Reilly asked about Trump’s avowed respect for Putin, whom O’Reilly called ”a killer.” President Trump shot back: ”There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Promise keeping leads to problems, But if delivering on promises has a satisfying ring to it, Trump’s actions themselves have also had repercussions  —   often beyond the intended. His flurry of executive orders and pronouncements began on the afternoon he made his inaugural address. He said the Affordable Care Act (”Obamacare”) would no longer be enforced where it burdened a person or a business. There, he seemed to say, done. Of course, neither the White House nor the majority party in Congress is quite prepared to offer a replacement to the ACA just yet, so the health insurance companies wonder who will square the circle on costs. But Trump has set the nation’s new course, and for the rest, well, time will tell. So it was with a rash of other shifts in policy as well. The new president instituted a federal hiring freeze and said any proposed new regulation would have to be accompanied by the killing of two old ones. He froze some government research into climate change, restarted the Keystone oil pipeline project, and temporarily shut down some federal departments’ social media accounts. Perhaps the greatest controversy thus far has arisen from Trump’s sweeping order barring entry to the U. S. for anyone coming from any of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Coming one week into the new administration, the order also suspended the nation’s refugee program in general, blocked Syrians indefinitely and placed other new restrictions on immigration. Although the White House denied this was a ”Muslim ban,” it was close enough to please those supporters who wanted it to be precisely that. Longtime backer Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said the idea had always been to have a Muslim ban and the president had asked to be shown ”the right way to do it legally.” In other words, it played as another campaign promise kept, perhaps the most salient yet. That was surely the tone in the president’s own Twitter messages on the subject, in which he continued to call it a ban even this weekend. No one should forget that Trump first moved ahead in the polls among Republican candidates for president in December 2015 when he proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the U. S. And it was clear from polls and interviews that these moves were resonating with Trump’s legion. Whatever else polls may show about the current political moment, Trump’s voters are still with him and his hard base could not be more excited. Pushback scales up quickly, At the same time, there has been pushback on a Trumpian scale. The day after he took the oath of office, hundreds of thousands marched in protest in Washington, D. C. and other major cities in the U. S.  —   thousands more in Europe. A week later, when the travel ban was announced, it caused chaos and confusion in international airports around the world. Protesters soon arrived to add their voices. Soon, businesses and schools were objecting as well as human rights activists. Cable TV filled with images of families torn asunder. Then on the next Friday, a federal judge in Seattle issued a restraining order against the entire executive order. On Saturday night, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (that has jurisdiction over several states on the West Coast) let the judge’s ruling stand pending further proceedings. The president reacted with outrage, on Twitter. ”What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, came come into the U. S.?” Of course, not ”anyone” can come into the U. S. at least not through an airport or border port of entry, and that has been true for a long time. But on Sunday, the president was tweeting again: ”Just can’t believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!” The Justice Department (where one uncooperative acting attorney general, Sally Yates, had already been fired and replaced) got busy on an appeal. But in the meantime, the Department of Homeland Security went back to admitting people from the targeted countries and the State Department went back to issuing visas. Other executive actions may also find disfavor once they are more widely known, especially where they may seem to contradict Trump’s campaign promises rather than fulfill them. One such order struck at the effort to give consumers greater leverage in dealing with investment brokers who manage their retirement money. Snuffing the   ”fiduciary rule” was only one of several moves that helped bank stocks put yet another leg on the ”Trump rally” that propelled the Dow Jones Industrial Average up over 20, 000 again on Feb. 3. There was also an order scrambling the ”principals committee” of the National Security Council, dropping the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence but adding presidential chief strategist Steve Bannon. This followed a series of   moments with both the retiring DNI (Gen. James Clapper) and the exiting CIA director (John Brennan). If we are thinking here about points to remember, many Americans may one day look back on these two weeks as the time they realized how important Bannon was to Trump, his election and his plans to govern America. Time magazine marked the emergence of Bannon as the central White House figure by putting him on the cover, calling him both ”The Great Manipulator” and ”the second most powerful man in the world.” Bannon had, indeed, begun to look like the power behind the throne, the gray eminence behind much of what Trump was prioritizing  —   a rival in influence to Jared Kushner, the husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Kushner is seen as the most trusted intimate, Priebus as the conduit to Congress and party leaders. Bannon is also notable in that his background is in finance (Goldman Sachs as well as his own firm) and the media, having been a publisher of the   ”platform for the  ” Breitbart. com, which has been a haven for white nationalists and a variety of conspiracy theories. He and his close adviser Steve Miller are generally regarded as the architects of the inaugural address and the blitzkrieg of policy moves that followed. Bannon is also seen as a flash point in the new White House’s media relations. He has told the news media in general to ”keep its mouth shut” and be chastened by their failure to anticipate Trump’s victory in the election. Arguing over ”alternative facts” But Bannon has not been alone in his open animosity toward the traditional news media. What had been a difficult relationship during the campaign has persisted into the governing phase of the Trump phenomenon. On Day 1 of the new regime, an almost absurd controversy arose over the size of the crowd in attendance on the National Mall at Trump’s   which Trump and his spokesman called the largest in history. Photographs, transportation records and other evidence suggested the crowd was substantially smaller than for the Obama inauguration in 2009. Trump sent his press secretary out on a weekend afternoon to dispute all other sources of information and insist on the president’s version. Another White House counselor, pollster and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, later referred to the ”alternative facts” about the crowds offered by the White House. A few days later, in his first meeting with congressional leaders, Trump insisted that campaign totals showing him losing the popular vote by 2. 8 million were wrong because ”between three and five million” people voted who were not citizens. The state authorities in charge of this process immediately said this was not possible. Indeed, every study done by officials or academics has found little or no evidence of actual voter fraud. Trump said he would order a major investigation of the matter, but no such probe has yet begun. Stunners relegated to minor mishaps,  It is difficult to assess how a given story would have played in the media, or in memory, had it happened at a different point in time. How would the country have reacted if the first days of any other presidency had included a nasty firefight in a foreign country that killed a U. S. Navy SEAL and a substantial number of civilians? Or if the senior career staffers at the State Department had decided to retire, almost en masse? How would the country have reacted had either of the last two presidents issued a proclamation on Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews? And would that story have had legs if it turned out the State Department draft of that Holocaust message had indeed included a reference to Jews that went missing from the White House version? What if another president, having campaigned on support for expanded Israeli settlements on the disputed West Bank, suddenly said 5, 500 such units ”would not be helpful” to peace talks? What if that president also suddenly softened support for moving the U. S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? In our particular point in time, stories such as these can scarcely find space or time in the media. Even stories that seem to gasp for air find oxygen in short supply. The new president remains popular among Republicans, and intensely so among that harder base of backers who voted for him in the primaries. These supporters could not be more gratified by the first two weeks of the Trump presidency if he had finished it by walking across the Potomac. More generally, however, polls find the new president getting no bounce at all from taking office. Gallup and   put his approval in the low 40s, CBS News’ poll had him at just 40 percent. The election of 2016 should have taught us not to place too much faith in polls. But it is hard not to notice these numbers are the lowest for any new president since polling began. Someday, we may look back and be amazed at how high President Trump soared from a poor start. Or we may say the first report card was a portent of what was to come for his presidency. In any event, we are not likely to forget how it began."
875,"There’s a moment in the Broadway musical Hamilton where George Washington says to an exasperated Alexander Hamilton: ”Winning is easy, young man. Governing’s harder.” When it comes to health care, it seems that President Trump is learning that same lesson. Trump and Republicans in Congress are struggling with how to keep their   campaign promise  —   to repeal Obamacare without leaving millions of people without health insurance. During the campaign, Trump promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act immediately upon taking office. Last month, in an interview with The Washington Post, he said he had a replacement law ”very much formulated down to the final strokes.” But on Sunday, he dialed back those expectations in an interview with Fox News. ”It’s in the process and maybe it will take till sometime into next year, but we are certainly going to be in the process. It’s very complicated,” Trump said. He repeated his claim that Obamacare has been ”a disaster” and said his replacement would be a ”wonderful plan” that would take time ”statutorily” to put in place. And then he hedged the timing again. ”I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments,” he said. Trump’s recent hesitation comes as Republicans in Congress tame their rhetoric surrounding the health care law. Sen. Lamar Alexander,  . chairman of the Senate health committee, said he’d like to see lawmakers make fixes to the current individual market before repealing parts of the law. ”We can repair the individual market, which is a good place to start,” Alexander said on Feb. 1. He has also urged his colleagues to leave the other parts of the health care sector  —   Medicare, Medicaid and the employer market  —   alone. Throughout the campaign, and over the six years since the law passed, Republicans in Congress have vowed to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act. But in the time since the law went into effect, it has helped as many as 20 million people get insurance who didn’t have it before, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Just last week, the open enrollment period for 2017 ended and HHS reported that 9. 2 million people bought insurance through the federal government’s insurance marketplace  —   slightly lower than last year but still a large number. About 3 million more people likely bought coverage on   exchanges, based on enrollment in past years. In addition, about 10 million people qualified for health coverage because of the expansion of Medicaid in most states. That left Trump and Republicans, the day after the election, facing the choice of fulfilling their clear promise to repeal the ACA and the reality that doing so could leave millions of people without access to health care. At that time the public seemed to gain a new appreciation of the law once it was actually threatened with repeal. In recent weeks, several polls have shown that more people view it more favorably than they did before the election. Another reality Republicans have had to face is that, even though they control both houses of Congress and the White House, their ability to repeal the ACA is limited. That’s because Democrats in the Senate can block bills using their filibuster power. But laws dealing with taxes and the budget are protected from filibuster, so Republicans can roll back many Obamacare provisions because they involve tax credits and federal spending. That leaves lawmakers having to build a new health care system that works within the general framework of the Affordable Care Act. They can get rid of subsidies to help people buy insurance, but the law creating   insurance exchanges, for example, will still be on the books. That’s why Alexander and a handful of other Republicans are beginning to talk about repairing the current system. Currently, not enough young healthy people have signed up for coverage to offset the costs to insure sicker, older people. The result is that premiums have risen and insurance companies that lost money pulled out of many markets. But not everyone is on board. House Speaker Paul Ryan,  . said last week in an interview on Fox that repairing the health care system means ”You must repeal and replace Obamacare.”"
876,"What’s going to happen to the federal health law? The quick, accurate answer is that no one knows. But amid the uncertainty about the future of the Affordable Care Act, states still have to manage their insurance markets. Most states have muddled through the 2017 enrollment season without making changes. Minnesota, for its part, took three unusual actions that are worth a closer look. In January, Minnesota: Here’s more. The Bailout, In response to some of the highest premium hikes in the country —  50 to 67 percent, on average —  Minnesota lawmakers passed a bailout for people who earn too much to qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s federal tax credit. The $300 million law will cut monthly premiums by 25 percent for about 125, 000 Minnesotans. Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton has backed the measure since October, saying the ACA is ”no longer affordable to increasing numbers of people.” But passage wasn’t assured, as both houses of Minnesota’s Legislature are controlled by Republicans. The bill passed in January and is supposed to go into effect by April 30, and will be retroactive to the beginning of the year. It is thought to be the second time a state has offered up state tax money to stabilize an insurance marketplace created by the health law. (Alaska came up with a $55 million bailout in 2016.)   Coverage, A failed amendment to the Minnesota legislation sought to strip dozens of   essential benefits from health plans, with the expectation that   coverage would cost less. Republican Minnesota State Rep. Steve Drazkowski offered the amendment. ”What we’re doing is trying to create an environment that, if and when the ACA goes away, that Minnesotans will have the freedoms they need in order to start to bring some   competition, some free market ingenuity and innovation into the health insurance market,” Drazkowski said, adding that he was trying to eliminate the current, ”      dictating set of mandates.” Drazkowski’s amendment caught the eye of   and former Centers for Medicare  Medicaid Services administrator Andy Slavitt, who tweeted about it. The list of benefits that consumers could choose to have covered  —   or not  —   under Drazkowski’s amendment included maternity care, diabetes treatment and mental health care, among others. Some items on the list are very specific: Lyme disease, prostate cancer screening and outpatient surgery. ”Telling people, ’Only buy what you need,’ implies that people know that they’re not going to need the emergency room or that there’s not going to be an addiction problem in their family,” Slavitt said. ”I don’t think we, as a country, want people to not have access to the services they need.” Dayton and other Democrats opposed the amendment and it was dropped from the final legislation. But Slavitt said it’s a cautionary tale about   catastrophic plans that cover little or no basic care. He doesn’t dispute the notion that the individual market needs help, but he says offering extremely limited plans amounts to   ”gotcha” insurance. ”This is the most blatant one I’ve seen,” Slavitt said, of the failed amendment’s approach. But other amendments did make it into the final law, including a provision that changes Minnesota’s longstanding state laws requiring HMOs to be   . The new law allows      HMOs to sell health plans in Minnesota. Dayton said these measures were not well thought out. ”I think it is unnecessary and unwise to rush the reforms added to this bill, without proper public review or full consideration of their consequences,” said Dayton. A   Public Option? Minnesota is one of a handful of states that offers a   basic health plan for some   class residents. Called MinnesotaCare, the plan provides subsidized health coverage to about 100, 000 Minnesotans. Eligibility for a family of four is capped at $49, 000 per year. Dayton wants to open the plan to all to all Minnesotans, with higher income residents paying full price for their coverage. ”This public option could offer better benefits than any policies presently on commercial markets, more options for people to keep their doctors and clinics and less expensive than what is available today,” said Dayton during an announcement of his annual budget plan last week. Dayton says allowing people with higher incomes to buy MinnesotaCare coverage, paying full freight, would reduce prices and increase competition on the individual market. Supporters of the ”public option” say it could provide better coverage and cost less because the government could take advantage of its buying power to negotiate better deals with insurance companies. Opponents say expanding government’s role in health care is a bad idea. As he campaigned for the presidency, Donald Trump said a public option would drive away private insurers, ”leaving Americans with fewer options and eventually no choices but a   plan.” The   bailout is just the beginning of what are expected to be broader health insurance reform efforts in Minnesota. Among them is a renewed call for   health insurance that is not expected to be   in the state’s Republican legislature. This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, Minnesota Public Radio and Kaiser Health News."
877,"The innovation of synthetic fleece has allowed many outdoor enthusiasts to hike with warmth and comfort. But what many of these   nature lovers don’t know is that each wash of their jackets and pullovers releases thousands of microscopic plastic fibers, or microfibers, into the environment  —   from their favorite national park to agricultural lands to waters with fish that make it back onto our plates. This has scientists wondering: Are we eating our sweaters’ synthetic microfibers? Probably, says Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, St. George. ”Microfibers seem to be one of the most common plastic debris items in animals and environmental samples,” Rochman says. In fact,   studies have shown that these synthetic microfibers  —   a type of plastic smaller than a millimeter in length and made up of various synthetic polymers  —   have popped up in table salt in China, in arctic waters and in fish caught off the coast of California. These tiny fibers make up 85 percent of human debris on shorelines across the globe, according to a 2011 study. They’re basically inescapable. So it’s not unlikely they’re finding their way into the human diet, especially in seafood. In an effort to increase transparency and minimize pollution from their products,   clothing company Patagonia, popular for its   vests, pullovers and jackets, has started to partner with research groups to get to the bottom of how these fibers might be affecting both wildlife and human health. Last year, the company worked with a research group led by Patricia Holden, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a study to quantify microfiber release in washing machines. The group ran both   and   polyester fleece jackets through the wash without detergent to get a handle on the mass of microfibers shed each time. The results, published in September of last year in Environmental Science and Technology, were  . Each wash of a jacket shed microfibers up to 2 grams. (For reference, a paperclip weighs 1. 5 grams.) Also, each fleece jacket released seven times more fibers when washed in a   washing machine versus a  . The dryer traps extra fuzz in the lint filter, says Holden. ”But in the washer, [the microfibers are] carried down the drain.” From there, they end up in wastewater treatment plants, where many fibers can’t be filtered out and are released into the environment. Holden notes that this is just one pathway microfibers take into the environment. There could be additional pathways that scientists have yet to understand, she says. And then there is the larger question: Are these tiny synthetic fibers harmful to humans and wildlife? The answer is still fuzzy. Some research indicates certain wildlife might be affected: Two studies showed that ingesting microfibers leads to increased mortality in water fleas and makes common crabs eat less food overall. But it’s unclear what effects, if any, they have on you and me. So the question for us is: Do we choose to eat seafood, knowing that we’ll probably get a few microfibers woven in? Or do we quit seafood altogether on the chance that they could have adverse health effects? ”I have no doubt that every time I eat oysters and mussels I eat at least one microfiber,” says Rochman, who studies microplastics in marine habitats and continues to indulge in seafood. ”I see dust in the air and we inhale that. The question is, at what point does it become a problem? Here, the benefits outweigh the costs.” Gregg Treinish, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Adventure Scientists, has a different take. ”If you’re eating fish, you’re eating plastic,” Treinish says. ”There’s no proven causal relationship with health issues, but I don’t want to spend the next 50 years eating it and then learn I shouldn’t have been.” Holden, Rochman, Treinish and others all agree that we don’t understand everything about how microfibers traverse ecosystems and what they do inside human and wildlife bodies. But to minimize pollution in the first place, there are   solutions we can adopt. Treinish rigged his washing machine with a filter designed for septic systems, hoping to catch some microfibers before they escape into the waterways. So far, he has filled two Nalgene water bottles with the filtrate. He continues to use the filter. And he suggests a simpler solution: Just wash your fleece less often. ”Obviously I’ll wash my jacket if a kid throws up on it,” Treinish says, ”but not if I just wore it once. It’s important what individuals do. I hope that doesn’t get lost.”"
878,"It’s been a long week for the Assali family. The Assalis are Syrian Orthodox Christians. They are not refugees. But when they arrived last week with visas and green cards, they were put back on a plane to Qatar. Then they got word that as green card holders, they would be allowed into the U. S. On Monday morning at Kennedy Airport in New York, Ghassan Assali and his family stood clutching each other, waiting for a glimpse of their six relatives. ”I’m too emotional, you know,” Ghassan said. ”I’m gonna cry.” The six grabbed their luggage from baggage claim and everyone embraced. It was an emotional reunion 13 years in the works. It was supposed to happen last weekend, but President Trump’s executive orders disrupted those plans. Matthew Assali and five others were detained and put on a plane back to the Middle East. ”On the plane, all of us was very scared, and we don’t know what happened,” Matthew said. ”We played by the rules. We don’t do anything wrong.” Assali’s brother and other family members live in Allentown, Pa. He’s long wanted to join them and escape his   country. ”For better future, for better opportunities,” Matthew said. A lawsuit on behalf of the Assalis, which the government didn’t oppose, and the support of elected officials made the second trip successful. Still, on this flight to New York,    Sarah Assali felt nervous. As she spoke, her aunt, Sarmad, translated her words from Arabic to English. ”She was very scared, and really worried that they weren’t going to make it here, even though they were on the road,” Sarmad said. ”She’s very thankful to everyone that helped them get here.” Outside JFK, Republican Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who has criticized Trump’s actions on immigration, said the Assalis’ story shows that many Americans want to welcome Syrians to resettle here. ”We’re celebrating the rule of law today,” Dent said. ”We’re celebrating fairness and justice. And most of all, we’re celebrating a wonderful family.” The celebration will continue in Allentown. The family dinner Sarmad planned last week will happen Monday. ”And hopefully tomorrow is a new day, where we start with school registration, and we build our future,” Sarmad said. It’s a future she hopes will one day take them back to their native Damascus, but as long as the Syrian conflict continues, they’ll keep building their lives in the United States."
879,"President Trump’s executive order on immigration restricting travel to the U. S. for travelers from seven   countries led to a firestorm of criticism, lawsuits and injunctions by five federal judges staying the order. But questions remain about who can and can’t come to this country. Among those caught in the confusion are a number of prominent musicians, whose personal lives  —   and livelihoods  —   have been put on hold. Omar Souleyman is a Syrian singer who in recent years has collaborated with Björk and performed at the Nobel Peace Prize concert. Five years ago, he moved to the southeast of Turkey to avoid the war at home in Syria. Souleyman has a new album on the way, and he was planning a U. S. tour to promote it. He’s toured the U. S. 16 times before. This time around, says his manager, Mina Tosti, they were planning tour dates in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and Arizona, and were in the thick of planning an appearance at the SXSW festival in March as well. The visa paperwork for this trip was already well underway when the executive order was announced. When Tosti visited the homepage of the U. S. Embassy in Ankara last week, she saw this notice: ”’If you already have an appointment scheduled,’” she reads aloud, ”’please DO NOT ATTEND.’ Capital letters.” She says there’s an unspoken message behind those words: ”You are not welcome. Do not come near us.” Now that the order is in limbo, Tosti is not sure what to do. Neither is immigration lawyer Matthew Covey, who heads a U. S. nonprofit called Tamizdat that advocates for foreign artists and helps facilitate their visa applications. ”For the arts, it’s really not a resolution at all,” Covey asserts. ”Because at least for performing arts programmers, the temporary restraining order is just that. We don’t know when or if it will disappear, and we’ll go back to the ban. So if you’re running a performing arts organization here in the U. S. and you’re trying to figure out who to book for June, July, even for March  —   there are very few presenters who are going to risk contracting with an artist from one of the seven countries now for any point in the foreseeable future.” Among those left hanging are some of the world’s top musicians. Kayhan Kalhor is a virtuoso of the Persian kamancheh, a bowed stringed instrument. Kalhor is a   Grammy Award nominee and a longtime collaborator of cellist   Ma. Kalhor was born and raised in Iran, but he is a Canadian citizen  —   and he lives in California. Right now, he’s on tour in Iran. Isabel Soffer was hoping to help him tour the U. S. in May. She’s an American who produces concerts and festivals across the country and works extensively with artists from the Middle East. ”So many of these incredible artists from all over the world are doing this dance,” Soffer observes, ”because so many of them have complex lives based around mobility. Where do they belong? Where do they live? What passports do they have? How do they function?” Mahdyar Aghajani is an Iranian producer and composer   in this country for his score for the film ”No One Knows About Persian Cats”  —   a ” ” about Iran’s banned underground music scene. ”Until two years ago,” Aghajani says, ”we were considered satanists.” He’s now based in Paris. Speaking via Skype, he says he still manages a   collective called Moltafet back home. ”They cannot work in Iran,” he says, ”because the government is against them, so they’re illegal. They cannot officially monetize their music.” So Aghajani was hoping to bring Moltafet to the U. S. to reach both the Iranian diaspora here and mainstream   fans. ”And we had so many states [as] part of the tour,” Aghajani says, ”and now this thing has put everything on hold, basically, because half our plan is now nothing.” Aghajani says that as an Iranian artist, he’s already had to figure out how to knock down official hurdles. And he thinks that what he and his friends have gone through can be a model for others. ”The borders, they cannot stop us,” Aghajani says. ”Right now, with all this technology, we don’t have to physically be there to do a show. I mean, you’ve got projection to hologram to augmented reality, virtual reality, all these streaming services. There’s so many technologies right now that we have access to, that I think the artists should be creative, like they shouldn’t be scared or hopeless or anything like that. Imagine if I had this mentality  —   we had Ahmadinejad. I know Trump is very bad and everything, but Ahmadinejad was way crazier, I think!” For now, attorney Matthew Covey of the organization Tamizdat is offering to prepare and file visa applications, pro bono, for artists from any of the seven countries named in the executive order, no matter what happens."
880,"The Netherlands was the first to ask to be second . .. but they certainly weren’t the last. Take a moment to think back to President Trump’s inauguration. (It’s tough to remember, we know. A lot has happened since then.) In his speech, Trump delivered the following memorable line: ”From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first.” The phrase ”America First” has a long history tied to isolationism and   as NPR’s Greg Myre and Scott Simon have recently explained. But for one Dutch comedy show, the phrase carried something else . .. Opportunity. On Jan. 23, just days after the inauguration, Zondag Met Lubach posted an ”introduction video about the Netherlands,” narrated in a    . The video promoted Dutch language, culture and landscapes, offering biting commentary of Trump along the way: ”This is the Afsluitdijk. It’s a great, great wall that we built to protect us from all the water from Mexico. . .. ”In December we’ve got this scandalous tradition of Black Pete. It’s the most offensive, the most racist thing you’ve ever seen. You’ll love it, it’s great. ”We also have a disabled politician for you to make fun of. . .. ” ”We totally understand it’s going to be America First,” the video concluded. ”But can we just say, The Netherlands Second? Is that okay?” That was two weeks ago. The video went viral, racking up more than 20 million views on YouTube. And in the last four days, a host of other nations created matching videos in a strange satirical contest to win the No. 2 spot in Trump’s heart. Switzerland threw its hat into the ring, by way of SRF Comedy . .. Denmark, by Natholdet . .. And many more, as videos, often produced by comedy TV shows, have poured in  —   from Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Portugal. On Monday, Italy and Croatia chimed in. Morocco made a pitch for a   nation to take the slot. A website, EverySecondCounts. eu, popped up to keep track of all the ”entries.” The videos are a mix of straightforward national pride  —   Switzerland praising its mountains, the Netherlands and Germany espousing the virtues of their languages  —   and a     emphasis on national shames. In the original video, the Netherlands highlighted its racist Christmas blackface tradition (which is real). Switzerland, for its part, presented this: ”We also love to treat our women badly. Love it. We didn’t let them vote until 1971. In some places even until 1990. We grabbed them by the civil rights. And they let us do it! It was great.” ”Just like you, we had one of the best slavery businesses in the 17th century,” Morocco submitted. ”We also have the best TV channels in Morocco. Our state TV station even teaches women how to cover up bruises due to domestic violence.” And then there’s Germany, of course: ”Great leader, so smart, great hair, great suit, look at his suit. He made Germany great again. The media totally loved him. Wrote only nice things about him. Great guy. Total winner. His book a bestseller,” the narrator drones, over photos of Adolf Hitler. ”Steve Bannon absolutely loves him,” he says. And upon occasion, the videos strike a serious policy note. ”And last but not least, we’ve got a great, great, great dependency on the United States,” the original Dutch video intoned. ”It’s huge. If you screw NATO you’re going to make our problems great again. . .. Please don’t.” You can watch more of the videos below, and keep an eye on Every Second Counts for new entries. Rumor has it entries from Spain, Slovakia and Australia are on their way."
881,"Charles Lindbergh became an instant American hero when he piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in 1927, the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic. Lindbergh was an icon in Europe as well, and he moved to England in the late 1930s. By 1941, though, he was back home, touring the U. S. as the leading voice of the America First Committee  —   an isolationist group of some 800, 000 members that claimed England was trying to drag America into a war he thought it should avoid. ”I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed,” Lindbergh said in 1941, just months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the U. S. into World War II. A few momentous years later, after the devastation of the war, isolationism was out of fashion. Instead, America became the driving force in establishing a global web that defines the world to this day  —   NATO, the United Nations, a strong U. S. military presence in Asia, open seas, a host of trade agreements. These arrangements are now being challenged by President Trump. He has often described them as a burden the U. S. should shed, and he has distilled his approach into the phrase ”America First.” ”From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first,” Trump said at his inaugural on Jan. 20. Trump has never made the connection to Lindbergh and his group, and there are both similarities and differences. In foreign policy lingo, Lindbergh and his group were isolationists. They wanted to keep the U. S. out of most foreign entanglements. Trump is more commonly described as a unilateralist  —   someone who thinks the U. S. can be engaged around the world, but on its own terms, unconstrained by alliances or multinational groups like the United Nations. Still, Trump, like Lindbergh before him, argues the U. S. should not be the world’s policeman. Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group, which analyzes global risk, explained Trump’s worldview this way in an interview with NPR: ”The U. S. should not be promoting its values internationally. It should not be telling other counties how they run themselves. The multilateral institutions that the U. S. has had a significant role in are part of that problem.” A focus on burdens, Trump has plenty of company in attacking the global status quo. Liberals and conservatives argue that institutions like the U. N. and NATO should, at minimum, be restructured to keep up with a world that has changed dramatically since they were established. Critics also point to U. S. military actions that have resulted in inconclusive wars at enormous costs. ”Many Americans looked at the policies of the past decades and saw that the U. S. acting as the global sheriff did not benefit them,” Bremmer said. ”It was trillions of dollars wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan, with thousands of American lives lost . .. and they don’t want to see that anymore.” Trump has talked mostly about disrupting the world order, without saying what would replace it. Yet if the U. S. simply recedes from its superpower role, Russia, China and Iran and others would gladly step in to fill that void, according to many analysts. ”The international order that America created is now under unprecedented threat from multiple directions,” retired Gen. David Petraeus warned recently on Capitol Hill. Petraeus said the U. S. still has the resources to be a superpower, but he worries about ”something perhaps even more pernicious  —   a loss of   resolve and strategic clarity on America’s part about our vital interest in preserving and protecting the system we sacrificed so much to bring into being.” Trump has focused on the burdens rather than intangible benefits that the U. S. received by working to shape the world in its image for decades. He argues that NATO allies aren’t pulling their weight, those U. S. troops in Asia since World War II are too expensive, and trade agreements are costing American workers their jobs. ”For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military,” Trump declared at his inaugural. Lindbergh changes course, Lindbergh once expressed similar sentiments. ”The doctrine that we must enter the wars of Europe in order to defend America will be fatal to our nation if we follow it,” he said in 1941. But then came Pearl Harbor, and that changed everything. Lindbergh’s movement collapsed  —   and he not only backed the U. S. war effort, he joined it. Although he had civilian, not military status, he still manged to fly more than 50 combat missions in the Pacific. And after the war was over, he was often back in Europe, supporting the U. S. effort to rebuild the Continent. Every president faces unexpected crises, and as Trump sets his course in a volatile world, his own interpretation of America First may also be challenged. Greg Myre is a national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1"
882,"Editor’s note: This piece includes quotes from James Baldwin in which he uses a racial slur. Fimmaker Raoul Peck’s   documentary I Am Not Your Negro features the work of the late writer, poet, and social critic James Baldwin. Baldwin’s writing explored race, class and sexuality in Western society, and at the time of his death in 1987, he was working on a book, Remember This House. It was never completed, but his notes for that project became the foundation for Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro. Among those notes was a letter J Baldwin wrote to his literary agent, Jay Acton, in 1979. In that letter, he wrote that he wanted to explore the lives of three of his civil rights movement contemporaries and close personal friends: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. ”I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other as in truth they did,” he wrote, ”and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much who betrayed them and for whom they gave their lives.” Peck had been wanting to make a film about Baldwin for years, but he says it felt like an impossible one to make. When he first read Baldwin’s letter, he knew he had the basis for that film. ”I had access to those notes, which for me was the real opening I needed to address the film I wanted to make  —   which was how do I make sure that people today come back to Baldwin and the important writer that he was, and the important words that he have written, and [have] this   confrontation with reality today with words that he wrote 40, 50 years ago?” The   filmmaker has been a fan of Baldwin’s writing since he was a teenager. ”He helped me understand the world I was in,” Peck says. ”He helped me understand America. He helped me understand the place I was given in this country.” And Peck wanted to do the same with I Am Not Your Negro. In the documentary, he weaves together archival images and footage to illustrate the impact Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had  —   the ways in which they were different, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which they were alike. Peck says MLK Jr and Malcolm X are often portrayed as being polar opposites in the civil rights movement, but at the times of their deaths, they had in fact become increasingly interested in economic injustice and the class disparity. ”One of the important parts of this story is that both of them were leaving the race issue, because they understood that it was just one side of the battle,” Peck says. ”It’s about class  —   how in this country, the classes reproduce themselves. If you’re born rich, you have a 99% chance to stay rich. If you are born poor, you have a 99% chance to stay poor. That’s the big great story of the American dream. It was always the dream of a minority.” But I Am Not Your Negro isn’t just a history of the civil rights movement, or its key players. The film also examines, as James Baldwin did in his writing, institutions of racism and the ways they have been upheld throughout the years in American society by people in power, even by Hollywood, through stereotypes and erasure. ”Leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are, in one way, too familiar with already. What this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality,” Baldwin said. ”This means, in the case of an American negro, born in that glittering republic. And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone, every face is white, and since you have not seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians  —   when you were rooting for Gary Cooper  —   that the Indians were you! It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.” Peck says Baldwin deconstructed Hollywood, ”and all the soft power that Hollywood means, and the lies that is also transported in those films. This is something that we need to confront ourselves with.” Indeed, confronting ourselves is at the core of I Am Not Your Negro. When Peck began working on the film ten years ago, he meant to rely mostly on Baldwin’s words. As he worked, however, the narrative shifted. ”It became scarier and scarier because I realized I was making a film where the reality was galloping even quicker than I was making it. At the time, my concern was, how do I put these important words of James Baldwin on the front row? You know, how do I make them accessible to the new generation? And as I was editing this film, we started to have those images of young black men being killed  —   of the resistance, of Black Lives Matter, of young people again going on the streets to protest. And it was incredible to see. It’s happening again, almost the same words and the same anger. And then you see that, my God, nothing have changed fundamentally.” So Peck turns Baldwin’s words into a mirror on modern audiences by juxtaposing the archival tape of the civil rights movement, or Baldwin’s speeches and television appearances, with carefully chosen contemporary footage. As Baldwin speaks about the possibility or impossibility of a black president, Peck plays tape from the first Obama inauguration. As Baldwin talks about how black people have seen the ”corpses of your brothers and sisters pile up around you, not from anything they have done  —   they were too young to have done anything,” the film shows photographs of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin. And, in a 1963 television segment titled ”The Negro and the American Promise,” as Baldwin speaks about the way Malcolm X validates protesters’ existence, a young black protester shouts ”I am” on the streets of Ferguson in 2013  —   and Baldwin muses, ”There are days  —   this is one of them  —   when I wonder, how precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here, and how are you going to communicate to the vast heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here?” Raoul Peck says that Baldwin always spoke directly to his audiences  —   then and even now  —   and his words were frank and direct without being cruel. Baldwin put the onus of change squarely on people in positions of power and privilege. ”What white people have to do,” Baldwin said once, ”is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.” Because, as Baldwin wrote, ”not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced.”"
883,"Updated at 10:30 p. m. ET  President Trump, in another broadside against the news media, on Monday accused ”the dishonest press” of failing to report terrorist attacks. But in a list put out by the White House later Monday evening, many of the attacks cited, such as the attack the Orlando night club shooting last June and 2015 attacks in San Bernardino, Calif. and Paris were extensively covered by the media around the clock. Speaking to troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, the headquarters of the U. S. Central Command, Trump cited a series of recent attacks and then added, ”It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even reported, and in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t even want to report it.” Trump told the troops that the media ”have their reasons, and you understand that,” but didn’t elaborate beyond that. Trump initially cited no examples of the media’s failure to report terrorist attacks. Onboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington with the president, press secretary Sean Spicer said terrorist attacks ”aren’t exactly covered to a degree on which they should be” and said they would release a full list of examples soon. Late Monday evening, the White House did just that. According to a White House official, the point they were trying to make ”is that these terrorists attacks are so pervasive at this point that they do not spark the    coverage they once did.” ”If you look back just a few years ago, any one of these attacks would have been ubiquitous in every news outlet, and now they’re happening so often . .. that networks are not devoting to each of them the same level of coverage they once did,” the administration official continued. PolitiFact rated Trump’s claim as ”Pants on Fire,” writing that they ”found no support for the idea that the media is hushing up terrorist attacks on U. S. or European soil. The media may sometimes be cautious about assigning religious motivation to a terrorist attack when the facts are unclear or still being investigated. But that’s not the same as covering them up through lack of coverage. There is plenty of coverage of in the American media of terrorist attacks.” Numerous journalists have been killed by terrorists, including freelance reporter James Foley, who was the first American to die at the hands of ISIS, in 2014. Many others have died covering fighting related to the war on terrorism, including NPR photographer David Gilkey and interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna, who were killed last June while covering the fighting in Afghanistan. The Committee to Protect Journalists keeps a tally of journalists killed each year. Here’s the entire unedited (we did not fix misspellings, for example) list of 78 attacks from September 2014 to December 2016 provided by the White House: MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, September, 2014, TARGET: Two police officers wounded in knife attack, ATTACKER: Abdul Numan Haider, TIZI OUZOU, ALGERIA, September, 2014, TARGET: One French citizen beheaded, ATTACKER: Jund   in Algeria, QUEBEC, CANADA, October, 2014, TARGET: One soldier killed and one wounded in vehicle attack, ATTACKER: Martin   OTTAWA, CANADA, October, 2014, TARGET: One soldier killed at war memorial two wounded in shootings at Parliament building, ATTACKER: Michael   NEW YORK CITY, NY, USA, October, 2014, TARGET: Two police officers wounded in knife attack, ATTACKER: US person, RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA, November, 2014, TARGET: One Danish citizen wounded in shooting, ATTACKERS: Three Saudi   ISIL members, ABU DHABI, UAE, DATE: December 2014, TARGET: One American killed in knife attack, ATTACKER: Dalal   SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, December, 2014, TARGET: Two Australians killed in hostage taking and shooting, ATTACKER: Man Haron Monis, TOURS, FRANCE, December, 2014, TARGET: Three police officers wounded in knife attack, ATTACKER: Bertrand Nzohabonayo, PARIS, FRANCE, January, 2015, TARGET: One police officer and four hostages killed in shooting at a kosher supermarket, ATTACKER: Amedy Coulibaly, TRIPOLI, LIBYA, January, 2015, TARGET: Ten killed, including one US citizen, and five wounded in bombing and shooting at a hotel frequented by westerners, ATTACKERS: As many as five   members, RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA, January, 2015, TARGET: Two US citizens wounded in shooting, ATTACKER: Saudi   ISIL supporter, NICE, FRANCE, February, 2015, TARGET: Two French soldiers wounded in knife attack outside a Jewish community center, ATTACKER: Moussa Coulibaly, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, February, 2015, TARGET: One civilian killed in shooting at a   rally and one security guard killed outside the city’s main synagogue, ATTACKER: Omar Abdel Hamid   TUNIS, TUNISIA, March, 2015, TARGET: 21 tourists killed, including 16 westerners, and 55 wounded in shooting at the Bardo Museum, ATTACKERS: Two   extremists, KARACHI, PAKISTAN, April, 2015, TARGET: One US citizen wounded in knife attack, ATTACKERS:   ISIL supporters, PARIS, FRANCE, April, 2015, TARGET: Catholic churches targeted one civilian killed in shooting, possibly during an attempted carjacking, ATTACKER: Sid Ahmed Ghlam, ZVORNIK, BOSNIA, April, 2015, TARGET: One police officer killed and two wounded in shooting, ATTACKER: Nerdin Ibric, GARLAND, TX, USA, May, 2015, TARGET: One security guard wounded in shooting at the Prophet Muhammad cartoon event, ATTACKERS: Two US persons, BOSTON, MA, USA, June, 2015, TARGET: No casualties one police officer attacked with knife, ATTACKER: US person, EL GORA (AL JURAH) EGYPT, June, 2015, TARGET: No casualties camp used by Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) troops attacked in shooting and bombing attack, ATTACKERS: Unknown number of   members, LUXOR, EGYPT, June, 2015, TARGET: One police officer killed by suicide bomb near the Temple of Karnak, ATTACKER: Unidentified, SOUSSE, TUNISIA, June, 2015, TARGET: 38 killed and 39 wounded in shooting at a beach frequented by westerners, ATTACKERS: Seifeddine Rezgui and another unidentified attacker, LYON, FRANCE, June, 2015, TARGET: One civilian killed in beheading and explosion at a chemical plant, ATTACKER: Yasin Salhi, CAIRO, EGYPT, July, 2015, TARGET: One killed and nine wounded in VBIED attack at Italian Consulate, ATTACKER: Unidentified ISIL operatives, CAIRO, EGYPT, July, 2015, TARGET: One Croatian national kidnapped beheaded on August 12 at an unknown location, ATTACKER: Unidentified   operative, PARIS, FRANCE, August, 2015, TARGET: Two civilians and one US soldier wounded with firearms and knife on a passenger train, ATTACKER: Ayoub   EL GORA, EGYPT, September, 2015, TARGET: Four US and two MFO troops wounded in IED attack, ATTACKER: Unidentified, DHAKA, BANGLADESH, September, 2015, TARGET: One Italian civilian killed in shooting, ATTACKER: Unidentified, COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, September, 2015, TARGET: One police officer wounded in knife attack, ATTAKER: Palestinian national, EL GORA, EGYPT, October, 2015, TARGET: No casualties airfield used by MFO attacked with rockets, ATTAKER: Unidentified   operatives, PARRAMATTA, AUSTRALIA, October, 2015, TARGET: One police officer killed in shooting, ATTAKER: Farhad Jabar, RANGPUR, BANGLADESH, October, 2015, TARGET: One Japanese civilian killed in shooting, ATTAKER: Unidentified, HASANAH, EGYPT, October, 2015, TARGET: 224 killed in downing of a Russian airliner, ATTAKER: Unidentified   operatives, MERCED, CA, US, November, 2015, TARGET: Four wounded in knife attack on a college campus, ATTAKER: US person, PARIS, FRANCE, November, 2015, TARGET: At least 129 killed and approximately 400 wounded in series of shootings and IED attacks, ATTAKERS: Brahim Abdelslam, Saleh Abdeslam, Ismail Mostefai, Bilal Hadfi, Samy Amimour, Chakib Ahrouh, Foued Mohamed Aggad, and Abdelhamid Abaaoud, DINAJPUR, BANGLADESH, November, 2015, TARGET: One Italian citizen wounded in shooting, ATTAKER: Unidentified, RAJLOVAC, BOSNIA, December, 2015, TARGET: Two Bosnian soldiers killed in shooting, ATTAKER: Enes Omeragic, SAN BERNADINO, CA, US, December, 2015, TARGET: 14 killed and 21 wounded in coordinated firearms attack, ATTAKERS: Two US persons, LONDON, ENGLAND, UK, December, 2015, TARGET: Three wounded in knife attack at an underground rail station, ATTAKER: Muhyadin Mire, DERBENT, RUSSIA, December, 2015, TARGET: One killed and 11 wounded in shooting at UN World Heritage site, ATTAKER: Unidentified   operative, CAIRO, EGYPT, January, 2016, TARGET: Two wounded in   shooting outside a hotel frequented by tourists, ATTAKERS: Unidentified ISIL operatives, PARIS, FRANCE, January, 2016, TARGET: No casualties attacker killed after attempted knife attack on Paris police station, ATTAKER: Tarek Belgacem, PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, January, 2016, TARGET: One police officer wounded in shooting, ATTAKER: US person, HURGHADA, EGYPT, January, 2016, TARGET: One German and one Danish national wounded in knife attack at a tourist resort, ATTAKER: Unidentified, MARSEILLES, FRANCE, January, 2016, TARGET: One Jewish teacher wounded in machete attack, ATTAKER: 15   Ethnic Kurd from Turkey, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, January, 2016, TARGET: 12 German tourists killed and 15 wounded in suicide bombing, ATTAKER: Nabil Fadli, JAKARTA, INDONESIA, January, 2016, TARGET: Four civilians killed and more than 20 wounded in coordinated bombing and firearms attacks near a police station and a Starbucks, ATTAKERS: Dian Joni Kurnaiadi, Muhammad Ali, Arif Sunakim, and Ahmad Muhazan bin Saron, COLUMBUS, OH, US, February, 2016, TARGET: Four civilians wounded in machete attack at a restaurant, ATTAKER: US person, HANOVER, GERMANY, February, 2016, TARGET: One police officer wounded in knife attack, ATTAKER: Safia Schmitter, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, March, 2016, TARGET: Four killed and 36 wounded in suicide bombing in the tourist district, ATTAKER: Mehmet Ozturk, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, March, 2016, TARGET: At least 31 killed and 270 wounded in coordinated bombings at Zaventem Airport and on a subway train, ATTAKERS: Khalid   Ibrahim   Najim Laachraoui, Mohammed Abrini, and Osama Krayem, ESSEN, GERMANY, April, 2016, TARGET: Three wounded in bombing at Sikh temple, ATTAKERS: Three identified minors, ORLANDO, FL, US, June, 2016, TARGET: 49 killed and 53 wounded in shooting at a nightclub, ATTAKER: US person, MAGNANVILLE, FRANCE, June, 2016, TARGET: One police officer and one civilian killed in knife attack, ATTAKER: Larossi Abballa, KABUL, AFGHANISTAN, June, 2016, TARGET: 14 killed in suicide attack on a bus carrying Canadian Embassy guards, ATTAKER:   operative, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, June, 2016, TARGET: 45 killed and approximately 240 wounded at Ataturk International Airport, ATTACKERS: Rakhim Bulgarov, Vadim Osmanov, and an unidentified ISIL operative, DHAKA, BANGLADESH, July, 2016, TARGET: 22 killed, including one American and 50 wounded after   siege using machetes and firearms at holy Artisan Bakery, ATTACKERS: Nibras Islam, Rohan Imtiaz, Meer Saameh Mubasheer, Khairul Islam Paye, and Shafiqul Islam Uzzal, NICE, FRANCE, July, 2016, TARGET: 84 civilians killed and 308 wounded by an individual who drove a truck into a crowd, ATTACKER: Mohamed Bouhlel, WURZBURG, GERMANY, July, 2016, TARGET: Four civilians wounded in axe attack on a train, ATTACKER: Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, ANSBACH, GERMANY, July, 2016, TARGET: At least 15 wounded in suicide bombing at a music festival, ATTACKER: Mohammad Daleel, NORMANDY, FRANCE, July, 2016, TARGET: One priest killed in knife attack, ATTACKERS: Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Nabil Petitjean, CHALEROI, BELGIUM, August, 2016, TARGET: Two police officers wounded in machete attack, ATTACKER: Khaled Babouri, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA, August, 2016, TARGET: Two killed and one wounded in knife attack at a hostel frequented by Westerners, ATTACKER: Smail Ayad, COPENHAGEN, DENMAKR, September, 2016, TARGET: Two police officers and a civilian wounded in shooting, ATTACKER: Mesa Hodzic, PARIS, FRANCE, September, 2016, TARGET: One police officer wounded in raid after VBIED failed to detonate at Notre Dame Cathedral, ATTACKERS: Sarah Hervouet, Ines Madani, and Amel Sakaou, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, September, 2016, TARGET: One civilian wounded in knife attack, ATTACKER: Ihsas Khan, September, 2016, TARGET: 10 wounded in knife attack in a mall, ATTACKER: Dahir Ahmed Adan, NEW YORK, NY SEASIDE PARK AND ELIZABETH, NJ, US, September, 2016, TARGET: 31 wounded in bombing in New York City several explosive devices found in New York and New Jersey one exploded without casualty at race in New Jersey one police officer wounded in shootout, ATTACKER: Ahmad Khan Rahami, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, October, 2016, TARGET: Two police officers wounded in stabbing, ATTACKER: Belgian national, KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT, TARGET: No casualties vehicle carrying three US soldiers hit by a truck, ATTACKER: Ibrahim Sulayman, MALMO, SWEDEN, October, 2016, TARGET: No casualties mosque and community center attacked with Molotov cocktail, ATTACKER: Syrian national, HAMBURG, GERMANY, October, 2016, TARGET: One killed in knife attack, ATTACKER: Unknown, MANILA, PHILIPPINES, November, 2016, TARGET: No casualties failed IED attempt near US Embassy, ATTACKERS: Philippine nationals aligned with the Maute group, COLUMBUS, OH, US, November, 2016, TARGET: 14 wounded by individuals who drove a vehicle into a group of pedestrians and attacked them with a knife, ATTACKER: US person, N’DJAMENA, CHAD, November, 2016, TARGET: No casualties attacker arrested after opening fire at entrance of US Embassy, ATTACKER: Chadian national, KARAK, JORDAN, December, 2016, TARGET: 10 killed and 28 wounded in shooting at a tourist site, ATTACKERS: Several gunmen, BERLIN, GERMANY, December, 2016, TARGET: 12 killed and 48 wounded by individual who drove truck into a crowded market, ATTACKER: Anis Amri, Domenico Montanaro contributed."
884,"Moriah, N. Y. is a tiny, sleepy place on the shore of Lake Champlain. Not so long ago, this was a major industrial port. Iron ore carved out of the hills here was packed onto train cars and barges. That iron ore helped build America’s cities, but ”then it all came to an abrupt halt,” Tom Scozzafava says. Scozzafava grew up in Moriah and now serves as town supervisor. He remembers the good times and he remembers the summer the good times stopped. ”1971, the miners  —   600 of them  —   went home for their annual August vacation and they were never called back,” he says. It didn’t just happen in one town or one state. Beginning after World War II and accelerating in the ’70s and ’80s, rural economists say much of small town America began a painful decline, shedding jobs and losing population. These are the parts of America where voters felt like Donald Trump was speaking directly to them. ”The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” President Trump said in his inaugural address. ”Rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” Critics pounced on the president’s language, suggesting it was too bleak, too apocalyptic. But rural policy experts like Dave Swenson say it’s pretty accurate for a lot of small town America. Swenson studies rural communities and economic development for the state of Iowa. ”  of our 99 counties [in Iowa] have posted population declines,” Swenson says. ”Those folks have had to migrate.”   Young people moved away to the cities, main streets dried up. Swenson says people left behind feel angry, humiliated. ”What’s left out in many of these places are the people that were unable to migrate, people who were unable to find new occupations or   themselves into new trades,” Swenson says. The question now is whether Trump’s policies and ideas can change things, driving jobs and investment and people back to places like rural Iowa or Moriah, N. Y. Rural experts who spoke with NPR are skeptical. They say taking a tougher line with China or Mexico likely won’t cause a surge of new manufacturing in small towns. ”About 65 to 80 percent of the manufacturing losses in our country are directly related to automation and technology,” says Chuck Fluharty, who heads an organization called the Rural Policy Research Institute. Those kinds of job cuts can’t be reversed by tariffs or trade deals. Fluharty says what rural America needs is an investment in what he describes as human capital, health care and education. He also says small towns need to open their doors to immigrants. ”The rural regions that will thrive in the future are the ones where that diversity is strongly expressed,” Fluharty says. But efforts to create any kind of path to citizenship for undocumented families living in rural America seem unlikely to move forward. Rural economists say the new administration could boost some regions in the short term with big investments in infrastructure, roads and bridges. Parts of the country could also see a boom from increased oil or gas production. Still, most policy experts think the   trends hurting small towns  —   urbanization, globalization and mechanization  —   won’t change much under President Trump. And if he can’t deliver on his promise to make rural America great again, this could be one of the biggest political challenges he faces."
885,"Lancaster, Ohio, the home of the Fortune 500 company Anchor Hocking, was once a bustling center of industry and employment. At its peak following World War II, Lancaster’s hometown company was the world’s largest maker of glassware and employed more than 5, 000 town residents. Though Anchor Hocking remains in Lancaster today, it is a shell of its former self, and the once thriving town is beset by underemployment and drug abuse. Lancaster native Brian Alexander chronicles the rise and fall of his hometown in his new book, Glass House. ”People are genuinely struggling,” he tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. ”The economy of the town is struggling, not because there’s high unemployment, [but] because the employment that there is all minimum wage, or even lower than minimum wage.” Fairfield County, in which Lancaster is located, went 61 percent for Donald Trump in the presidential election  —   a fact that Alexander attributes to the candidate’s message of disaffection. Alexander says on Election Day one Lancaster woman told him she voted for Trump because she wanted ”it to be like it was.” On how Lancaster was once deemed an   town, After World War II, Forbes devoted almost its entire 30th anniversary issue to Lancaster, Ohio, of all places, and positioned Lancaster as the epitome and the apogee of the   town  —   a sort of perfect balance between large industry, agriculture [and] small businesses, like retail and merchants and so on. . .. And everything was in this state of almost Utopian equilibrium, and for the most part it really was like that. Which is not to say there were not problems. There’s always been problems, there’s always been   scandals, and there’s always been an element of poverty, a fair amount of drinking in Lancaster. My grandfather used to say  —   he was an old glass man from western Pennsylvania  —   and when he would come to visit he would say that he never saw a town with more churches and more bars. . .. So it was not free of problems, but it was really, from my life, very much like Leave it to Beaver, quite honestly. On how Anchor Hocking contributed to the fabric of the town during its heyday, You had a core of   sophisticated people who made good livings working right downtown at the corner of Broad and Main Street, and more importantly, in some ways, their wives  —   remember this is ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and into the ’70s  —   their wives typically didn’t work at a   job outside the home. They threw themselves into the town. So they did hospital benefits, they did benefits for preserving the old Antebellum homes in Lancaster, they did vaccination drives, they made sure the sidewalks got repaired, the streets got paved, they attended city council meetings. This was a core of civic leadership. On the 1987 acquisition of Anchor Hocking by the Newell Corp. It was a hostile takeover. It’s still a little bit mysterious exactly how hostile it was, but they buy it in a hostile takeover, and the first thing they do is fire all of the executives and close down the headquarters. So now you have gutted a core group of people that were active in the life of the town. As one person in Lancaster, an   who I interviewed said, ”It ripped the heart out of this town.” So you’ve taken away the executives, you’ve taken away their wives, their families. . .. [It was] devastating for the town. And the new incoming people, the people Newell picked to run Anchor Hocking never lived in Lancaster they all lived in Columbus. There’s a   belief, unshakable belief, that Newell instructed its incoming executives to not live in Lancaster, so as not to be involved in the United Way and other Lancaster civic activities. I could not find any proof of that, but you cannot shake Lancasterians’ belief that that was, in fact, the case. . .. Workers will tell you that Newell was not a bad employer. They were not necessarily unhappy under Newell. It wasn’t the same it was less of a family atmosphere. Workers who are hourly people and salaried people all say the same thing. They say that the company became somewhat more efficient, that they made money, they made money for Newell, that they were not unhappy under Newell, but it didn’t feel like the old Anchor Hocking, and it never would again. On how what happened in Lancaster reflects a larger trend in capitalism, When you can pay a foreign worker a third or less of what you’re paying a unionized flint glass worker in Lancaster, that’s an element, but it’s far from the only one. We seem to have this   belief that this is all some sort of natural evolution, like how the dinosaurs died. But what I’m trying to argue in the book is that some of this, at least in part, results from a series of conscious decisions [by] politicians, economists, business people, financiers. On what Lancaster is like today, The houses, for example, are not quite as well kept up as they used to be. The west side, which has always been the working class side of town, is even more disheveled than it used to be. . .. Parents are in jail, so grandparents or aunts or uncles have the kids. I saw just the other day a map of the state of Ohio that showed the percentage of kids who are now a part of the social service system and what the percentage of their parents who are opiate users. In Fairfield County, 58 percent of the kids who are in the system, their parents used opiates. The county next door, Hocking County, it’s over 70 percent. So now you’ve got drugs in the community, which are an escape from all this sort of stuff. . .. The best thing going for Lancaster is how much people love their town, and they want it to work. But they’re up against some very tough situations. On Lancaster voters supporting Trump in the presidential election, I think partly Trump has already fulfilled at least one expectation, and that is to sort of express this sort of generalized anger and aggressiveness that they wish they could [have] and Trump, I think, is sort of their pilot in doing it for them. Ultimately, I think they’ll find that to be empty, but I can’t be sure."
886,"Why does female genital mutilation (FGM)  —   a practice that the U. N. has classified as violence against women  —   remain so entrenched in parts of the globe? Researchers in Bristol, England, have come up with a new theory. They looked at data on more that 60, 000 women over the age of 40 in five West African countries who had at least one daughter. And they found that in cultures where the practice of cutting all or part of a woman’s external genitalia is prevalent, cut women, compared to uncut women, have more babies who survive. ”In societies where cutting is the norm, being cut gives women social status and more social support among women,” says Janet Howard, lead author of the article and anthropology professor at the University of Bristol. ”They have more and better marriage opportunities”  —   and thus a better chance of bearing children. The study appears on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. In many African and some Middle Eastern countries, more than 200 million women and girls have undergone some form of genital cutting as a    ritual, according to the World Health Organization  —   and another 3 million girls are at risk of being cut each year, most of them under the age of 15. The practice has no health benefits. And its harms are  : severe bleeding and pain, infection, problems urinating, and even death, according to WHO. Over a lifetime, FGM can diminish sexual pleasure, lead to problems in childbirth, produce chronic urinary tract infections and cause depression and other mental health problems. For decades, governments and public health advocates have worked to educate people about the medical harm caused by FGM. Still, it remains widespread even as some countries pass laws to stop it, international organizations set goals to eliminate it and education efforts stress its dire health consequences. Those efforts compete with strong cultural beliefs that if a woman is not cut, she is unclean and must be ostracized by her community  —   and, in some societies, should not marry. So a woman who is not cut has a reduced chance of marrying and bearing children, says Katherine Wander, professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and author of an accompanying News  Views commentary in the journal. In those circumstances, ”not being cut is a detriment” to bearing children, says Bettina   professor of anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not part of the study. In societies where almost every woman is cut, even if an uncut woman manages to find a husband, she’s ostracized by other women, says Wander. ”When women who are not cut marry into a family with a cutting tradition, they’re treated quite horribly,” she says. ”They’re made fun of. People won’t eat the food they prepare. They’re called dirty and spiritually impure. The primary source of conflict is not with their husband but with other women in the household, who look at them with disgust.” A common strategy to reduce FGM, says Howard, is to educate groups of people, hoping to bring about a consensus that cutting is bad. ”The idea is the group changes all together, they all put down their knives and agree not to cut,” she says. ”This paper suggests that we shift our focus from the risks associated with cutting  —   most people have heard those messages already,” Wander says. A first step for public health advocates, she says, might be something as simple as building friendships among cut and uncut women through singing or dancing or based on common concerns like food or water supplies. The idea is that building social networks would lead to the next step, she says: ”talking about the benefits girls and women realize from their cut status and then providing other ways to realize those benefits.”"
887,"In Afghanistan, the number of civilian casualties reached an   high in 2016, the United Nations reported Monday. Nearly 11, 500 civilians were killed and wounded in the country last year  —   including more than 3, 500 children. It is an overall increase of 3 percent compared with 2015, which was the previous   since the U. N. began systematic documentation in 2009. Among children, the latest numbers represent a staggering 24 percent increase in injuries and deaths. Most of those child casualties came from fighting between different groups in heavily populated areas however, there was also a sharp increase because of unexploded land mines, rockets and other remnants of war. ”The U. N. blamed most of the civilian casualties on the Taliban, but it also documents an increasing number of attacks perpetrated by a   franchise of Daesh or ISIS,” Lisa Schlein reported for NPR’s Newscast unit. The U. N. attributed 899 civilian casualties to ISIS last year, up from 89 in 2015. ”After nearly 40 years of conflict in Afghanistan, U. N. officials warn Daesh is now surfacing as another deadly element in this endless war,” Schlein reported. The rise of   militants only adds another layer of instability and violence to what was already a brutal war between the government and militants. As the U. N. report published Monday makes clear, the Afghan military and police were responsible for killing or injuring some 2, 300 civilians, while NATO forces that are no longer engaged in a combat mission nonetheless were responsible for killing or injuring more than 220 civilians. The report highlighted one incident in particular, questioning whether NATO airstrikes in a densely populated part of the city of Kunduz in November 2016 complied with international humanitarian law: ”International humanitarian law obliges all parties to the conflict to do everything feasible to cancel or suspend an attack if it becomes apparent that the target is not a military objective or the attack may be expected to cause disproportionate harm to civilians. . .. ”In this regard, the use of airstrikes in a densely populated village during the night that resulted in 68 civilian casualties, including the deaths of 26 women and children and the injury of 23 others raises serious concerns.” Children are especially vulnerable. ”On 17 October, I was walking in my village when I heard a horrible explosion,” a    boy from Kunduz told U. N. investigators, who included his words in their report. ”I really don’t know what happened. Now I realize I have lost one of my legs. My brother says I was injured as a result of a   improvised explosive device detonation.” The U. N.  ’s special representative for Afghanistan, Tadamichi Yamamoto, said at a news conference Monday that he was ”particularly concerned” about the dramatic increase in the number of children being injured and killed by fighting, and also by unexploded landmines, shells and rockets left behind in populated areas. A    girl in Baghlan province told U. N. investigators the following story last July: ”Yesterday, I was playing with other children on the streets near our house in the village. I saw our neighbor, a boy who later died, holding something made of metal. I knew that it was something explosive. He told all of us ’I’m going to detonate it.’ ”I slapped him on his face and told him ’don’t do it!’ and then I moved further away from him. He began hitting the object with a stone. It exploded. I fell unconscious and I don’t know what happened next.” The explosion killed four children and injured three more, including the girl who recounted the story. ”The disproportionate rise in child casualties resulted mainly from an overall 66 percent increase in civilian casualties from unexploded remnants of war,” explained Danielle Bell, the human rights director for the U. N. mission to Afghanistan. Bell said the vast majority  —   86 percent  —   of people killed and injured by   unexploded ordnance were children. Because Afghanistan has suffered    conflicts for decades, there are unexploded military remnants from multiple conflicts. But Bell and her team found a direct correlation between casualties from exploded ordinance and areas with the heaviest ground fighting in recent years, and concluded that the majority of casualties were the result of military remnants from the conflict that began with the U. S.  invasion in 2001. The Afghan government has taken steps to identify and remove landmines and other leftover explosives, including   demining teams. However, the U. N. report found 20 incidents of violence against deminers last year by Taliban and   militants, which ”hindered demining efforts, creating further risks for civilian communities.”"
888,"When the country elects a Republican president, and there’s an opening on the U. S. Supreme Court, that president will nominate a conservative to fill the seat. The question is: What kind of a conservative? There are different kinds of conservative judges, from the pragmatist to the originalist. Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee, is a   originalist. The late Justice Antonin Scalia spent decades on the Supreme Court promoting originalism, which he defined this way: ”The constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.” Judge Gorsuch, who would succeed Scalia if confirmed, has a similar but less blunt way of putting it. In a 2016 speech, he declared that while legislators should consider policy questions and moral convictions in shaping the law, judges should do neither. Rather, ”judges should instead strive to apply the law as they find it, focusing backwards, not forwards,” on the original meaning of the Constitution when it was written 230 years ago. Todd Gaziano, senior fellow in constitutional law at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, explains originalism this way. ”The text is the best evidence,” Gaziano says. ”If a phrase in the Constitution is unclear, we look to how that phrase was used in other contexts.” Originalists try to decipher whether the phrase was a ”term of art” at the time, or look to contemporary dictionary definitions. At the announcement of his nomination last week, Gorsuch cited as his first mentor one of the Supreme Court justices he clerked for, Byron White. White, however, was a very different kind of conservative. He was a pragmatist, observes Allan Ides, who also clerked for White and is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. ”Originalism is kind of odd when you think about it,” Ides comments. Rather than ask the judge to consider the consequences of a decision, advocates of originalism want the judge to focus only on ”what would have been done 200 years ago. ”It’s a peculiar theory that I think the public is attracted to because it sounds so simple and so true, but it’s completely false,” Ides contends. Ides notes that Justice White was one of the two dissenters from the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade abortion decision. But he looked forward as well as back. ”And if you read his opinion, part of it is very pragmatic,” he observes, adding that White argued the decision would not work and went too far. ”Pragmatism, it can embrace a wide range of points of view, it’s just that it’s based on reality. So my objection to Gorsuch is I don’t like the way he thinks. I don’t think he thinks broadly enough.” Ides says Gorsuch is stuck in the ”narrow tunnel” of originalism. Ides adds that originalists aren’t the only judges who look to the original meaning of the Constitution. Liberal judges do that, too they look at the text and structure as well. Indeed, when the Supreme Court ruled   that the Constitution guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun, both the majority opinion, written by Scalia, and the dissent cited historical records to make their case. Both, Ides contends, used history in an adversarial way. ”But they’re both plausible interpretations of the history and the text,” Ides said. ”It just shows it’s kind of an empty technique. It pretends to be something it isn’t.” Ides sees the conservative agenda on the court over the past 10 to 20 years as aimed at limiting the power and role of the federal government. The potential ultimate irony is that for the Trump administration and its aggressive use of federal and executive power, that could be bad news."
889,"If you were outside in the Midwest at around 1:30 local time this morning, you might have received quite a shock. A meteor streaked across the sky in a vivid, bright green flash. It set off sonic booms that were loud enough to shake houses in   Wisconsin, as National Weather Service meteorologist Jeff Last tells The  . Take a look at this video, captured on a police dashcam in Lisle, Ill.: The meteor was visible in much of eastern Wisconsin and far northeast Illinois, Last says. He says the object likely broke up and that pieces might have ended up in Lake Michigan, though it is ”probably going to be impossible to tell” exactly what happened. Last says it is ”relatively rare to see one this vivid”  —   he says meteorologists see video like this every year or every other year from somewhere in the U. S. The American Meteor Society tracks reports of meteor sightings, and says that it received more than 200 today. Most of those reports were in Illinois and Wisconsin, but there were also sightings in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, New York, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ontario, Canada. So why the bright green color? ”It’s probably the interaction of the material in the meteor and the friction, the heat that is a result of the friction as it moves very, very rapidly through the atmosphere,” says Last. The AMS explains that the makeup of elements can impact the color we see. For example, it says the element nickel can cause a meteor to appear green. Meteors traveling at high speeds can ”intensify certain colors compared to others,” it adds."
890,"How could the first Super Bowl of the Trump era escape politics? It couldn’t. If you were just watching the game on TV, the politics were mostly subtle. Sure, there were the political ads. There were ads for everyone from NASCAR to Airbnb, which has taken on President Trump’s travel ban. But Madison Avenue seemed to care more about who won the popular vote than who won the election. The overtly political ads celebrated diversity, globalism and immigration  —   there was even one about The Wall that wasn’t allowed to show The Wall. There was social commentary packed into a contrasting pair of    ads  —   one from Audi where a father thinks to himself about all the social limitations he won’t let into his daughter’s mind, followed by a lighter ad for Mr. Clean where the husband does the cleaning. A pregame   ad brought back from 2014 featured ”America The Beautiful” sung in many different languages, which drew plenty of divided reaction. Then there was that hair ad proclaiming, ”America, we’re in for at least four years of awful hair.” For the   it’s not just a matter of how many people voted for which party last year, though. Democratic pollster Geoff Garin offered a reminder that areas that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 produce nearly   of the country’s economic output  —   a pattern that goes a long way to explain Trump’s victory. Back inside NRG Stadium in Houston it was a light touch. Things started with the   reemergence of former President George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara, who were both recently hospitalized, to conduct the coin toss. In a brief moment, cast members from the Broadway smash hit Hamilton took a jab at patriarchy, asking the Almighty to ”crown thy good with brotherhood. .. and sisterhood. .. from sea to shining sea.” (Vice President Mike Pence was again in the audience for the cast’s performance, but there was no booing this time.) The game began as kind of a shocker. The dynastic Patriots were faltering. The Atlanta Falcons were surging all through the first half, and Nate Cohn of The Upshot sent up a prophetic stat: Halftime approached with a lot of questions about tone. Lady Gaga was the lone star in the Texas night sky, emerging on the roof of the stadium with a constellation of   drones behind her. It was a collection of red drones and blue drones, at first divided, coming together as one to resemble the American flag. Before the game, Gaga had told reporters, ”I believe in the spirit of equality and the spirit of this country, as one of love and compassion and kindness.” She is no fan of Trump, but she didn’t really go there on the stage. The symbols were present throughout her performance  —   most notably singing ”Born This Way,” with its message of inclusiveness across all lines of race, sexuality and gender. Hillary Clinton liked it. But if you weren’t into the message, it was easy enough to sit back and enjoy the singing and spectacle. Lady Gaga was using a live mic, but there were no   moments. So that was it. If halftime came and went without controversy, then it seemed that the impossible had happened. The first Super Bowl of the Trump era came without politics slathered all over it. Oh, if only. Perhaps it was all teed up from the start  —   Bleacher Report, for example, framed the game as ”more than a game, but a clash of cultures.” It quoted players anonymously saying they were rooting for the Patriots because of Trump. Even a Patriots player said if they won, he would boycott the trip to the White House. Team owner Robert Kraft and star quarterback Tom Brady are friends with Trump. Brady stirred controversy during the season because a ”Make America Great Again” hat was spotted in his locker. Meanwhile, the Falcons’ owner spoke out against Trump’s immigration ban. Somehow, the Super Bowl was destined to become a rehash of the 2016 campaign. There was no way the Patriots could come back, right? They were down by 18 at the half, and the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history had been just 10. It wasn’t even within the margin of error. Well, New England came out of the locker room ready to claw back in the second half. The Falcons, with their   lead, as interpreted by the statisticians, were about to face their own version of the blue wall. Danny Amendola was prepared to Make The Patriots Great Again. The improbable      conversions. The first overtime in Super Bowl history. The Patriots did everything they needed to do, and there just weren’t enough votes left in Detroit or the Philly suburbs to turn it around. If you were inside the often insufferable world of Beltway Twitter Sunday night (that many of us inhabit) there was no risk of missing out on the joke. OK, I’ll admit, it was hard to resist. The president, of all people, was mum on Twitter during the game after a weekend of blasting a ”  judge” over blocking Trump’s immigration order. In the end, Trump  —   who got pretty close with a prediction of an   Patriots win  —   was excited for his victorious friends Brady, Belichick and Kraft. And, as for the experts, well, again we were hearing that probability ain’t perfect. We have reflected in the past on whether social media ruined the 2016 election. It would be grossly out of proportion to suggest that the political rabbit hole some on Twitter went down last night ruined anything  —   especially when you see how happy Gronk was."
891,"The federal conspiracy trials against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his followers is beginning on Monday, with jury selection for the trial of six of Bundy’s supporters. The cases, stemming from a 2014 armed standoff against federal agents in Nevada, are unfolding in several stages. Bundy and his four sons are among the 17 total defendants but won’t be immediately entering the courtroom. Instead, the first phase involves six of Bundy’s followers, each facing up to 101 years in prison, according to The Associated Press. The six men  —   from Idaho, Arizona and Oklahoma  —   have been ”characterized as the least culpable ’followers and gunmen’ among the 19 men arrested a year ago,” the AP writes. (Two of the men arrested already pleaded guilty to conspiracy, the news service explains the other 17 men are the defendants in the current case.) ”They’re not the Bundys,” an attorney for one of the men tells the AP. ”But realistically, this is a Bundy case. The outcome of this trial affects the other two.” The underlying conflict that led to the armed standoff in Nevada goes back decades. Since the ’90s, Bundy had refused to pay required grazing permits and fees to the U. S. government  —   the government says he owes about a million dollars, all told. A court ordered him to remove his cattle from federal lands. NPR’s Kirk Siegler explains what came next: ”It all boiled over in April of 2014 when federal agents came to round up hundreds of his cows near his ranch in the Nevada desert. ”They were met by the the armed Bundy militia, some on horseback, waving American flags. Interstate 15 was blocked. Guns were drawn and things got extremely tense. Federal agents in   combat fatigues eventually stood down. . .. Cliven Bundy wasn’t arrested until almost two years later.” Bundy’s arrest early last year came about because of another     armed standoff between   militants and the U. S. government. Two of his sons, Ammon and Ryan, were leading an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in early 2016. Cliven Bundy flew up to join them, and was arrested in Portland, Ore. In the months since, the Malheur occupiers surrendered  —   and then, in a surprising court decision, several occupiers were acquitted of charges that they conspired to keep federal employees from doing their jobs. The result emboldened the Bundy militia in Oregon, as Kirk reported at the time. And it may have prosecutors on the Cliven Bundy cases rethinking their strategy, Kirk reports. He spoke with Rick Pocker, former U. S. attorney for Nevada, who said, ”The pressure is really on the government. ”If there’s two straight acquittals, of individuals who engage in pretty much the same conduct and it’s very confrontational, that could embolden a lot of folks on the right wing of the ideological spectrum,” Pocker told Kirk. And there’s another wrinkle in the cases, the AP reports: ”The government may also have to overcome a potentially damaging new BLM inspector general ethics and conduct report, made public this week. ”It said the Salt Lake   land management supervisory agent who headed the Bundy cattle roundup misused his position during the 2015 Burning Man festival in northern Nevada, and manipulated a hiring process so a friend could get a bureau job.” In general, jury selection will be important in this case as a whole, Kirk reports sentiments on the federal government and land issues can vary widely between rural and urban communities. Jury selection is expected to take several days."
892,"Plants that feed on flesh have fascinated scientists going all the way back to Charles Darwin, and researchers now have new insight into how these   evolved. Even plants that evolved continents away from one another rely on strikingly similar tricks to digest their prey. ”The pathways to evolving a carnivorous plant, and in particular, to a pitcher plant, may be very restricted,” says Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo. In the journal Nature Ecology  Evolution, he and his colleagues say they’ve found genetic changes related to carnivory in Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants. Unlike the famous Venus flytrap, which has jaws that snap shut, pitcher plants trap insects by luring them into a   leaf with slippery sides. Once bugs fall in, they don’t make it back out. Instead, they get stuck in a liquid that breaks down their exoskeleton and flesh, giving the plant the nutrients it needs to survive in a   environment. Scientists have long wondered how   plants like these developed such an unusual lifestyle. ”It’s kind of counterintuitive that a plant is actually using an animal for some of its food,” says Albert, who says he has been fascinated by carnivorous plants since he was a kid. ”We usually think of animals, such as ourselves, as using plants.” To explore genetic changes that might allow plants to catch and digest prey, Albert and his colleagues first focused on the Australian pitcher plant. This plant has two different types of leaves  —   plain old leaves that photosynthesize and specialized leaves that form into the   pitcher. The researchers sequenced the plant’s DNA and then looked to see which genes were turned on in each type of leaf. ”What we found is that certain genes are only on in the pitcher leaf, or preferentially on in the pitcher leaf, and that some of these very likely have to do with the trap development,” Albert says. The researchers also took samples of fluid from this plant’s traps to analyze the stew of digestive enzymes and other proteins, and compared it to fluid from the unrelated American and Asian pitcher plant species. They also looked at digestive juices in another carnivorous plant, a sundew, which has leaves with sticky little hairs that trap insects like flypaper. What they found is that all of the plants seemed to rely on similar enzymes  —   despite the fact that these plants evolved independently. ”In a number of cases, the very same genes from noncarnivorous ancestors have been recruited for carnivorous purposes,” says Thomas Givnish, who studies plant evolution at the University of Wisconsin. What’s more, the genes seemed to have been tweaked in similar ways  —   presumably because they’re all doing similar jobs to help the plants consume their prey. ”So it’s a really unique study and the first of its kind,” Givnish says. Some of these enzymes originally existed to help plants defend against stresses like fungal infections but got repurposed for eating bugs. One example, Albert says, is called chitinase: ”The chitinase that was originally probably evolved in defense from fungal chitin was repurposed, so to speak, to attack and break down the chitin of insect exoskeletons.”"
893,"This Sunday, Feb. 12, is Darwin Day, an international day of celebration commemorating the birth of Charles Darwin and his contributions to science. It’s also an excuse for   and   events around the globe, and for all of us to take a moment to appreciate the value of science and the wonders of the natural world. As you prepare to celebrate, here are a few things you might want to know about Darwin  —   some insights new and old to impress your friends and family. 1. Darwin developed the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Studies consistently find that many Americans  —   including college students and even   teachers  —   misunderstand critical features of how the process works. You can read through common misconceptions here, or review the key ingredients for natural selection  —   heritable variation that leads to differential reproduction  —   in this easy   created for 13. 7. 2. Darwin wasn’t only a meticulous observer of the natural world, he was also a careful reader and a diligent   when it came to his own habits. Beginning in 1838, Darwin kept a notebook in which he recorded the books he was reading. From 1837 to 1860, he reported reading 687 distinct works of English  . These years span an important period in the development of his thinking, from his return to England from the Galapagos Islands to the publication of On the Origin of Species. What can we learn from the reading habits of a creative and enormously influential scientist? A new paper by Jaimie Murdock, Colin Allen and Simon DeDeo offers the first quantitative analysis of Darwin’s book list, investigating the extent to which his decisions about what to read reflected exploration. That is, to what extent was Darwin systematically exposing himself to ideas that might be surprising in light of what he’d previously read? And to what extent did these habits change throughout this period of his career, as his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection was beginning to take shape? To answer these questions, the authors used techniques from machine learning, statistics and information theory to analyze the full text of most books on Darwin’s list, yielding   representations of the content of each book and a quantitative method for estimating the overlap in general content across books. The analyses revealed distinct epochs in Darwin’s reading habits, including an initial period in which he delved more deeply into topics he had already encountered, and a final period, leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species, in which he engaged in greater exploration. Rather than narrowing his focus or shielding his theorizing from new ideas, his later years were marked by breadth and novelty. 3. Darwin shared his birthday  —   Feb. 12, 1809  —   with another revolutionary figure: Abraham Lincoln. Where the first transformed how we understand ourselves in relation to other species, the second changed the way we understand ourselves in relation to other humans. In an essay adapted from his book Angels and Ages, writer Adam Gopnik encapsulates Lincoln’s and Darwin’s monumental contributions like this: ”Lincoln and Darwin can be seen as symbols of the two pillars of the society we live in: one representing liberal democracy and a faith in armed republicanism and government of the people, the other the human sciences, a belief that objective knowledge about human history and the human condition, who we are and how we got here, exists. This makes them, plausibly, ’heroes’.” So take advantage of Feb. 12 to celebrate Darwin, the human sciences, and scientific discovery. And, if you’re so inclined, tip your hat to Lincoln, too. Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo"
894,"Like any good pair of twins, Run the Jewels have a freaky sort of unspoken fraternity. When   and Killer Mike strode in with their usual uniforms  —   Mike in a gold chain as thick as a garter snake, El in a fitted Yankees cap and pair of   sunglasses  —   the two didn’t have to do as much as nod to one another before upending three tracks from their latest LP, RTJ3, in strange and perfect symbiosis.   (née   née Jaime Meline)  —   rapper, producer, and   godfather of the backpacker scene of the  ’s  —   and Killer Mike  —   known for guest features on tracks by Atlanta’s Dungeon Family in the   solo work in the    ’00s, and perhaps most widely for his very public support of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign last year  —   have   each other in a supergroup that somehow seems to get better, louder, and more pertinent since their start in 2013. They represent an ideal evolution of underground   to mainstream success, mixing a fundamentally activist animus with   production without losing a speck of vital force. On an unseasonably beautiful day in D. C. Run the Jewels was sweaty and sulfuric,   with one another in an exchange so slick, easy, and conspiratorial, it felt like we were in on their shared language. Run the Jewels 3 is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) Killer Mike (vocals)   (vocals) Trackstar the DJ (DJ) Producers: Abby O’Neill, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Nick Michael, Morgan Noelle Smith Production Assistant: A Noah Harrison Photo: Claire  . For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
895,"By the time Kay Schwister got her diagnosis last summer, she couldn’t talk anymore. But she could still scowl, and scowl she did. After weeks of decline and no clue what was causing it, doctors had told Schwister  —   a    vocational rehab counselor and mother of two from Chicago  —   that she had an incurable disease called   disease, or CJD. The disease was shrinking Kay’s brain, and riddling it with holes. She would likely live only a few more weeks, the doctors said. It was a diagnosis that no one could ever want. But the fact that Schwister was able to get a firm diagnosis while still alive is a relatively new development that represents a step forward in understanding a group of devastating neurological disorders. And, some biochemists say, it could lead to better ways of diagnosing brain diseases that are much more common, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. For Kay Schwister, it all started in the spring of 2016, when she started getting headaches and feeling dizzy all the time. Aging, she told herself, just didn’t feel very good. Over the next few weeks, she got steadily worse. ”She got to the point where she was so nauseous and so dizzy that she stopped driving and actually stopped working,” says her husband, Tim Schwister. By the time Kay entered the emergency room last June, her speech had changed. She was enunciating things in a strange way, and finishing each sentence on a really high note. Doctors drew blood and spinal fluid and tested it for things like multiple sclerosis and mercury poisoning. Those tests came back negative. Soon, Kay couldn’t talk or walk. ”Not knowing what we were dealing with was probably one of the hardest things to ever go through in life,” says Tim. ”We really wanted to know what we were up against, and if there was anything that we could do.” Ultimately, Kay’s doctors ordered a newly developed test for   disease  —   a very rare condition that’s thought to kill about 1 in a million people worldwide every year, including about 300 deaths annually in the U. S. That test came back positive. About a month after Kay entered the hospital, the Schwisters had their answer. It was ugly, but still an answer. Normal proteins in Kay’s brain had started misfolding, bending themselves into an unnatural shape and coaxing other proteins to do the same, like some kind of malicious origami. These misshapen proteins, known as prions, formed clumps in the brain, causing neurons to die. ”It’s almost as if it starts to turn certain portions of your brain off,” says Tim. The vast majority of CJD cases worldwide are like Kay’s, popping up for no apparent reason. Other cases seem to be inherited. A very small number of patients have contracted the illness through close contact with material from an infected person’s brain or nervous system  —   during certain transplant procedures or via contaminated surgical equipment, for example. And another form, variant CJD, is the human version of mad cow disease, and has been linked to eating infected beef. The last known time someone in the U. S. got CJD from contaminated surgical tools was in 1976 the last known U. S. death due to CJD acquired from infected human tissue was in 2014, says Safar, likely acquired years before from contaminated human growth hormone. There is no cure or treatment for CJD. All Tim could do for his life partner of 35 years was to try to make her as comfortable as possible. Still, having a diagnosis spurred the many people who loved Kay into action, Tim says. Family and friends flew in from all over the country to visit. She was rarely alone. ”Every day, it was nonstop,” Tim says. ”People that were there to visit with her, just to try to keep her spirits up.” She never went home. Kay Schwister died within seven weeks of entering the hospital. Until recently, families like the Schwisters wouldn’t have known what their loved one was suffering from until it was all over, when an autopsy might have shown that the brain was smaller than expected. Under a microscope and using a special stain, a pathologist would have seen holes in the brain, along with tangles and clumps of misfolded proteins. But diagnosis after death is too late  —   not just for the patient and families, but also for researchers trying to study potential therapies to slow down or stop the progression of the disease. These same diagnostic frustrations apply to some of the most common forms of dementia, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, which are also associated with protein misfolding. ”The trouble with many of these diseases, some of which are incredibly prevalent, is that it can take months or years [to diagnose],” says Byron Caughey, a biochemist at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. a part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. A previous spinal fluid assay for CJD could identify brain cell injury, but not the cause of that injury. That’s why Caughey recently teamed up with scientists in Italy, Japan and the U. K. to develop a different test. It’s called   which stands for ”    conversion.” The test, developed a few years ago and still available via only a few laboratories, harnesses the bad protein’s ability to induce normal, neighboring proteins to take on its twisted form. The test takes about 90 hours and involves getting a sample of spinal fluid, shaking it up with normal proteins and waiting to see if the normal proteins misfold. Caughey and some Italian scientists have even figured out how to avoid the spinal tap they can make the test work with a sample of cells taken from deep inside a patient’s nostril, from a spot that is separated from the brain by just a bony partition. ”So, we now have the ability to collect a little bit of spinal fluid or nasal brushing from patients while they’re still alive, and with quite a high degree of certainty, tell whether or not they have a prion disease,” says Caughey. In several studies now, he says, the   test has sensitively and specifically identified CJD prions in symptomatic patients the test has since been distributed to CJD surveillance centers in multiple countries. ”Technologically, it’s a major new paradigm for testing protein misfolding,” says Dr. Jiri Safar, director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and one of Caughey’s collaborators. Since the center started using the assay in April 2015, it has tested more than 5, 000 samples from patients referred by doctors scattered around the U. S. Canada and Mexico. And within that group, Safar says, about 500 people tested positive for CJD. The assay costs about $50 to run. ”It’s a major game changer,” says Safar, who hopes wider use of the test in suspected cases will help to completely eliminate the already scant possibility of transmitting CJD through infected blood or organs. Caughey, Safar and colleagues reported in late November in the journal Annals of Neurology that a   version of their test was just as effective in diagnosing the disease as an autopsy or biopsy of a living brain (which is another diagnostic option, but a risky, invasive one). Alison Green, a biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in the U. K. is now working on a modified version of the test that has been shown capable of detecting Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. ”It’s very important, because there is no other diagnostic test for Parkinson’s disease,” Green says. ”It’s purely a clinical diagnosis at present.” Parkinson’s is a chronic and progressive movement disorder that eventually includes symptoms of dementia in an estimated 50 to 80 percent of cases. Diagnosing it sometimes requires years of observation, at which point a patient has already lost a lot of neurons. In a small study published last summer, Green used a version of   that looks for   (a protein that’s associated with Parkinson’s) on 20 people who had a Parkinson’s diagnosis, and 15 people in a control group. ”And you can get a nice,   positive result after 120 hours,” she says. Nineteen out of 20 patients with Parkinson’s were correctly identified, and there were no false positives. Green is now replicating the study with 110 subjects. If the test proves to be as reliable as it was in her first study, Green says, it could become an important diagnostic tool for doctors to rapidly identify a patient’s ailment and start therapies as soon as possible, when they might still make a difference. ”A lot of these drugs or therapies are being introduced way too late because patients aren’t diagnosed early enough,” Green explains. ”And they may be effective treatments if you give them earlier.” She’s also applied for funding to develop a test that would look for abnormal   peptides, possible indicators of Alzheimer’s disease. The ultimate goal, says Green, is to have a whole bank of   assays so that patients with any kind of undiagnosed dementia can get answers. Knowing the prognosis earlier, she says, could give some patients and families more choices. ”If you have early onset dementia, do you really want to spend the last few years of your life working, or do you want to take early retirement?” says Green.   And even for diseases that have no option of being slowed or reversed, she says, a firm and accurate diagnosis can still offer something essential to families  —   a spur to move beyond tests and treatments. ”We really, truly wanted to know if there was something that we could do for her,” says Tim Schwister of his wife, Kay. The diagnosis let him and his sons know that chasing further treatment at that point wouldn’t help, and that the best they could do was to turn their attention to making Kay comfortable, and spending time with her. The diagnosis also helped the Schwisters connect with other families who’d gone through the same experience. In a time of such great loss, Tim says, ”it’s nice to know that you’re not alone.”"
896,"Stand in the center of this house and you’ll find yourself in the living room and the dining room. And the bedroom. Oh, and also the kitchen. At 500 square feet and designed to hold as many as six people, the house makes for quite a tiny home. But for many, it’s just enough for now. Since flooding in West Virginia last June killed at least 23 people and destroyed more than 5, 000 homes, residents have been struggling to find adequate housing. These small homes, built by high school students in nearby vocational schools, may be the solution. Dakota Carte, a student working on the building project at Carver Career Center in Charleston, stands inside one of the houses, gesturing to different areas in the house. There’s a loft for sleeping up top. Then there’s a hot water tank, a fridge and a stove, all in close proximity. ”This is a tiny house, so everything is a little compact,” Carte says. The entire structure is a little bigger than a generous   closet. Because so many West Virginia families are still struggling, the school board decided students would build tiny homes for flood victims rather than working on bookshelves or birdhouses. ”Folks in West Virginia were still suffering even though all the press had gone away,” said Kathy D’Antoni, who oversees the state’s vocational schools. For the project, the schools received $20, 000 from the Board of Education, along with significant contributions from neighboring communities. So far, 15 homes have been built. By participating, students can learn practical skills like carpentry, electrical work and plumbing. Emily Glover, a student at Marion County Technical Center, worked on construction with classmates after school. ”You learn everything from laying it out to actually building it,” she said. One of these homes will belong to Brenda Rivers, who lost her house to the flood last June. For months, she lived in a camper on the back of her daughter’s property. She had partial flood insurance and received assistance from the federal government to help pay off her mortgage. Even then, she couldn’t afford the down payment for another home. Her son offered her a mobile home, but she said she couldn’t find anyone to move it. ”The weather was getting bad, and I said ’Just let me have my tiny house until spring or summer,’” she said. Rivers said she can’t imagine living in the tiny home  . (It is pretty tiny, after all.) But for her and other families benefiting from the project, the houses are a tiny but altogether significant step in regaining a home."
897,"Stories about black women whose employers asked them to cut their dreadlocks or to trim their big afros have surfaced with more frequency in the last few years. Now a new study confirms that many people  —   including black ones  —   have a bias against the types and styles of natural hair worn by black people. The ”Good Hair Study” was conducted by Perception Institute, which describes itself as ”a consortium of researchers, advocates and strategists” that uses emotional and psychological research to identify and reduce bias in areas such as law enforcement, education, civil justice and the workplace. The study resulted from a partnership with Shea Moisture, a   hair and body products company, and aimed to better understand the connection between implicit bias and textured hair. The Good Hair Study asked over 4, 000 participants to take an online IAT, or implicit association test, which involves   photos of black women with smooth and natural hair, and rotating word associations with both. According to the study, ”a majority of people, regardless of race and gender, hold some bias towards women of color based on their hair.” But the results also indicate that this bias is learned behavior, and can be unlearned. In the study, millennials of all races came across as more accepting of textured hair. And ”naturalistas,” women who choose to wear their hair natural, ”showed either no bias or a slight preference for textured hair.” Some key findings confirm that black women suffer more anxiety around hair issues, and spend more on hair care than their white peers. They are almost twice as likely to experience social pressure at work to straighten their hair compared to white women. The study also concludes that, ”White women demonstrate the strongest bias  —   both explicit and implicit  —   against textured hair.” They rated it as ”less beautiful,” ”less  ” and ”less professional than smooth hair.” However, white women who are in contact with black women naturalistas demonstrated lower levels of bias. Given that white women make up a large majority of the 38 percent of female managers who decide what looks are appropriate for work, legal conflicts sometimes ensue. And courts tend to rule in favor of employers in such cases. Noliwe Rooks, a Cornell University professor who writes about the intersection of beauty and race, says for some reason, natural black hair just frightens some white people. ”I have yet to come across an actual court case . .. where the texture of hair for another racial group has reached the point of a court case,” she said. The good news is that natural hair has become increasingly popular, as black women decide to give their hair a break from chemicals and heat. The Boston Globe reported that ”sales of hair relaxer dropped from $206 million in 2008 to $152 million in 2013.” At the same time, demand for products for natural hair began to increase. Tellingly, beauty companies outside the black beauty and hair industries began to notice. Carol’s Daughter was bought by L’Oréal in 2014. Today, numerous      companies have lines for naturally curly hair. There are even online curl pattern charts that ”grade” curls’ looseness or tightness to guide the towards products that will work best for her. It seems the naturalistas are making inroads. Certainly, popular culture is infused with images of women with natural, unstraightened hair: Tracee Ellis Ross, Yara Shahidi and Marsai Martin have all gotten praise for frequently going au naturelle on their hit show  . Esperanza Spaulding reigns over her bass with a towering Afro. NBC viewers reeled when Tamron Hall traded her slick pixie for a little curly fro in 2014. So for younger people, natural hair is just that  —   a natural, obvious thing to wear. Even the U. S. Army got on board after an initial stumble. If trends signal what’s ahead, workplaces may eventually become safe havens for natural hair, which has endured as a touchstone in racial politics for far too long."
898,"Most of us have reached for a painkiller, at one time or another, only to discover the date on the label shows it has expired. But what does an ”expiration” date on medicine really mean? Is it dangerous if you take it anyway? Less effective? It turns out that date stamped on the label actually means a lot. It’s based on scientific evidence gathered by the manufacturer showing how long the drug’s potency lasts. Companies expose their medications to different environments, different temperatures and humidity levels to see just how long it takes for the medication to degrade to the point that its effectiveness is compromised. The general rule, says pharmacist Mike Fossler, with the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, is that once a drug is degraded by 10 percent it has reached ”the end of its useful life.” If you take it months or even years past the expiration date, it’s unlikely to do you any harm, he says it just might not do you much good. That may not be a big deal if you’re treating a headache, but if you’re fighting a bacterial infection with antibiotics like amoxicillin or ciprofloxacin, for example, using less than fully potent drugs could fail to treat the infection and lead to more serious illness. Pharmacist Mohamed Jalloh, a spokesman for the American Pharmacists Association, says there’s an even bigger reason not to rely on old drugs: antibiotic resistance. When you inadvertently ”underdose” yourself by taking antibiotics that aren’t full strength, he says, you run the risk that the bacteria you’re battling will figure out not only how to defeat this weakened drug, but other antibiotics, too. At least 23, 000 people each year in the U. S. die from infections that have become resistant to antibiotics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ”If your medicine has expired, don’t use it,” concurs Ilisa Bernstein, deputy director of the office of compliance in the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. That goes for    drugs, as well as prescription meds. Check the expiration date before even buying those pain relievers or allergy tablets, some pharmacists advise  —   the same way you check your milk. Buy the one with the date that’s furthest away. ”Once the expiration date has passed,” Bernstein says, ”there is no guarantee that the medicine will be safe and effective.” Of course, even new drugs can quickly lose potency if they’re not stored properly. Get those pills out of the bathroom ”medicine cabinet” now, pharmacists say. The steam from your shower or shave kills pills fast. ”Medicines like the kind of environment that people like  —   a little dry and not too hot or cold,” Fossler says. And, of course, don’t take medication to the beach or leave it in a hot car. Like humidity, heat degrades a medicine’s active ingredients. Some medications are more vulnerable than others, so check the label. Insulin, certain immunotherapy drugs, and some children’s pain relievers and cold remedies require refrigeration and protection from light. And compared to capsules and tablets, ”liquids are not as highly preserved,” says Barbara Kochanowski, a scientist with the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. Liquid drugs can more easily become contaminated with bacteria and fungus. Anytime you see a change in the color, odor or consistency of a drug  —   such as a cream turning into a runny solution  —   consider it a red flag, Kochanowski says, and consult your pharmacist. It’s probably time to toss that medication. Some drugstores, hospitals with pharmacies, drugmakers and   centers have been authorized by the federal government, in recent years, to serve as ”  ” sites for some drugs that are expired, or no longer needed. You can check the FDA and Drug Enforcement Agency websites for their latest guidance on the safest ways to dispose of various drugs."
899,"Pinball is big business in Japan. Known as pachinko, the   industry is dominated by Korean Japanese, an immigrant community that has been unwelcome and   for generations. Min Jin Lee’s new novel Pachinko is about much more than the game. It’s about the story of one family’s struggle to fit into a society that treats them with contempt. Lee got the idea for her book when she was still a college student. It was 1989 and she went to a lecture by an American missionary who had been working with the Korean Japanese in Japan. He told a story about a    boy who committed suicide. After his death the boy’s parents found his school yearbook. ”And in this yearbook several of his classmates had written things like: Go back to your country,” Lee says. ”They had written the words: die, die, die. The parents were born in Japan, the boy was born in Japan. . .. That story just really could not be more fixed in my brain.” Lee, a   was determined to tell the history of Koreans in Japan. She lived there for a while and interviewed many Korean Japanese to get a sense of what life was like for them. She decided to tell their history through a multigenerational family story. ”I was very interested in history but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes and it can feel a bit medicinal,” she says. ”I wanted . .. to give these people flesh and blood in the same way that people that I know have contradictions and betrayals and deaths and marriages and the kind of texture of life.” The story begins in the early 20th century when Korea is already under Japanese rule. A young girl named Sunja is growing up in a small fishing village on a tiny Korean Island. She falls in love with a good looking, older man from the mainland. When she becomes pregnant he tells her he is already married. Sunja is saved from disgrace by a Christian minister staying at her family’s boarding house who offers to marry her and take her to Japan. ”She’s a child, she’s 16,” Lee says. ”When she goes to Japan she simply has no idea what’s going to wait for her. And to be frank, most Koreans really didn’t know that this was going to happen. They didn’t know that the history would turn out this way.” The impoverished Koreans who left their occupied homeland didn’t find life much easier in Japan. Sunja has two sons and her husband takes care of them both. But when he is arrested for preaching Christianity, her life becomes even more difficult. She and her children survive World War II but then the Korean War breaks out. With the war and partition of Korea, it becomes almost impossible for Sunja to return to her homeland. Twenty years later she still yearns for what she has lost. After the war the pachinko parlors start popping up all over in Japan. Both of Sunja’s sons find work in the noisy pin ball dens which are often run by Korean Japanese. ”The Korean Japanese could not find legal employment for . .. seven or eight decades,” Lee explains. ”Even now they have great difficulty finding jobs in certain sectors. So, in pachinko they were able to find a kind of employment haven.” Though they may have found employment, and in many cases, financial success, that didn’t necessarily translate into respect. Despite its popularity, the Japanese look down on pachinko parlors as gambling dens with connections to criminals. Even so, one of Sunja’s sons thrives in the business. But her firstborn, Noa, never comes to terms with the circumstances of his life. ”Noa really is symbolic,” Lee says. ”He is an emblem of so many people that I met who wanted very desperately to just belong. And they would do everything they possibly could within legal channels to be considered a respectable human being.” As a naturalized American who feels she belongs in this country, Lee says it is hard for her to understand that generations of Koreans have never been fully accepted in Japan. But many of the Korean Japanese she interviewed dismissed her concerns. They have adapted to living in Japan even if their presence there is still not fully embraced."
900,"Updated with arguments, A   panel of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals had tough questions Tuesday for both sides arguing over the future of President Trump’s executive order barring refugees and citizens of seven   countries from entering the United States. Arguing for the administration, August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, urged the judges to stay a temporary restraining order issued by District Judge James L. Robart of Seattle. His order last week put the Trump travel ban on hold. Flentje argued that the plaintiffs, the states of Washington and Minnesota, did not have standing to challenge the president’s action because the executive order was ”well within the president’s power.” That led to a skeptical question from Judge Michelle Friedland, who asked, ”Are you arguing, then, that the president’s decision in that regard is unreviewable?” Flentje paused before saying yes. The attorney for the states challenging the travel ban also faced a grilling. Noah Purcell, solicitor general for the state of Washington, opened by saying that it’s the judiciary’s role to check abuses by the executive branch. ”But the president is asking this court to abdicate that role here, to reinstate the executive order without meaningful judicial review and to throw this country back into chaos, ” he said. Judge Richard Clifton wondered whether the states could really prove that Trump’s ban amounted to an attempt to ban all Muslims from entering the country. ”I’m not entirely persuaded by the argument if only because the seven countries encompass only a small percentage of Muslims . ..,” said Clifton. ”I have trouble understanding why we’re supposed to infer religious animus when in fact the vast majority of Muslims would not be affected as residents of those nations.” Purcell responded that ”to prove religious discrimination we do not need to prove that this order harms only Muslims, or that it harms every Muslim.” The legal arguments lasted just over an hour. They were conducted over the phone since the three judges preside in three different states. In his closing statement, Flentje, perhaps sensing that the court leaned away from the administration’s position, argued that the temporary restraining order on the president’s travel ban was too broad and he urged the judges ”to stay the injunction or to limit it to the presentation of the state of Washington.” Here’s our original post: The 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments Tuesday evening over whether President Trump’s travel ban should remain on hold or go back into effect. Trump’s executive order temporarily barred visa holders from seven   countries, as well as all refugees, from entering the country. It was signed on Jan. 27 and quickly challenged by an array of lawsuits. One of those cases resulted in a temporary restraining order, blocking the ban  —   for now  —   from going into effect. It’s that restraining order, not the ban as a whole, that lawyers will be arguing over Tuesday. The arguments before a   panel will be held by telephone at 6 p. m. ET (3 p. m. PT) and you can listen live online. Here are a few things to know before the arguments get going: How did we get here?  Trump’s original executive order (which we’ve annotated here) bars travelers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia for 90 days, suspends new refugee admissions for 120 days, and blocks refugees from Syria indefinitely. The White House denies that this amounts to a ”Muslim ban,” as Trump called for during the presidential election. But all seven of the listed countries are majority Muslim. The order calls for the eventual prioritization of refugee claims from people of ”minority religions” in their country of origin  —   and in an interview Trump said that Christians from the Middle East would be prioritized. On Jan. 30, Washington became the first state to sue the administration, arguing that the order is discriminatory and violates the Constitution as well as federal law. (The lawsuit is one of many challenging the travel ban.) That case  —   with Minnesota joining Washington  —   resulted in Judge James L. Robart siding with the states in granting a temporary restraining order that blocked the ban from being enforced until the court case could move forward. The Department of Justice asked the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals to immediately reinstate the ban. The court refused to immediately intervene but asked the states and the DOJ to make more arguments for and against the restraining order. Both sides have filed briefs to try to make their case and will be presenting them again in oral arguments Tuesday night. What’s at stake Tuesday? The appeals court will not decide the overall legality or constitutionality of Trump’s travel ban. The only thing under consideration Tuesday is the temporary suspension of the travel ban. If the court upholds the temporary restraining order, then the ban will continue to not be enforced as the court case moves forward. If the court sides with the U. S. government, the ban will go back into effect for now  —   and the case against the order will still move forward. On the law and policy blog Just Security, Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman  —   who served in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama  —   notes that the court’s decision might not actually be that exciting. ”Just so that everyone’s expectations are not unduly raised (and then dashed),” he writes, there’s ”a very real possibility” that the court won’t consider the merits of the case at all. A temporary restraining order can’t usually be appealed, as the government acknowledges. The DOJ argues that it is able to appeal this one, based on technical reasons involving the difference between a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction. Lederman says the judges might well focus on that procedural distinction  —   whether it can be appealed in the first place  —   instead of other elements of the case. What are the arguments on each side? Aside from the procedural element (which relies on riveting questions like what counts as an adversary hearing, and how long the TRO will be in effect) the two sides are arguing over who is more likely to win the overall case over Trump’s travel ban. The likelihood of winning is a factor in determining whether a temporary restraining order is appropriate. The DOJ cites the president’s broad authority on immigration issues as a reason the government is likely to win this case, eventually. The states, meanwhile, say they’ll win, based on their evidence that the travel ban was designed to discriminate on the basis of religion and violates the right to due process. Then there’s the question of ”irreparable harm.” Washington state originally asked for the restraining order because it argued the travel ban was actively harming its residents. The federal government, meanwhile, argues that suspending the ban is causing harm by violating the separation of powers and exposing citizens to risk, and also because it amounts to ”judicial  ” of the president’s judgment on national security. (The state says the temporary restraining order just restores the status quo from before the ban, and that the DOJ’s argument ”makes no sense. ”) The DOJ also argues that even if it were appropriate, the temporary restraining order should have been imposed more narrowly, rather than nationwide  —   while the states say a nationwide halt was necessary to protect residents who might travel through a port of entry anywhere in the country. Who are the judges who will decide?  The arguments on each side will be presented to a   panel of the 9th Circuit: William Canby Jr. Richard Clifton and Michelle T. Friedland. Canby was appointed by Jimmy Carter, Clifton by George W. Bush and Friedland by Obama. What happens next? As the appeals court considers the DOJ’s request to reimpose the executive order, the case continues to move forward at the district level. A host of other lawsuits challenging the executive order are also unfolding across the country  —   The Hill reports that there are more than 50 such lawsuits brought by state attorneys general, religious groups and individuals. Eventually, one of the cases might well make it before the U. S. Supreme Court. Bob Ferguson, the attorney general of Washington state, told NPR’s Michel Martin he sees that as ”entirely possible.” As NPR’s Nina Totenberg has reported, Senate Democrats have signaled that the executive order might factor into confirmation hearings for Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee for the court’s open seat, as they weigh his position on the legality and constitutionality of the travel ban."
901,"Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly took the blame for the rocky rollout of President Trump’s travel ban on people from seven mostly Muslim countries. Kelly defended the ban in an appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, which he labeled a ”pause,” as lawful and constitutional. But he said he should have given lawmakers a heads up before the president signed the order. ”This is all on me,” Kelly contended. ”I should have delayed it just a bit, so I could talk to members of Congress particularly the leadership of committees like this to prepare them for what was coming.” Kelly rebutted criticism from lawmakers upset with how some travelers were reportedly treated at airports the weekend the order was put in place. He said no one was forced to stand for hours at a time and that the Customs and Border Patrol Agents under his command behaved professionally. He said the temporary immigration ban was needed because vetting in the affected nations was ”loose” and that many of the countries on the list were failed states. Asked why Saudi Arabia, where most of the   hijackers came from, was not on the list, he said they have ”very very good police forces and intelligence forces, so we know when someone comes here from Saudi Arabia who they are and what they’ve been up to.” Democrats pushed back. Bennie Thompson, of Mississippi, the senior Democrat on the panel, argued that the ban could put Americans at risk. Pointing to a picture of a young Somali girl holding a teddy bear, Thompson said she had been vetted ”for years.” Suspending the admission of people like her ”does nothing to make us safer,” Thompson said. ”To the contrary,” the executive order ”makes America less safe by serving as a recruitment and propaganda tool for terrorist groups.” Kelly said thousands of people who fought alongside ISIS in Syria could have the kind of papers that would allow them to get into Europe and then to the U. S. Kelly seemed to suggest judges might be too isolated to rule properly on the issue. He said he ”had nothing but respect for judges,” but ”in their world it’s a very academic, very almost in a vacuum discussion.” And Kelly added, ”Of course, in their court rooms, they’re protected by people like me.” Kelly also said it’s possible some terrorists have already entered the country while the court stay has been in place, but that no one will know until they act  —   or, as Kelly put it, ”until the boom.”"
902,"Outside the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle last Friday afternoon, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson suddenly found himself in the national spotlight after federal Judge James L. Robart had just imposed an immediate, nationwide halt to President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees. As camera shutters clicked, Ferguson played David to Trump’s Goliath. ”The law is a powerful thing,” Ferguson said. ”It has the ability to hold everybody accountable to it and that includes the president of the United States.” Now, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing Ferguson’s case against the Trump administration a decision is expected later this week. In the space of a few days, Ferguson, a Democrat just beginning his second term, has gone from unknown state attorney general in the far corner of the country to making national headlines. He told member station KUOW in Seattle it was an ”unusual experience.” ”I mean CNN called my    mother in Seattle trying to track me down so they could talk to me on Friday night for example,” Ferguson said. Professional chess player, Ferguson and his team moved swiftly after Trump issued his executive order. Within 72 hours, they had drafted a lawsuit and rounded up declarations of support from   companies like Amazon and Expedia. Ferguson compared the pace to his time on the professional chess circuit in Europe playing under the clock. ”This is what reminds me of that,” he told KUOW. ”When constitutional rights are involved you have to be willing to move quickly and play in that ’time trouble’ as a lawyer that’s what our team is doing.” Approximately 100 companies, more than a dozen states and 10 former   national security, foreign policy and intelligence officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, have put their support behind Ferguson’s lawsuit. Ferguson got help rounding up that backing from Harold Koh, a law professor at Yale University. Koh says the effort began in earnest when a mutual friend put him in touch last Saturday with Washington state Solicitor General Noah Purcell, who works for Ferguson. ”And then suddenly it’s, ’Gee can you file something by tomorrow?’ and it’s on Super Bowl weekend too and I’m a big Patriots fan so my thought [is] try to get this done before the kickoff,” Koh joked in a phone interview. Soon the former U. S. officials were emailing around a draft   declaration that condemned Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees as ”unnecessary” and harmful to U. S. national security and foreign policy. Koh says to file the declaration with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the former officials took pictures of their signatures with their phones and emailed the photos to submit to the court. Unlikely foil, Ferguson might seem an unlikely foil to the new president. At 51, he still has a boyish face framed by glasses and a mop of dark hair. But longtime Democratic political consultant Christian Sinderman, who has worked for Ferguson, says in many ways he has been preparing for years for a moment like this. ”You know there’s a Harry   quality of Bob Ferguson, the glasses, the serious intent and the sense of almost destiny in standing up for what’s right and the little guy,” Sinderman said. This isn’t the first time Ferguson has gone up against the federal government in court. He repeatedly sued the Obama administration over the pace of cleanup at the Hanford nuclear site in southeast Washington. Hanford is home to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left over from plutonium production during World War II and the Cold War. More recently, Ferguson has made headlines at home by calling for a repeal of the death penalty and for proposing a ban on   assault weapons. ”Higher ambitions” Ferguson grew up the sixth of seven children in a Catholic family in Seattle. His mother was a special education teacher and his father worked at Boeing. At the University of Washington, Ferguson was student body president. Before attending law school at New York University, he and a college friend, Brian Bennett, spent six weeks driving around the country with the goal of seeing a game at every Major League Baseball stadium. ”It was a   trip in my   old Honda hatchback and we made it to each one. My car broke down a few times, a number of stories along the way but we did actually make it to each ballpark,” Bennett said, recalling the trip recently. Bennett, now an attorney himself, describes Ferguson as fiercely competitive in everything he does. He noted that Ferguson won his first campaign for public office in 2003 by defeating the chair of the King County Council in Seattle  —   a fellow Democrat. Even before his lawsuit against the Trump administration, Ferguson was viewed as a likely candidate for Washington governor in 2020. Sinderman believes Ferguson is a tactician who looks for opportunities to both make a difference and make a name for himself. ”Since Bob first came into public life in Washington state, it’s been clear that he’s got higher ambitions than the current office that he’s working in,” Sinderman said. While Ferguson has vowed to take the case to the U. S. Supreme Court if necessary, it is also apparent that he and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee are prepared to go to court again if the Trump administration issues more executive orders on issues like immigration, climate change, voting rights or health care. As Inslee told The Washington Post recently, ”This is what the resistance looks like.”"
903,"Updated at 4:45 p. m. ET, The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers has granted an easement allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, paving the way for construction of the final 1. 5 miles of the nearly   pipeline. In doing so, the Army cut short its environmental impact assessment and the public comment period associated with it. In a Jan. 18 notice published in the Federal Register the Army had said it would accept public comments on the project through Feb. 20, still nearly two weeks away. On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process, and last week the Army said that it had been directed to expedite its review of the route. In a letter to Congress announcing the decision, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Paul Cramer cited the president’s memorandum, saying that ”consistent with the direction” in the memo, his agency would ”waive its policy to wait 14 days after Congressional notification before granting an easement.” He wrote that the Army would officially grant the easement as soon as Wednesday afternoon, at which point the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, would be able to begin construction. The letter noted that the nature of the project  —   which involves drilling a horizontal hole under a part of the Missouri River known as Lake Oahe for a   diameter pipe  —   does not require a separate construction license. That gives opponents of the pipeline very little time to pursue legal action, as the Standing Rock Sioux promised to do after the president’s memorandum was signed. In a Jan. 31 statement, the tribe said it would ”vigorously pursue legal action to ensure the environmental impact statement order issued late last year is followed so the pipeline process is legal, fair and accurate.” A request by the tribe to halt the project was not granted by a U. S. district judge, as the Chicago Tribune reported. The director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which has helped organize demonstrations against the pipeline since last summer, released a statement promising to fight the Army’s decision. ”The granting of an easement, without any environmental review or tribal consultation, is not the end of this fight  —   it is the new beginning,” he wrote. ”Expect mass resistance far beyond what Trump has seen so far. . .. Our tribal nations and Indigenous grassroots peoples on the frontlines have had no input on this process.” On Tuesday morning, a post to the Facebook page for the Oceti Sakowin encampment south of the pipeline route told supporters of the protesters to submit public comments to the Army’s environmental assessment page. After the Army’s decision was announced, a post to the Facebook page for the nearby Sacred Stone Camp said, ”PLEASE, THIS IS OUR LAST STAND.” More than 70 people were arrested last week near the pipeline’s route, when the Morton County Sheriff’s office moved people off what it said was privately owned land."
904,"The confirmation today of Betsy DeVos as the 11th U. S. secretary of education brought angry denunciations and firm pledges of support  —   no surprise for a Cabinet nominee who had become a lightning rod for Americans’ views about their public schools. Here’s our roundup, with excerpts from reactions around the country: First, DeVos herself tweeted shortly after her confirmation: And this tweet from Vice President Pence, who cast the   vote in the Senate: President Trump tweeted his congratulations: The teachers unions, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union with 3 million members, issued this statement: ”Americans across the nation drove a bipartisan repudiation of the   agenda for students and public education. Today’s outcome marks only the beginning of the resistance.” And here’s Randi Weingarten, president of the 1. 6   American Federation of Teachers: ” . .. DeVos shows an antipathy for public schools a   embrace of private,   alternatives and a lack of basic understanding of what children need to succeed in school.” Education groups, The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: ”We believe that Secretary DeVos will put students and families first and we look forward to working with her to ensure each child has access to a   public school and a safe and supportive environment in which to learn.” Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, who now leads the Foundation for Excellence in Education: ”Under Secretary DeVos’ leadership, I am confident the federal government will loosen its grip on our education system and return power to the states and parents where it rightfully belongs.” Todd A. Cox, director of policy for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.: ”[DeVos] demonstrated a breathtaking dearth of qualifications to lead the Department of Education. From her lack of understanding of and commitment to basic education policy and legal obligations under critical federal civil rights laws, she demonstrated time and again that she was not fit to serve as Secretary of Education.” John B. King Jr. is the incoming president and CEO of The Education Trust and DeVos’ predecessor as education secretary under President Obama: ”Throughout the confirmation process, The Education Trust expressed concerns about Betsy DeVos’ commitment to fully embracing public education and to using the full range of tools at the Secretary’s disposal. . .. As the former Secretary of Education, I sincerely hope that Ms. DeVos will work hard to prove these concerns wrong and will lead the Department in a manner that protects fundamental civil rights and promotes opportunity and achievement for all students.” Conflicting views from the Senate, Lamar Alexander,  . is the chairman of the Senate committee that handles education and a former secretary of education: ”I championed Betsy DeVos because she will implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind the way Congress wrote it: to reverse the trend toward a national school board and restore local control of Tennessee’s public schools. Under her leadership, there will be no Washington mandates for Common Core, for teacher evaluation, or for vouchers.” Sen. Al Franken,  .: ” . .. she is the most incompetent   nominee I have ever seen. Last night, I urged my Republican colleagues to oppose her nomination, because if we cannot set party loyalty aside long enough to perform the essential duty of vetting the President’s nominees, then I don’t know what we are even doing here.” The PTA, From a statement by National PTA President Laura Bay: ”National PTA is committed to working collaboratively with Secretary DeVos and the Department of Education to . .. advance policies that ensure all children reach their highest potential. Critical progress has been made to improve education, provide educational equity for all children and make sure every child is prepared for   success. We cannot go backward.” The National School Boards Association, From a statement by Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director and CEO: ”This is a pivotal time in public education and our nation’s school children deserve the best education possible. We must and we can enhance public education by working together to find and implement the best ideas to accomplish this.”"
905,"Today the Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as President Trump’s education secretary,  . Vice President Pence had to cast an unprecedented   vote, after hearings that became fodder for Saturday Night Live after angry constituents swamped Senate offices with 1. 5 million calls a day after two Republican senators defected and Democrats held the floor overnight in protest. The    philanthropist and activist from Michigan takes over the leadership and management of a federal bureaucracy with 4, 400 employees and a $68 billion annual budget. Now, the question is: How much will actually change for the nation’s 50 million public school students and 20 million college students? Perhaps her opponents should take a deep breath. The federal role in education policy is limited. Less than 10 percent of funding for   schools comes from the feds, for example. That said, here’s what we’ll be watching in the coming weeks and months. On the higher ed side, The Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization. Three issues that may come up early in a DeVos Education Department: the role of   college costs and enforcement of Title IX (which governs sex discrimination, including sexual assault cases). On the   side, The headline here is: More state   power. Regular readers of our NPR Ed blog know that the main   education law was reauthorized last year as the Every Student Succeeds Act, ESSA, which covers annual testing, among other things. The new law gave more authority to the states, at the expense of the federal government, to identify and remedy failing schools. The Trump administration has already paused the process of ESSA implementation. Republicans in Congress have moved to use a   law called the Congressional Review Act to throw out the new accountability rules altogether. That leaves states in a situation that some Democrats and advocates have dubbed ”chaos and delay.” Other groups, including the National Governors Association, have said they welcome having still more authority at the state level. Some civil rights advocates have raised concerns that, in the absence of a strong federal hand, some states will be less vigilant than others in identifying and correcting historic educational inequities of race and class. DeVos’ responses to Sen. Patty Murray,  . in her controversial written questionnaire, indicate that she comes down on the side of states’ rights: ”It is necessary and critical for states to have flexibility to determine how to identify and improve schools.” DeVos’ department may take a leaf from Arne Duncan’s book and set up a competitive grant program that encourages states to expand school choice. If so, we’ll likely be hearing more about the benefits of private, virtual, religious and   schools. The school reforms DeVos backed in Michigan have favored   charter school operators. And her husband previously held financial stakes in the   and online K12 Inc. whose numbers she (erroneously) cited  in defending virtual schools in her written answers to the Senate. The organization she chaired, the American Federation for Children, favors both vouchers and a device called ”tax credit scholarships,” which allows companies to offset tax liability by funding students to attend private schools. In Florida, which the AFC has called out as a model program, 70 percent of these scholarships go to religiously affiliated schools. "
906,"This story is part one of a   investigation. Read part two here. Ellen Bethea sat alongside her husband’s hospital bed after doctors told her that Archie, the man she had been married to for almost five decades, wouldn’t make it. ”As soon as everybody else was asleep and I was sitting there with him, he passed on,” she remembers. ”So I think he kind of waited for me to be with him.” Bethea says her husband had several health problems and died of liver disease. Later that day in November 2015, the staff at the hospital near her Jacksonville, Fla. home asked Bethea something she hadn’t prepared for: Which funeral home did she want to use? Bethea had never planned a funeral before, but knew of only one in town  —     Funeral Home of Jacksonville. Some of her family and friends had used it and, she said, it had a good reputation. She and her family went there the next day. After meeting with a staff member, they walked out with a bill of over $7, 000. Bethea provided a copy of the itemized funeral bill to NPR. One thing quickly stood out, but only if you know something about Jacksonville’s funeral market. The cost of Archie’s cremation  —   $3, 295  —   was more than twice the amount charged elsewhere in Jacksonville by the company that owns  . The cremations are done in the same place and in the same way. In a   investigation into pricing and marketing in the funeral business, also known as the death care industry, NPR spoke with funeral directors, consumers and regulators. We collected price information from around the country and visited providers. We found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress. Funeral homes often aren’t forthcoming about how much things cost, or embed the information in elaborate package deals that can drive up the price of saying goodbye to loved ones. While most funeral businesses have websites, most omit prices from the sites, making it more difficult for families to compare prices or shop around. NPR reporters also found it difficult to get prices from many funeral homes, and federal regulators routinely find the homes violating a law that requires price disclosures. In Jacksonville,   and several other businesses in and around Jacksonville are part of a large,   portfolio of about 1, 500 funeral homes and several hundred cemeteries. The owner and operator is Service Corporation International (SCI) a   company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The   firm claims 16 percent of the $19 billion North American death care market, which includes the U. S. and Canada. Company documents say it has 24, 000 employees and is the largest owner of funeral homes and cemeteries in the world. In Jacksonville, SCI sells cremations under the    Memorial brand at large, luxurious funeral homes. The company also sells them for lower prices at   storefront outlets under other brands such as Neptune Society and National Cremation Society. In communities around the country, it’s common to find wide swings in prices for funeral services. ”That to me, starts to cross a line into consumer deception,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a death care industry watchdog group based in Burlington, Vt. Slocum was talking generally about markets such as Jacksonville, where a company’s centralized crematory handles remains from a variety of differently branded outlets  —   from posh funeral homes to humble storefront cremation societies. The cremations are all the same, but some will cost much more than others, depending on where the consumer made the arrangements, and which of the company’s brand names appears on the invoice. ”You only get that lower price for the cremation society if you happen to know that it exists and is owned by the same business,” Slocum says. ”I’m not saying they’re doing something illegal, but I am questioning whether or not we can really say, ’Oh, they give a much higher level of service.’ ” The cremations arranged through all those outlets are performed in a large crematory at 517 Park St. in Jacksonville. The crematory’s supervisor, Troy Brown, wrote on his LinkedIn profile that the Park Street facility serves 14 funeral homes. ”Direct cremation is the same no matter where you go,” says Slocum. ”When we’re talking about situations where some consumers do not know or can’t find out that that same business offers the same service at a lower price, maybe at a similar location, that is when I would have a problem with it.” But Scott Gilligan, a lawyer for the National Funeral Directors Association, says comparing the two cremations is ”like saying all weddings are the same.” ”Just like if I want a hamburger at a gourmet place, it’s the same hamburger I’m going to get at McDonald’s. But it’s going to cost more because of the atmosphere, because of what is being done. It’s choices,” Gilligan says. According to Gilligan, when consumers choose a funeral home, they’re generally not making that decision on price. They’re looking at other factors, such as reputation and location. When it comes to identical services, such as Jacksonville’s cremations, which have different brand names and different prices, Gilligan says: ”Well, that is simply someone offering a service, or offering a division, which is going to cater to people who are looking for the price.” One thing the storefront and the larger funeral homes have in common is an upselling strategy. Both try to sell consumers packages that bundle together multiple goods and services. This makes all of the funerals more expensive. Bethea says it happened to her. ”Well, actually, I think they only showed us one package that they had,” she says. That package, known as the Honor Cremation Service, included a number of extra charges, including $495 for stationery and $345 for an Internet memorial. That price premium is a problem the federal government has tried to fix with ”the Funeral Rule,” a regulation in place since 1984. It requires itemized price lists. But funeral directors are still free to emphasize packages in the sales process, as they did with Bethea. ”You know, Archie didn’t have hardly very much life insurance  —   maybe 5, 000  —   and I had, you know, a little bit of money in the bank, and it took everything.” SCI, whose officials declined to speak with NPR for this story, tells consumers in sales materials that buying a funeral package saves them money. But company executives tell investors a different story. In a presentation to Wall Street investors last year, the company said consumers spend an extra $1, 900, on average when they buy a package, versus an ”a la carte” funeral. For some context, the national median cost of a funeral with a burial, not including cemetery costs, is over $7, 000. SCI CEO Tom Ryan told investors: ”Think about society today. We are in a hurry, right? Everybody is on the clock . .. What we find is when we deliver these packages, people tend to spend more money because they’re buying more products and services.” He added that consumers, in fact, like the packages. ”And most importantly, we survey our customers, and the highest customer satisfaction scores come from people that select the packages. So we know we’re doing the right thing. The packages allow us to do that for all parties involved,” Ryan said. Company executives told analysts in July they’re rolling out a new    system that also increases   revenue. Packaging goods and services under multiple brands and setting different prices for identical services are strategies the company uses in many of its markets, which span 45 states and the District of Columbia. In Raleigh, N. C. for example, the company’s full service funeral home and storefront cremation office are across the street from each other. Crossing that street can save you  —   or cost you  —   $1, 895. Riley Beggin of NPR, Brian Latimer and Emily Siner of Nashville Public Radio, Marisa Demarco and Ed Williams of KUNM, and Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma contributed to this story."
907,"Updated at 4:50 p. m. ET, A wall of dangerous storms is moving across the South, threatening communities in their path with high winds, severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes. The National Weather Service warned of severe thunderstorms and hail along the Mississippi coast and issued a series of rapidly updated tornado warnings for parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The NWS New Orleans Office is updating its Twitter account here with information for the U. S. Gulf Coast. The governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards, declared a state of emergency after severe storms moved through the southeastern part of the state. Earlier Tuesday, the National Weather Service confirmed that multiple tornadoes touched down in and around New Orleans. The website for the electricity utility in New Orleans, Etergy, showed that more than 15, 000 customers had lost power. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu told The Associated Press that dozens of people reportedly suffered minor injuries, and a spokesman for the city’s Emergency Medical Services described those injured as ”walking wounded.” At 11:33 a. m. CT, the NWS office for New Orleans tweeted, ”Dangerous tornado on the ground in New Orleans East. Take Shelter IMMEDIATELY! !!” Kimberly Chaney told the AP she was trying to record a video of the tornado when her mother pulled her inside their home. ”Four of them huddled in a middle bedroom as the twister hit, knocking down part of the roof and blowing out the windows,” the news service reported. ”[Chaney] says their cars all were totaled, and her niece is worried because her computer was damaged with her homework stuck inside.” ”[Chaney] says she told her: ’It’s a natural disaster. Your teacher will understand.’ ” Images of the area published by the New Orleans   showed funnel clouds, hail and dark skies. A video taken in one neighborhood showed twisted metal and downed trees, emergency vehicles and power lines crisscrossing debris. The newspaper reported at least one injury in New Orleans East. Outside Baton Rouge, local ABC affiliate WBRZ reported that two mobile homes were ”completely gone,” posting photos to Twitter of twisted metal in a tree and a toothbrush standing upright in the grass. Homes were damaged in the city of Donaldsonville, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where photos shared on the official town Twitter account showed a home without a roof, and wood and metal in the road."
908,"At a roundtable meeting with county sheriffs on Tuesday morning, President Trump repeated a false statistic about the U. S. murder rate that he repeatedly deployed on the campaign trail. On multiple occasions Trump has suggested the murder rate is at a historic high, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. In fact, the murder rate is currently at less than half its peak. But here’s what Trump said to the county sheriffs at the White House on Tuesday: ”. .. the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that?   years. I used to use that  —   I’d say that in a speech and everybody was surprised, because the press doesn’t tell it like it is. It wasn’t to their advantage to say that. But the murder rate is the highest it’s been in, I guess, from 45 to 47 years.” According to the FBI, the murder rate for 2015, the last year for which data are available, was 4. 9 per 100, 000 people. Every year between 1965 and 2010, the FBI reported a higher rate than that. In some cases, it was much higher. In 1974, 1980, 1981 and 1991, the murder rate was at least twice as high as the 2015 rate. Then it dropped dramatically: From 2010 to 2014, the murder rate reached   lows, dropping from 4. 8 out of 100, 000 down to 4. 4. Last year, the FBI recorded an increase  —   back up to 4. 9. As NPR reported, that was a   rise of 11 percent. Trump repeated inaccurate statements about the murder rate several times on the campaign trail. But he got it basically right in his victory stump speech, when he noted that ”the murder rate has experienced its largest increase in 45 years”  —   as we noted in our fact check, that increase was, in fact, the biggest in 44 years. But he got it wrong again at the sheriffs’ gathering. Even with an 11 percent annual increase, murder rates remain lower than at almost any point in the last 47 years."
909,"At a gathering of sheriffs at the White House on Tuesday, President Trump joked about destroying the career of a Texas politician who is trying to set limits on an   police practice. The remark came after a participant at the sheriff’s roundtable raised the issue of asset forfeiture  —   that’s when the government seizes ”suspicious” assets and keeps them, even if the person who had the item was never convicted (or even accused) of a crime. The resulting funds often go directly into police budgets. Taking property from people who haven’t been convicted of a crime is legal, but controversial. ”Police confiscate cars, jewelry, cash and homes they think are connected to crime. But the people these things belong to may have done nothing wrong,” NPR’s Laura Sullivan explained a few years ago. ”Prosecutors say the seizures are helpful tools to combat drug dealers and drunken drivers,” Laura wrote. ”But for people who haven’t committed a crime, the cases are expensive to contest and often disproportionately affect people without means or access to a lawyer.” One sheriff at the gathering mentioned that some critics have said the practice violates due process, and called for limits. Trump responded: ”I’d like to look into that . .. There’s no reason for that,” suggesting that only ”bad people” would want to reform or limit asset forfeiture. A few minutes later, the following exchange occurred, as transcribed by the White House: PARTICIPANT: Mr. President, on asset forfeiture, we got a state senator in Texas who was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we can receive their forfeiture. THE PRESIDENT: Can you believe that? PARTICIPANT: And I told him that the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation. THE PRESIDENT: Who is the state senator? Want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career. (Laughter.) Okay, thank you. The remark made national headlines. The sheriff did not give a name. But one state senator in Texas who introduced such legislation, and could plausibly have been the subject of the conversation, told the Dallas Morning News, ”I don’t know the sheriff. Quite frankly, I don’t pay much attention to what Trump says anymore.” The sheriff who raised the issue, Harold Eavenson of Rockwall County, told the newspaper he didn’t take the president literally and thought he was just being ”emphatic.” ”He was making a point about how much he opposed that kind of philosophy,” Eavenson told the Dallas Morning News. ”I appreciated what the president said. I can assure you that he is on our side.”"
910,"A widely used blood test to measure   trends can give imprecise results, depending on a person’s race and other factors. This test means diabetes can sometimes be misdiagnosed or managed poorly. Doctors have been cautioned before that results from the A1C test don’t have pinpoint accuracy. A study published Tuesday underscores that shortcoming as it applies to people who carry the sickle cell trait. Glucose levels in the blood rise and fall all the time, so it can be tricky to look at a single exam to diagnose diabetes or manage the disease in people who have it. But one test gets around this problem. The A1C test measures sugar that binds to hemoglobin molecules in red blood cells. It provides an average of blood sugar over the past three months, ”so this has turned out to be an incredibly powerful test, both for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes,” says Dr. Anthony Bleyer, a kidney specialist at the Wake Forest School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The problem is that the test results can vary, depending on circumstance. For example, people with anemia may get inaccurate readings. So do people who carry unusual types of hemoglobin, the best known being sickle cell trait. Eight to 10 percent of   carry the sickle cell trait. But only people who inherit two copies of the sickle cell trait, one from each parent, develop the disease. And a few years ago, scientists realized that A1C readings for   typically don’t match those from whites. They are generally higher. ”The test was really standardized based on white individuals, and there were just a small number of   individuals in that study,” Bleyer says. And while the difference isn’t large, it can matter a lot, especially for people who are close to the line that defines diabetes. Someone who appears to be just under the line and diagnosed as having prediabetes may in fact have a higher level of A1C, which would push them into a diagnosis of diabetes. Vagaries in these readings can also be misleading for people whose treatment is guided by this test, because doctors may be overly aggressive in controlling blood sugar, to the point that a patient can end up with seriously low blood sugar. In a report published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, scientists at Brown University and the National Institutes of Health examined data from two large studies to compare test results of   with and without the sickle cell trait. The studies used standard A1C tests that had previously been shown to give low readings for people with the sickle cell trait. The scientists were surprised to find how big a difference it made. About 4 percent of the people in the study who carried the sickle cell trait were diagnosed with diabetes, but they expect a test corrected for bias would have identified about 7 percent  —   nearly twice as many people. ”We were really shocked by that, honestly,” says Mary Lacy, a graduate student at Brown University and lead author of the study. ”That’s huge!” Likewise, they found 40 percent fewer cases of prediabetes than they expected among people carrying the sickle cell trait. The test readings are only off by a few tenths of a percentage point, but that was enough to push many people below the cutoff points that indicate diabetes or prediabetes. This observation is one reason doctors should be cautious in interpreting A1C results, researchers say. ”Doctors generally take the test fairly literally,” says Tamara Darsow, senior vice president for research and community programs at the American Diabetes Association. ”How much this impacts care and the interpretation of A1C results I think is variable.” The association’s guidance document cautions doctors that the A1C tests can be off by plus or minus 7 percent among people with unusual hemoglobin traits. As the new study underscores, that is more than enough variability to affect a diagnosis. So instead of making a snap diagnosis, particularly for   doctors could additionally run some more traditional   tests. Those aren’t influenced by race or sickle cell status (though they can vary for other reasons). ”Information together from all of these tests can be much more powerful than those taken in isolation,” Darsow says. The American Diabetes Association would ultimately like to come up with more concrete treatment guidelines, but for now their word to doctors is this: Be aware this is an issue and use your best judgment."
911,"Beatrice Sanchez and Mariana Arias drive around their city,   N. C. in search of a very specific population of residents: Latinos with prediabetes. The two women, both bilingual and Hispanic, are recruiting participants for a Type 2 diabetes prevention study called ”La Comunidad,” a   local version of the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program trial that staved off diabetes through changes in diet and physical activity in about 50 percent of study participants. The results of that study suggested it was possible to fight a disease that affects about 29 million Americans without drugs and their side effects. It was more effective than using a common diabetes drug called metformin, which cut that number by just 30 percent. The Diabetes Prevention Program is ”still the gold standard,” says Mara Vitolins, an epidemiologist at Wake Forest University Medical Center in   who is leading La Comunidad. When the results of the Diabetes Prevention Program were first published, Vitolins was eager to test this concept in her own city, but cost was a big challenge. The program required six months of    counseling with case managers trained in nutrition or fitness, followed by personal visits every month for another year and a half. The first two years of intervention amounted to more than $2, 600 per person. To reduce the cost, Vitolins decided to focus on a part of the earlier program that relied on group counseling for her   study, called Healthy Partnerships in Preventing Diabetes (HELP). ”The whole idea was to take something that was extremely expensive and find every way that we could to make it more community friendly and that it can be sustained,” she says. HELP replaced case managers with community health workers and group meetings to help participants lose weight and bring their blood sugar levels down. It worked. The   study, which was completed in 2011, met goals close to or the same as those reached by the DPP for about a third of the cost —  $850 per person. But the study was small, with only 301 participants, so it was impossible to tell if it lowered participants’ risk of developing diabetes. And the HELP study had another shortcoming. Though it was designed to reach a   underserved population, it included very few Latinos, a group that makes up about 15 percent of   residents. Latinos are more susceptible to developing diabetes at a young age according to CDC data from 2011, the average age for diabetes diagnosis among whites was 55, but 49 for Hispanics. To reach the Latino population, Vitolins launched La Comunidad in 2014, translating the HELP program materials into Spanish. But she knew she needed to do more than just change the language. So she hired Arias and Sanchez as recruiters and ambassadors to the city’s Latino population, which includes undocumented immigrants. ”We’ve got to establish communication,” says Sanchez. ”We’re targeting a group of people that are very cautious.” The team determines whether the participants’   levels are high enough to be classified as prediabetic. Some are turned away because they are pregnant or unknowingly already have   diabetes. Pregnancy was not an issue in Vitolins’ former study because the average HELP participant was 60 years old, says Vitolins. But most of the people joining La Comunidad are in their early 40s. ”We’re finding that the Latino community, especially the women, are qualifying at a younger age.” The project team is also finding that more Latino women than men qualify for the program. They speculate that Latino men may have more physically active lifestyles, keeping them from developing prediabetes. After qualifying, La Comunidad participants meet with a registered dietician. They also visit an outpatient clinic for general health assessments and blood work every six months for two years. The first recruits finished in May. But the bulk of the work happens during group meetings, which are held weekly for the first 24 weeks. After that, members gather once every other month for the rest of the study. Topics cover everything from basic nutrition to what kind of shoe is best for particular workouts. Group members share their own advice and experiences. One woman could not afford to buy prepared food, says Carmen Vazquez, a health adviser who helps lead the group meetings. Despite limited resources, she still manages to eat healthy and exercise. So far, she’s lost 40 pounds. ”She has been an example to the rest,” Vazquez says. The meetings help participants become aware of how foods and activities affect their bodies. ”One of the major emphases of the program is to be sure people take control of their own life,” says Vazquez. Information may have been missed because of health disparities, language barriers or just lack of education, and ”We are trying to fill that gap.” Vazquez is quick to point out that she and the other health advisers are laypeople  —   in fact, her background is in fashion. Vitolins says this is one of the keys to making the program affordable. ”It didn’t matter that the person leading it didn’t have a high school degree. It’s the fact that that person can communicate a message.” The ultimate goal of studies like La Comunidad, Vitolins says, is to determine whether   techniques are helpful from both a health and medical reimbursement perspective. In March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that Medicare would cover preventive programs that meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) requirements, such as data reporting. Vitolins agrees that   programs must have good data to support their use. ”We’re testing before we say everyone who’s in the Latino population should use this approach,” she says. ”We want it to be effective.” Not everyone shares Vitolins’ enthusiasm. Richard Kahn, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says it’s too early for Medicare and health insurance companies to be covering such programs, since they delay diabetes rather than prevent it totally. ”The question which is unanswered is whether that delay actually makes a difference,” Kahn says. Another question is whether weight loss in the first few years of a program makes a difference if participants just gain it back, which many do. ”We need more studies about how the body regulates weight.” In the meantime, Vitolins focuses on getting the message of diabetes prevention out to people who may not know their risk. Estimates vary depending on how blood glucose is measured, but the CDC reports that 86 million Americans are prediabetic, and many don’t know it. ”With the numbers that we think are out there, every single program that shows efficacy should be at the table,” Vitolins says. Amanda B. Keener is a freelance science journalist who writes for Nature, The Scientist and PBS. org."
912,"If a refugee commits a crime, will a federal judge have blood on his hands? President Trump says yes. After Judge James L. Robart temporarily blocked an executive order that stopped all refugees as well as visitors from seven   countries, the president wrote on Twitter: ”Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and the court system. People pouring in. Bad!” That’s an emotionally charged line, but problematic. If ”something happens,” and if anyone is blamed, the person most likely to be held responsible is the president. It’s his job  —   not a judge’s job  —   to defend the country within the confines of the law. Before going further, we should note that the risk of ”something happening” because of the court ruling is limited. The judge’s temporary move does not allow very many people into the United States. Well before the ruling, the president’s temporary travel ban for refugees and travelers from seven   nations had partly collapsed amid protests and administrative chaos. Huge categories of people initially affected, such as green card holders and Iraqis who aided the U. S. military, are now being let in regardless of the judge’s instructions. The people still affected were ordinary visa holders from the seven nations plus refugees, who were not coming in huge numbers to begin with. Now some can come, but only after the U. S. has vetted them using techniques refined since Sept. 11. Terrorist attacks in the U. S. in recent years have not been linked to refugees or visitors who were radicalized in the seven countries targeted by Trump’s order. But suppose that ”something happens” with one of the new arrivals. Who knows an individual could become radicalized. It would be understandable for some to blame the ”court system” —   understandable but wrong, according to Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor. Fried was the solicitor general  —   the government’s official lawyer before the U. S. Supreme Court  —   during the Reagan administration. ”If [an attack] were to happen it would be the fault of the law,” Fried told NPR’s Morning Edition, ”because the judge would have determined that the law requires this.” The job of the courts is to interpret the law  —   not to bend it to the demands of public officials. The president is still the one who coordinates military, intelligence and law enforcement assets to stop terrorist attacks and is supposed to figure out how to do so properly. Some presidents have tried to operate outside the law when national security demanded it. In 1952, for example, President Harry S. Truman memorably asserted, ”The president has the power to keep the country from going to hell.” That was his rationale for seizing control of the American steel industry. The Korean War was underway, steelworkers were threatening to go on strike, and Truman said federal control was essential to continuing the production of war material. His move was challenged before the Supreme Court, which was unmoved by Truman’s case. The court found no law under which the president could seize private property in the way that he had done and rejected his seizure by a   vote, even though several justices had been appointed by Truman himself. But here’s the rest of the story: Despite the court ruling, the country did not ”go to hell.” The United States did not lose the Korean War. Truman had to find other ways to get his job done within the law. He is remembered today as a strong president. Trump now faces the challenge Truman did. Of all the possible issues on which he could have focused the attention of Homeland Security officials at the start of his administration, he chose the travel ban. Now that his initial plan has been temporarily blocked, he can fight in court and hope for a more favorable ruling. (Fried, by the way, thinks Trump might get it.) He can ask Congress to change the law. Or he can conclude that travel bans are not so smart after all, and ask counterterrorism specialists for better ideas. No matter what happens, his job doesn’t change, and citizens, who are his employers, expect him to do it. While the president does not have ”the power to keep the country from going to hell” in any way he likes, he does have the responsibility to keep the country from going to hell while acting within the law. Upholding the Constitution is itself part of keeping the country from going to hell. Whatever happens, another saying by Truman will apply: ”The buck stops here.”"
913,"Israel’s parliament has passed a law that retroactively legalizes almost 4, 000 settler homes built unlawfully on private Palestinian land in the West Bank, a move that critics say is a massive blow to any future peace deal. The Knesset approved the legislation in a   vote Monday evening, at a time when Israel has ramped up plans for settlement expansion in the West Bank. It has announced plans for thousands of homes since President Donald Trump was inaugurated nearly three weeks ago, to the cheers of Israeli hardliners. Settlements are broadly viewed as an obstacle to peace by Palestinians and the international community. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes the measure as a ”  bill.” Rights groups have vowed to challenge it at the country’s Supreme Court. The U. N. says settlements on land captured by Israel nearly 50 years ago are illegal under international law. Some settlements in the West Bank were built with prior Israeli government approval the homes in question in this law were built in illegal outposts on Palestinian land. According to the Knesset, the Palestinian landowners would be forced to accept compensation, either financially or in the form of ”alternate plots.” The vote is another major victory for Israeli  . According to The Associated Press, Israeli Cabinet Minister Yariv Levin called it ”a first step in a series of measures that we must take in order to make our presence in Judea and Samaria present for years, for decades, for ages.” Judea and Samaria is the biblical name for the area that makes up the occupied West Bank. Even as Israel   plans for thousands of new settlement homes and has now retroactively approved others, it began the process of demolishing the illegal Amona outpost last week, sparking scuffles between settlers and security forces. Like the homes described in the new law, Amona was built without prior government authorization. However, the text of the legislation specifically excludes Amona and any other buildings that previously received final demolition orders from the courts. The measure caused an outpouring of scathing criticism from the U. N. human rights groups, Palestinians and other members of the international community. Israel’s own attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, has called the law unconstitutional and said he ”will not defend it in the Supreme Court,” according to the BBC. ”This is a political decision. and the political message from the Israeli prime minister and his very extreme coalition is that they’re not heeding the law of the international community,” Hussam Zomlot, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, told NPR’s Joanna Kakissis. ”Tonight it became clear that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to compromise the future of both Israelis and Palestinians in order to satisfy a small group of extreme settlers for the sake of his own political survival,” said the Israeli human rights group Peace Now. ”By passing this law, Netanyahu makes theft an official Israeli policy and stains the Israeli law books.” U. N. Mideast envoy Nickolay Mladenov said it ”opens the floodgates to the potential annexation of the West Bank,” according to the AP. ”It will have a drastic legal consequence for Israeli and for the nature of its democracy,” he said. ”It crosses a very, very thick red line.” The beginning of Trump’s term has appeared to embolden  ’ plans for settlement expansion. Last week, the White House issued a statement saying that it does not consider settlements ”an impediment to peace,” but it added that ”the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond the current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.” According to Reuters, a White House official stated that the Trump administration will now ”withhold comment on the legislation until the relevant court ruling.”"
914,"When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967   War, no Israeli citizens had lived in the territory for nearly two decades, since an earlier war. But in 1968, a small group of religious Jews rented rooms at the Park Hotel in Hebron for Passover, saying they wanted to be near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites in Judaism (as well as Islam and Christianity). The Israeli government reluctantly allowed them to stay ”temporarily.” From that beginning, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews now reside in the West Bank, citing religion, history and Israel’s security among their reasons for being there. But the Palestinians, along with the rest of the world, see their presence as one of the key obstacles to a peace agreement and the creation of a Palestinian state. The issue returned to the headlines when the United Nations Security Council recently voted 14 to 0 to condemn Israeli settlements. The United States, which often vetoes resolutions critical of Israel, abstained and allowed the resolution to pass. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, unleashing a stream of accusations against the Obama administration. U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry defended the U. S. position Wednesday in a lengthy speech that repeatedly admonished Israel over settlements. Here are seven key things to know about the settlements: 1. Settlements are growing rapidly, The term ”settlements” may conjure up images of small encampments or temporary housing, and many have started that way. But they now include large subdivisions, even sizable cities, with manicured lawns and streets full of   villas often set on arid hilltops. Israel is constantly building new homes and offers financial incentives for Israelis to live in the West Bank. When the Israelis and Palestinians first began peace talks after a 1993 interim agreement, the West Bank settlers numbered a little over 100, 000. Today they total around 400, 000 and live in about 130 separate settlements (this doesn’t include East Jerusalem, which we’ll address in a moment). They have grown under every Israeli government over the past   despite consistent international opposition.   leaders like Netanyahu have actively supported them. Moderates and liberals have also allowed settlements to expand, though usually at a slower rate. The settler movement is a powerful political force, and any prime minister who takes it on risks the collapse of his government. You can click here to see data on the settlements and a detailed map from Peace Now, an Israeli group that is opposed to settlements and closely monitors them. 2. Settlements complicate efforts for a   solution, Critics of settlements say they’ve intentionally been established in every corner of the West Bank, giving the Israeli military a reason to be present throughout the territory and making it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. The settlement locations and the roads that connect them make Palestinian movement difficult. The settlements are just one of many obstacles to a peace deal. Drawing boundaries, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees, and myriad security questions  —   including terrorism  —   are equally challenging, if not more so. And as the settlements grow, it will be increasingly difficult to remove a large number of them, a tactic known as ”creating facts on the ground.” 3. The distinction between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Shortly after the 1967 war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank and had a population that was then entirely Palestinian. Israel declared the entire city to be Israel’s ”eternal and indivisible” capital. No other country recognizes Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, with the United States and others saying the city’s status must be determined in negotiations. This is why the U. S. and other countries have never moved their embassies to Jerusalem. Most are in Tel Aviv. The Palestinians, meanwhile, claim the eastern part of the city as their future capital. Around 200, 000 Israelis now live in East Jerusalem. Combined with the roughly 400, 000 settlers in the West Bank, about 600, 000 Israelis now live beyond the country’s 1967 borders. That’s nearly 10 percent of Israel’s 6. 3 million Jewish citizens. While the Israelis tend to speak of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as two separate entities, the Palestinians regard them as a single body  —   the occupied West Bank. 4. What does Israel say about settlements? The settlers and their supporters cite the Jewish Bible, thousands of years of Jewish history, and Israel’s need for ”strategic depth” as reasons for living in the West Bank. They also note that Israel took the territory from Jordan, which has since relinquished its claim to the West Bank. Therefore, the settlers argue, there is no legal sovereign in the territory. However, no country, not even Israel, considers West Bank settlements to be sovereign Israeli territory. As we noted, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and administers it as part of Israel. But Israel has never annexed any other part of the West Bank. The settlers want to be formally incorporated into Israel, but that would ignite a major controversy. For now, Israel regards the West Bank as ”disputed” territory that has been under the Israeli military since the 1967 war. 5. How about the Palestinians? From some Palestinian cities, there are clear views of Israeli settlements  —   and new construction  —   on nearby hillsides. And in most settlement neighborhoods, there are wide areas of empty hillside closed to Palestinians, which Israel says are necessary buffers for security. Palestinians see them as visual proof that their   independent state is being taken from them. Palestinian leaders have opposed peace talks in recent years while, as they see it, Israel is building on land that is part of those talks. 6. Has Israel ever dismantled settlements? Yes, on a few occasions, most notably in 2005, when it removed all 8, 000 settlers from the Gaza Strip. Israel decided these small, isolated settlements were too difficult to defend in a territory where the Jewish residents accounted for less than 1 percent of the population. The evacuation of the settlements was deeply divisive within Israel, and Israel’s security forces had to drag some settlers from their homes kicking and screaming. The episode demonstrated that Israel could remove settlers, but it also showed how much friction it creates inside Israel. 7. What are the proposed solutions? Kerry on Wednesday outlined the general approach: land swaps. Under this scenario, the largest Jewish settlements, which are near the boundary with Israel, would formally become Israeli territory. In exchange, Israel would turn over an equal amount of its current land that would become part of a Palestinian state. In addition, settlements deep in the West Bank, far from Israel, would be disbanded. It would be a difficult political move for an Israeli prime minister, but it would also be difficult for a Palestinian leader to accept a peace deal without removing settlements. Greg Myre is the international editor of NPR. org. Follow him @gregmyre1, Larry Kaplow is NPR’s Middle East editor. Follow him @larrykaplow"
915,"Women with breast cancer who are at high risk for having a BRCA mutation that raises cancer risk often don’t get genetic testing, or even a chance to speak with a genetic counselor who’d help them weigh the necessity of such a test, a study finds. Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes increase the risk of breast and ovarian cancers, and women with close relatives who have had those cancers are considered at higher risk of having BRCA mutations themselves. Both the National Cancer Institute and the United States Preventative Task Force recommend that those patients talk to a genetic counselor about whether or not to get the BRCA test. But the study that surveyed newly diagnosed breast cancer patients found that while 80. 9 percent of   patients wanted testing, only 39. 6 percent had had a counseling session, and 50. 9 percent had a genetic test. The test results could help guide treatment, as well as future efforts to prevent more cancer. When asked why they didn’t get tested, the majority of the 773   patients said it was because their doctor didn’t recommend it to them. Just 13. 7 percent of them said the test was too expensive, and 10. 7 percent said they didn’t want it. The researchers say this suggests a disconnect between oncologist and patient, whether it be assessing BRCA risk isn’t on the physician’s radar, or that they just don’t find it important. The study surveyed 2, 529 women overall. ”Those numbers were really striking to us,” says Allison Kurian, an associate professor of medicine and health   at Stanford University, breast cancer doctor, and lead author on the study, which was published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. ”This really emphasizes the importance of cancer doctors in this process, and that patients get evaluated and tested the way they should be.” Kurian notes that the study only got the patient side of the story, not the physician side, so it’s unfair to assume the doctors are the sole cause of this disconnect. But by making genetic tests and counselors more available to patients at risk for BRCA, and making physicians more aware of the mutations’ implications, the gap between the need for and accessibility of genetic testing in these   patients will shrink, she says. Hospitals need to make sure breast cancer patients are screened for BRCA if they need it, says C. Anthony ”Tony” Blau, a professor of hematology at the University of Washington who specializes in breast cancer and was not involved with the study. The screening shouldn’t be on the patient or the oncologist, he says, but rather ”it should be part of the system. Hospital administrators don’t typically do things that save patients’ lives, but this could be one of those things.” Testing for the genes even when patients are already diagnosed with breast cancer and are at high risk for BRCA can be helpful, says Kurian. ”Knowing a patient has BRCA1 or 2 affects how we treat the cancer she has,” she says. ”We might give her different medications or different surgery options.” That knowledge can also help physicians keep an eye out for ovarian cancer, which occurs 11 to 17 percent more often in women with BRCA mutations and is difficult to diagnose early. It also lets oncologists keep an eye out for new cancers and treat them more effectively. ”Cancers sneak up on you,” Kurian says. If a woman is flagged during BRCA screening due to her family history, ”finding out she has a BRCA gene would let us start screening her as early as 25 years old. If we do find a really tiny cancer, she’ll probably do a lot better and need less therapy in the long run.” And because the BRCA mutations have a    chance of being passed down from parent to child, a patient carrying BRCA1 or BRCA2 is likely to pass it down to further generations as well. In screening breast cancer patients for BRCA risk, ”the implications aren’t only for the patient presently affected by breast cancer,” Blau says, ”but for their families and generations of descendants. The potential impact is enormous, and missing the opportunity to test for it is a big deal.”"
916,"Comedian and actor Irwin Corey, for whom the word ”however” was the perfect opening line, has died at age 102. With an impish grin and wild hair, Corey was a nightclub and   fixture who worked with stars from Jackie Gleason to Woody Allen. His admirers ranged from Damon Runyon to Lenny Bruce. Corey died Monday evening, his    tells NPR. The comedian had been sick earlier this year  —   but he’d been sent home from the hospital after seeming to recover. His last meal, she said, consisted of ice cream and egg drop soup. It’s impossible to provide a short explanation of Corey’s surreal brand of comedy, which was most potent when delivered in his seemingly nonsensical stream of non sequiturs. But the breadth of his career hints at his creative genius: Who else could have appeared in the 1976 film Car Wash, two years after accepting a National Book Award on behalf of the reclusive Thomas Pynchon? Billed as ”the World’s Foremost Authority,” Corey’s guise as an   professor offered a way to poke fun at multisyllabic jargon and those who use it. When political or scientific authorities seemed to annex a chunk of language, there was Corey to claw it back  —   a very human antidote to our complicated modern times. ”Sometimes, I forget what I’m talking about in the middle of a word,” Corey said at his 100th birthday party, which was attended by WNYC contributor Jon Kalish. Corey mixed social commentary into his playful approach to language  —   as at his birthday party in 2014, when he said, ”Ten years ago, we had Johnny Cash. We had Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Today, 10 years later, there’s no cash. There’s no hope. There’s no jobs.” Here’s how legendary theater critic Kenneth Tynan once described Corey: ”a cultural clown, a parody of literacy, a travesty of all that our civilization holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America. He is Chaplin’s clown with a college education.” Born in Brooklyn, N. Y. in 1914, Corey and his brothers and sisters grew up in the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum. After extreme poverty forced their mother to put her children in the home, she paid a monthly fee to help provide for them. Corey’s   beliefs led to him being blacklisted in the 1950s. Decades later, he was found to be panhandling in a Manhattan street. He told The New York Times that he donated all the money he collected to charity  —   often, to a cause that benefits children in Cuba. As Corey explained, he was asking for change around the corner from his home, navigating East 35th Street with his walker, handing out free newspapers and, over the years, collecting tens of thousands of dollars. When a reporter asked him why he hustled for change, he seemed confused. ”Why?” Corey repeated  —   and after a pause, he said, ”I want to help people out.”"
917,"Everyone expects Congress to change the Affordable Care Act, but no one knows exactly how. The uncertainty has one group of people, the homeless, especially concerned. Many received health coverage for the first time under Obamacare now they’re worried it will disappear. Joseph Funn, homeless for almost 20 years, says his body took a beating while he lived on the street. Now, he sees nurse practitioner Amber Richert fairly regularly at the Health Care for the Homeless clinic in Baltimore. At a recent visit, he mentioned that he’d been having some chest pains. ”And when exactly did you quit smoking?” Richert asked. In December, he said, when he moved into his first apartment in decades. That was a big change for the   . Last winter, Funn was living outside and trudging through deep snow for days. His left foot got so swollen, he could hardly walk. ”It was frostbite,” he recalled. ”I thought when you had frostbite, it’s like when you turn purple and blue. But when I came to see Dr. Amber, she said, ’No, that’s when they have to cut something off.’ So I was like, ’Whoa!’ ” Funn was admitted to the clinic’s convalescent center to be treated. The staff also signed him up for Medicaid, the government’s health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Like many people who are homeless, Funn was uninsured. But under the Affordable Care Act, Maryland is one of 31 states and the District of Columbia that expanded Medicaid to cover nondisabled childless adults. Health Care for the Homeless President Kevin Lindamood said that before Obamacare, only 30 percent of the patients they saw had health insurance. The group provides health care to people without homes as well as others who are in transition to more settled lives. ”Now [it’s] 90 percent of our clients, from 30 percent insured to 90 percent insured, either through Medicaid or Medicare,” he said. ”That’s a transformation.” He said the change allowed Health Care for the Homeless to open new clinics, including one for dental care, and to double the number of clients that can be seen. The group also hired more outreach workers to encourage homeless people to come in for help. Homeless advocates have argued that better health coverage should eventually reduce costly emergency room visits. They also say coverage can help people get off the streets by dealing with chronic problems, such as mental health issues, that might keep them outside. Lindamood said his clients are now worried. ”We’re working with very vulnerable people who are now coming to us, hearing the news in general and saying, ’Wait a minute, I just got access to care. Does this mean I’m going to lose it?’ ” he said. Republicans have promised to replace Obamacare but haven’t said how. President Trump has said no one will lose coverage. But White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has also said the administration hopes to turn Medicaid into a block grant  —   meaning states would get a set amount of money, along with more control over how to spend it. The approach has supporters. ”I think there’s a good case to be made that states will have more money to devote to the truly needy folks, because states will be more aggressive, in reining in wasteful expenditures, reining in unnecessary expenditures, reining in fraud,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian CATO Institute. But others are skeptical. Barbara DiPietro, policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, says block grants will likely mean less federal funding for Medicaid, forcing   states to make tough choices about whom to cover. ”So when we talk about no one will lose coverage, that’s heartening,” said DiPietro. ”But the details are always very important. What does that coverage look like? The population we serve typically falls through the cracks.” Almost 900, 000 patients are served by Health Care for the Homeless projects around the country. At the end of 2015, two years after Obamacare went into effect, about half those patients had Medicaid coverage. Joseph Funn said losing Medicaid would be a hardship for him, but he also thinks there are a lot of people on the streets of Baltimore who are worse off than he is. ”I can see them cutting me and giving the money to the people that need the most help,” he said. Now that he has his own apartment, he plans to get healthier so he won’t need as much care."
918,"If you’ve heard of interval training, you can probably thank Martin Gibala, professor and chair of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, whose research has helped popularize the   exercise technique. Interval training comes in many different flavors, but the general idea is to alternate periods of relatively intense exercise with recovery, either   exercise or rest. It can be a much more efficient way to get the benefits of exercise than longer workouts at an easier pace, says Gibala. And it’s not only for athletes it’s been studied in sedentary adults and people with heart failure, Type 2 diabetes and other ailments. In his book The One Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That’s Smarter, Faster, Shorter, which comes out Tuesday, Gibala explains the physiology and history of interval training and includes a dozen workouts. And yes, one of them is based on just one minute of hard exercise (with another nine minutes of   recovery periods and  ) which in a small study conducted by Gibala and colleagues improved markers of health comparably to a   session of steady, moderate exercise. We talked to him about the benefits of and misconceptions about interval training. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. When people talk about interval training, what do they mean? Broadly, there are two main types. High intensity interval training, or HIIT, would be intensities that are generally higher than what we see in public health guidelines. It’s a heart rate exceeding 80 percent of a person’s maximum, but not going all out. Sprint training is harder than that  —   an   pace. Which provides the bigger benefit? Clearly there’s a   between intensity and duration. The more intense the effort, the less duration required to reap the benefits. So sprint training is the most efficient, but it’s not for everyone. It’s less widely studied. We know a lot more about the adaptations the body makes with HIIT. Do we know what’s going on in the body to make these short bursts of exercise effective compared to longer sessions? I’ll talk about the muscles, since that’s what I know most about. The underlying cellular and molecular events largely seem to be similar. You want to create more mitochondria, to increase the capacity of muscles to burn sugars and fats. You can trigger that in different ways. You can do moderate intensity exercise, which continuously stimulates the muscle for a prolonged period of time. Or you can do short, very intense bursts of exercise. Or you can do something in between. Generally speaking, the results are the same. The fuel gauge can slowly drop over time or drop really quickly if you step on the gas really hard. The same basic process is triggered, but in less time with intervals. What is the biggest misconception or myth you see about HIIT? People tend to view intervals only as this         very intense exercise. That either scares them off or it makes them think that type of exercise isn’t suitable for them. The point I try to make is that interval training comes in different flavors. Even with interval walking, there’s some evidence that it’s the better way to go in terms of blood sugar control and boosting fitness [than steadier, slower walking]. But of course you should check with a doctor before starting a new exercise program. [People with unstable angina, for example, are not likely good candidates for interval training.] In some quarters, I see a move to demonize traditional cardio. That’s clearly wrong. The public health guidelines are based on great science, but only about 15 percent of the population is listening. So I want to give people more menu items to choose from. What if you are training for a 10K or even a marathon? Can you get by with interval training? Could you run a marathon by only training with intervals? Yes, but I’m not sure you’d run the best marathon that’s in you. Elite athletes will still use a blend of about 80 percent traditional   continuous training and about 20 percent interval training. It goes back to time efficiency. If time is restricted, it’s a good way to train. But there are health risks of higher intensity exercise, especially for older people or those with health issues. What should people watch out for?  I talked to Paul Thompson (the director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut) about this. He says that if it comes down to remaining sedentary or doing something, you’re better off doing something. But acute exercise [temporarily] elevates the risk of an adverse event. That’s more than offset by lowered risk during the rest of the day, when you’re not exercising. But you don’t know if you’re silently at risk. So it comes down to common sense. If you’re older or just starting out, gentler forms of intervals are a good way to benefit. There’s competing evidence on whether interval workouts are more or less appealing for people than slower exercise: They can save time, but are also more uncomfortable. How do you get over that?  Even I don’t want to do it every day! Sometimes I want to go for a walk in the woods with my dog. But people have a misperception that exercise is only good if you have 45 or 60 minutes at a time. You can fit exercise into life, rather than structuring life around exercise. Katherine Hobson is a freelance health and science writer based in Brooklyn, N. Y. She’s on Twitter: @katherinehobson."
919,"As he wends his way through the crowded alleys of a   neighborhood, Jakarta Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama stops to pick up a young Muslim girl in a headscarf, as residents and reporters snap pictures. He stops at a local mosque, where an all   team strikes up a groove with drums and tambourines to cheer him on in his campaign for  . None of his supporters seem to mind that Basuki, commonly known by his Chinese nickname, ”Ahok,” is Christian and an ethnic Chinese  —   the first time such a person has governed the capital. Why should they? Indonesia is proud of its reputation as not only the world’s most populous   nation, but also the most tolerant and moderate in the Islamic world, home to millions of Hindus and Christians as well as Shiite, Ahmadiyya and other minorities within Islam. But even as he campaigns for the governorship, Ahok is standing trial, accused of blasphemy against Islam. If convicted, he faces a maximum jail term of five years, and very few people charged with this offense in Indonesia manage to beat the rap. Last September, Ahok told a group of fishermen that politicians who quoted from the Quran to say they should not vote for a   were lying to them. But he also told the fishermen to vote their conscience. Ahok, who has a reputation as a blunt speaker, later apologized, saying he had no intention of insulting the Quran or Islam. But some Muslims took offense, and hundreds of thousands took to the streets in three massive rallies against Ahok that convulsed central Jakarta in November and December. Demonstrators continue to congregate at the courthouse where Ahok is on trial. Coils of barbed wire and riot police separate   and   protesters. ”God said, ’Do not vote for someone outside your group to become your leader,’” says Helmy, who goes by one name, selling Islamic flags at the protest. ”So it is forbidden for us to vote for a  .” Many Indonesians dismiss the ethnic and religious overtones of Ahok’s case, describing it as simply a   political contest. One of Ahok’s biggest critics has been former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Though retired, he remains a formidable power broker. And his son, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, is Ahok’s chief rival in the election. Ahok’s case has also uncovered   racial tensions and stereotypes. Many of his critics fear that Indonesia is at risk of political and economic domination by a minority of Chinese elites. Ethnic Chinese account for about 1 percent of Indonesia’s population. Under the dictator Suharto’s rule, they were subject to discriminatory policies, including a ban on public displays of Chinese language and culture. Since Suharto’s fall in 1998, Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese have made a comeback, even as the   protests have been accompanied by an increase in racial epithets aimed at Ahok and other Chinese. Many other Indonesians believe Ahok’s case cuts to even deeper constitutional issues that define Indonesia as a nation. In a lunchtime interview in the midst of a busy day of campaigning, Ahok says that Indonesia has already made these choices. The nation decided at its founding in 1945 to be a secular republic, based on the concept of ”unity in diversity.” ”They want to develop another ideology here in this country,” Ahok says of the Muslim hardliners pushing for his conviction. ”They want to force the implementation of Islamic law in this country. That means they want to dig up our present foundation and build another one. How come?” Rather than being angry at his situation, though, he says he’s proud his case is putting these crucial questions before the Indonesian public. ”I’m happy that history chose me for this position,” he says. ”You couldn’t buy it.” Ahok was not elected to his current position. He was Jakarta’s vice governor until 2014, when  . Joko ”Jokowi” Widodo was elected president and Ahok automatically took Jokowi’s former post. Jokowi’s trajectory is one that Ahok has said he wouldn’t mind following. Like Jokowi, Ahok has built his official track record and popularity by providing services and reforming government. Ahok has cleared slums, including Jakarta’s infamous red light district, cracked down on endemic official corruption and shored up the capital’s crumbling infrastructure. As Ahok campaigned his way through her neighborhood near East Jakarta’s Cibubur River, Muntema, a resident who goes by just one name, smiled approvingly. ”I’m very grateful that when we get sick, we no longer have to pay for health care,” she says. ”Also, the river here used to flood when it rained, but now that doesn’t happen since the governor sent workers to dredge it.” Ahok himself says although helping the poor is very important to him, his real aim in politics is to offer Indonesians a sort of civics lesson: ”How to educate the people to vote for the clean, transparent and professional politician.” Those who support Ahok and Jokowi see them as representative of this new breed of politician. And some analysts see Ahok’s trial as the revenge of the old breed. ”This is the deep state of Indonesia reacting to an outsider president,” says Andreas Harsono, a researcher with Human Rights Watch in Jakarta. By ”deep state,” Harsono means an alliance of the military,   Muslim organizations, paramilitary groups and government bureaucrats. The deep state, Harsono adds, exists beneath the institutions of Indonesia’s democracy, as well of those of other Southeast Asian nations, where younger voters are demanding more political participation from the entrenched elites who have governed their countries since the Cold War era. Particularly worrying, Harsono notes, are reports that the Indonesian military has been giving military training to the Islamic Defenders Front, a vigilante group that has been at the forefront of the protests against Ahok. A similar alliance of the military and Islamist groups in 1965 led to the worst political violence the country has ever seen: a purge of suspected communists that killed up to a million people. The verdict in Ahok’s trial is likely to come sometime after next week’s gubernatorial election. Even if he wins that election, he faces a maximum   jail term if convicted of blasphemy. Whether Ahok could then serve out his term as governor is unclear."
920,"The wall of silence in Indonesia surrounding one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century is beginning to fall apart. A forthcoming report by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights estimates that a purge of suspected communists during the   killed between 600, 000 and 1 million people. The violence reshaped Indonesia’s political landscape and affected the course of the Cold War, just as the U. S. was escalating its fight against communism in Southeast Asia. ”We conclude that there have been gross human rights violations, which can be classified as crimes against humanity,” says Yosep Adi Prasetyo, the commission’s deputy chairman. He says the report places the blame squarely on Indonesia’s military dictator Suharto, who died four years ago. ”We found that the military and police were involved in the killings, as well as forced disappearances, rape, forced movement of people, torture and other crimes,” Prasetyo says. A major general in the Indonesian army at the time, Suharto ousted Sukarno, the revered Indonesian independence leader and the country’s first president, in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of senior Indonesian generals on Sept. 30, 1965. Suharto blamed those murders on the Indonesian Communist Party, then the largest in the noncommunist world. Suharto also suspected Sukarno of complicity in the killings, which the perpetrators said were to prevent the generals from launching a coup attempt against the president. The military, under Suharto, then ordered that communists be hunted down. Survivors Fight To Clear Their Names, In central Jakarta, a handful of survivors live together in a nursing home. Every week, they gather outside the Presidential Palace to demand justice. At the time of the purge, Bujiati, who goes by just one name, was a village chief on the rural outskirts of Jakarta. She had previously worked as a factory worker for the   consumer goods firm Unilever. ”If you were diligent and worked hard, people would accuse you of being a communist,” she recalls. Bujiati, now 86, survived six years in a prison, and later in a hospital ward for mental patients and a leper colony. Tumiso Nitikarjita Lukas was then a   law school student. Like many young people his age, he supported Sukarno. For this, he was arrested and tortured. But he refused to admit to being a communist because, he says, he wasn’t one. ”The government must admit the barbaric acts it committed against its citizens and provide rehabilitation and compensation,” he says. ”We are still waiting. Our demands are not like what you see broadcast in the news. We keep it simple.” After his arrest, Tumiso was exiled to a remote island where he planted rice, built roads and cleared forests until his release in 1979. After that, he worked secretly as a tutor. People implicated in the   campaigns are still barred from working as teachers or civil servants, and in one of the most respected of Indonesian professions: puppet masters. Communism And The Cold War, Tumiso believes Indonesian authorities wanted him to confess to being a communist in order to get assistance from the U. S. government. At the time, the U. S. government was openly supportive of Suharto. It feared that Indonesia, with its big oil reserves, large population and strategic location, would be the next ”domino” to fall to global communism. ”The end of Sukarno was of great significance in terms of the Cold War for the Western powers,” says Katharine McGregor, an Indonesian history expert at the University of Melbourne in Australia. ”And for that reason, people also saw things more in black and white terms of ’it’s just communists being killed’  —   there wasn’t a lot of outcry from the Western world.” There has long been speculation that the CIA assisted in the   purge, but hard evidence is lacking. McGregor notes, however, that there is much clearer evidence of U. S. government support for an   rebellion by dissident army officers on Indonesia’s outer islands in 1958. In particular, Indonesian forces shot down a   bomber over Indonesian territory and captured its pilot,    American Allen L. Pope, along with documents linking him to the CIA. Indonesia sentenced Pope to death but later handed him back to the U. S. Many Opponents To Investigation, The   purge of 1965 effectively eliminated Indonesia’s political left wing. Under the three decades of Suharto’s authoritarian rule that followed, Indonesia was a     country without independent women’s rights groups, effective trade unions and other civil society institutions, and few channels for citizens to participate in politics. Even today, efforts such as the human rights commission’s to   the killing of communists face opposition from people such as Tribowo Soebiandono, the vice head of a group of military family members. ”We believe that we must still maintain vigilance against the threat of communism,” he says, speaking at his group’s office. ”This country is on the brink of collapse. Honestly, corruption is rampant. I don’t want to go pointing any fingers, but we can figure it out for ourselves.” Mainstream Islamic groups have also protested the National Human Rights Commission’s report and opposed any   of the killings. The commission’s study says that at the time, the military mobilized members of these groups to help kill communists. The Islamic groups and the communists were at odds over ideology, and over the Islamic establishment’s large landholdings, which were a target of the communists’ land reforms. A Question Of Justice, It is too early to tell whether anyone will be put on trial for the killings, or whether victims or their families will get any compensation. Human Rights Commission’s Yosep Adi Prasetyo says the commission’s mandate was simply to investigate, and it had enough trouble just doing that. ”It’s going to be difficult because the president’s    is one of the perpetrators that must be held accountable for the massacre and other crimes,” he says. Current Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s    was a general who played a major part in the campaign to eradicate communists. The general himself estimated that the purge killed some 2 million people. Indonesia is sometimes held up as an example of one of Asia’s more successful transitions from authoritarian state to democracy. Myanmar, for example, is looking to Indonesia as it begins its own such transition. Whether anyone is ever held to account for their crimes, and whether the victims ever get any justice, the victims say they have one overriding concern: that their country learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating this horrific episode in the future."
921,"In the foothills of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a gravel road leads to a    fence. Type in a key code, and a gate scrapes open. Undo a chain to get behind another. Everything here is made of metal, because the residents of this facility are experts at invasion and destruction. They’re wild pigs, aka feral swine, wild hogs or Sus scrofa. And biologists at the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins have invented a promising new way to track the invasive animals by looking for tiny traces of them in mud and water. Biologist Morgan Wehtje points to a boar who’s asking her to scratch his bristled back. At 280 pounds, he weighs about as much as an NFL tight end. ”His name is Makunakane, which means ’Big Papa’ in Hawaiian,” says Wehtje. The smaller pigs, like a female named Bobbie Socks, weigh about 150 pounds. They’re dense and compact, says Wehtje, ”which is why if they were to run at you they’d take you out.” Wehtje and her colleagues study the biology and behavior of these pigs, which were raised in captivity. They’re playing in the snow and scoping out the fence with their wet snouts. But their wild, much less cuddly counterparts are destroying the landscape in most U. S. states  —   inflicting an estimated $1. 5 billion in damage per year. These animals will eat anything, from rows of corn to sea turtle eggs, to baby deer and goats. ”People don’t realize that wild pigs are voracious predators,” says Jack Mayer, a biologist with the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S. C. who has studied wild pigs for 40 years. ”They will run down and kill and eat lamb, sheep, goats, calves, domestic chickens.” And more. ”Pigs will eat humans,” says Mayer. ”It’s been documented in combat, remote area homicide situations and plane crashes. Pigs will go in and feed on human carcasses.”  They are ”opportunistic omnivores,” Mayer says. ”If they can get their mouth around it and it has a calorie in it, they will eat it.” In Texas, feral pigs are tearing up suburban yards. In Louisiana, they damaged levees by digging for food. Pigs came to North America 500 years ago with early explorers as a source of food. Centuries later, the Eurasian wild boar was introduced to parts of the U. S. by sports hunters, and today’s feral swine are ”a combination of escaped domestic pigs, Eurasian wild boars, and hybrids of the two,” according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Once female wild pigs are about 6 months old or so, they can produce as many as a dozen offspring per year. For a number of reasons that haven’t been completely nailed down, their populations have really exploded in the last 30 years, Mayer says. There are now at least 6 million wild pigs across the country, with established populations in 35 states. State and federal legislators have funneled a lot of money into controlling and eliminating these animals because of the trail of destruction they leave behind. But controlling them can feel like an infuriating game of    because they move a lot, reproduce quickly and are smart enough to learn to avoid traps and bait. They’re also sneaky. ”These things are very secretive,” says Mayer. ”A lot of people didn’t know about wild pigs until they walked out their front door on Sunday morning and saw that it looked like somebody on drugs had rototilled their yard.” But the pigs may have met their match. Kelly Williams, a biological science technician at the National Wildlife Research Center, is going   on these hogs. She and her colleagues at the National Wildlife Research Center have recently developed a way  to keep tabs on the animals without ever even laying eyes on them. All she needs is a scoop of water. ”So, for example, right now in New Mexico the forest service is out collecting water for me,” says Williams. ”All they have to do is carry around a little Nalgene bottle, scoop up a water sample and ship it back to me.” Pigs love water and mud. They drink it, play in it and roll in it to keep heat and bugs away. When they do, they leave bits of themselves behind  —   drool, skin cells, hair and urine  —   like a wildlife crime scene. Each of those bits contains pig DNA. ”We know pigs are pretty messy, dirty animals, so they might shed more DNA than a coyote lapping up water or something,” Williams says. She worked with wild pigs at the National Wildlife Research Center to identify these tiny bits of DNA  —   called ”environmental DNA,” or eDNA  —   which can sometimes be detectable up to a month after a pig has visited a site. Ecologists have used eDNA to monitor invasive fish in the Great Lakes and endangered whale sharks in the Arabian Gulf. Williams’ colleagues developed a version to track the presence of Burmese pythons in Florida. Wild pigs are one of the first land animals to be tracked so extensively using eDNA. Williams starts with a bottle of dirty water, mixed with a solution to preserve the DNA inside. ”Sometimes it looks like chocolate milk,” she says. ”Sometimes it looks like lemonade.” Williams spins down all the solids in the liquid sample, amplifies the DNA inside, and compares what she finds to 125 base pairs of mitochondrial DNA that could only belong to a pig. At the end, she gets an answer: ”Yes, pigs were here,” or ”No, they weren’t.” She then passes the results along to people like Brian Archuleta, a wildlife biologist with the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in New Mexico. Archuleta has a goal for the new year: wild pig annihilation. ”Total elimination by the last day of September of this year,” he says of his goal. Archuleta is not joking. He covers eastern New Mexico, which is not only thousands of square miles of desert, mountains and sand dunes, but also right next to Texas, which is teeming with pigs (not to be confused with javelina, a smaller, unrelated species native to the Americas). To track wild pigs in his region, Archuleta used to have to repeatedly send people out across deserts and mountains to place cameras, use dogs to sniff them out, and bait traps with tubes of corn. ”The eastern side of New Mexico is a big place  —   lots of country. We are looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Archuleta. But recently, he just had a few people go out and collect water, and then shipped the samples to Kelly Williams. With the results he got back he was able to narrow the search to about 10 square miles in the desert, and another small area in the mountains. Next, Archuleta booked a helicopter, hired some sharpshooters and flew over the areas where pig DNA had been found. They shot eight hogs in one place and 13 in another. ”There are unknown places in New Mexico that I’m sure have pigs that we just don’t know about,” he says. He’s hoping the new eDNA sampler will help him find every last one. Meanwhile, Kelly Williams is already on to her next challenge. She’s working on a way to use eDNA to track another elusive species  —   the Nile monitor. These hissing,      lizards are expanding their reach in Florida. They eat endangered owls for breakfast."
922,"Updated at 10:25 a. m. ET on Feb. 7, A newly released report by Amnesty International alleges a widespread and systematic attack by Syria’s government against its civilian population, including murder, torture, enforced disappearances and extermination carried out at a military prison called Saydnaya. The report’s executive summary opens with this grim description: ”Saydnaya Military Prison is where the Syrian state quietly slaughters its own people. The victims are overwhelmingly ordinary civilians who are thought to oppose the government. Since 2011, thousands of people have been extrajudicially executed in mass hangings, carried out at night and in the utmost secrecy. Many other detainees at Saydnaya Military Prison have been killed after being repeatedly tortured and systematically deprived of food, water, medicine and medical care. The bodies of those who are killed at Saydnaya are buried in mass graves. It is inconceivable that these   and systematic practices have not been authorized at the highest levels of the Syrian government.” ”Every week, and sometimes twice a week, groups of up to 50 people were taken out of their cells, taken over to another building on the grounds of the prison and hanged to death,” report author Nicolette Waldman told NPR’s Steve Inskeep. ”On top of this, the conditions at the prison . .. are actually calculated [to] deliberately [subject] detainees to inhuman, repeated torture and the deprivation of food, water, medicine and medical care so they are dying in massive numbers even on top of these hangings,” she explained. Reports of torture and disappearances in Syria are not new. But the Amnesty International report says the magnitude and severity of abuse has ”increased drastically” since 2011. Citing the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, the report says ”at least 17, 723 people were killed in government custody between March 2011 and December 2015, an average of 300 deaths each month.” The victims  —   political dissidents, journalists, doctors and aid workers  —   were perceived opponents of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Waldman called on the Assad regime’s most powerful ally, Russia, to use its influence to stop what she called ”war crimes.” ”We can’t be sure about what kind of efforts Russia has made [already],” she said. ”However, as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council . .. it’s very difficult to believe that they could be supporting this type of massive crimes against humanity and war crimes.” On the basis of its own investigation, Amnesty International estimates that between September 2011 and December 2015, between 5, 000 and 13, 000 people were executed without legitimate trials at Saydnaya. The report says the organization has no evidence of executions after December 2015, but based on information that the facility is still being used to imprison dissidents, ”there is no reason to believe the executions have stopped.” The   report includes graphic details of systematic beatings, rapes and psychological degradation, not to mention the denial of food, water and medical care. Omar, a former detainee, described it this way: ” ’[A]t night, we could hear them beating them again with the tank belt [an improvised tool made out of tyre tread, which is attached to a wooden handle] and the green pipe. We knew the sounds that each made. First we were thinking the people were being released or taken to the civilian prisons. But at midnight, we heard the sound of torture again, and we thought they were dying, because the sound of the torture was so strong. They were beating them in a monstrous way.’ ” ”I think some of the most chilling aspects of the research, for me, was hearing the same exact procedures [multiple times],” said Waldman. ”This is how you corroborate these testimonies, because basically people saw and heard different aspects of the same thing happening again and again.” The report is based on a yearlong investigation, beginning in December 2015, of the violations reported at Saydnaya. The organization interviewed 84 people in total, many with firsthand experience at Saydnaya including 31 former detainees, four prison officials or guards and 22 family members of former or current detainees, as well as Syrian judges, lawyers and doctors familiar with the facility. All but two interviews with witnesses were conducted separately, says the report. Most interviews were conducted in southern Turkey, with others in Lebanon, Jordan, Europe and the United States. The Amnesty International report says the organization attempted to contact the Syrian government in January 2017 about the allegations raised in its report. But the organization has received no response."
923,"When Mana Heshmati isn’t working as an engineer, she’s cooking traditional Iranian food through her ” ” Peace Meal Kitchen, a   dining series based in Detroit. It’s a way to expose diners to her Iranian heritage and dispel misconceptions about the often misunderstood country. She held her first   in April to the delight of fans who ranged from the city’s   foodies to Iranian nationals who were craving a taste of home. Her dinners mostly feature traditional Persian cuisine, but she’s also delved into other misrepresented regions, such as an   event last fall. But a mission that started as a culinary cultural exchange has shifted in the wake of President Trump’s executive order barring travel from seven   nations. ”With the election,” she says, ”[the dinner series] is transforming into a platform to positively impact the community.” At a   over the weekend, Heshmati’s Peace Meal Kitchen filled a bar in Detroit’s Eastern Market district with the herbaceous aroma of traditional ghormeh sabzi, a Persian beef stew with herbs and spinach.  Outside the door of the bar waited long lines of diners, all hungry to show their solidarity with immigrants affected by the executive order, which calls for restrictions on travelers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. They feasted on sabze khordan, a salad of fresh herbs, radish and sheep feta served with fresh   barbari, an Iranian flatbread, seer torshi, a side dish of aged pickled garlic, and other dishes. In all, Heshmati and the event organizers raised more than $700, most of which is going to the ACLU of Michigan. They sold out of food within two hours. Peace Meal Kitchen is just one of hundreds of food businesses across the country that are taking the opportunity to raise funds for the ACLU, which in the days since Trump made his announcement has raised more than $20 million nationally. Metro Detroit is home to one of the largest Muslim immigrant populations in the country, including large concentrations of Iraqi, Yemeni, and Iranian immigrants, many drawn over the years to jobs in the automotive industry. More recently, parts of the area have welcomed a small number of Syrian refugees. Among the diners at Saturday’s event were Norris Howard and Latasha James, who heard about the dinner from a Facebook page. ”I grew up here and am so familiar with Middle Eastern food and culture,” says Howard, 29. ”To have something like this, we would be remiss to not support it.” James says she has   friends who, even though they were born in the United States, have encountered instances of discrimination when wearing a traditional hijab. ”To hear the intolerance, the stigma, it’s just so sad,” she says. Carolyn Anahid, 54, of suburban Troy, Mich. went to the dinner with her   husband and their two adult daughters. While not normally the types to hit up the city’s trendy   scene, the family says Peace Meal Kitchen’s cause seemed necessary. ”My daughter mentioned it, and that part of the profits would be going to the ACLU, so we immediately said we’re going to be supporting this,” says Anahid. Anahid says her family’s first reaction when Trump announced the travel restrictions was to check in with anyone they knew who might be impacted. ”For everybody who cares about this, there’s that electric reaction of, ’Oh, my god, where is everybody, what’s going to happen next?’ ” For the     Heshmati, using food as a means of discourse is a more organic, less intimidating way of addressing issues about identity and politics. ”Food has always been used as a bridging tool throughout many cultures throughout history,” says Heshmati. ”It takes out some of the stigma of some of the politics. It helps people reach a new level of understanding about a different culture. Food makes everything approachable.” Serena Maria Daniels is a freelance journalist based in Detroit."
924,"Many resettlement agencies are relieved refugees can once again come to the U. S. now that a federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that suspended the refugee program. So far, the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a request by the Trump administration to restore the temporary refugee ban. But this open door to refugees could close at some point depending on what the courts decide. Many refugees and workers at resettlement agencies are stuck in limbo. ”I don’t know how long I will have this job, because we are thinking there will be some layoffs if this continues,” says Omar Mohamed, a case manager for Church World Service of Lancaster, Pa. Local agencies worry they will no longer get the federal funding they need to provide services not only to new arrivals, but also to refugees still getting settled into their new country. Mohamed says there’s still a lot of work for case managers to do with refugees after they move into their new homes. ”Everything is new to them  —   this new culture, new people, new language,” he says. ”We have to teach them from zero.” Mohamed Muhumed’s family arrived in the U. S. about three weeks ago. He recently moved into a   apartment in Lancaster with his wife and their four children. An orphan at three years old, Muhumed fled Somalia and waited 23 years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia to be resettled. In 2014, after multiple interviews and security screenings, he finally moved, by himself, to central Pennsylvania, where he now works as a   driver. His wife and children joined him in Lancaster 10 days before Trump announced his temporary ban on refugees. ”I feel very, very happy,” says Muhumed, who adds that his family had ”good luck” to arrive before Trump’s executive order. In Philadelphia, Paw Wah doesn’t know if she’ll ever see her family reunited. She escaped persecution as a member of the Karen community, an ethnic minority in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Last year she moved out of a refugee camp in Thailand with her husband and their three young children, leaving behind their eldest daughter. Wah was planning to make a meal of fish paste, vegetables and soup to welcome her daughter to Philadelphia in late January  —   until Trump issued his refugee order. The flight to the U. S. for Wah’s daughter was canceled and hasn’t been rebooked yet, according to staff at the Nationalities Service Center, a refugee resettlement agency in Philadelphia that would help her once she gets off the plane. Betsy Jenson coordinates donations and volunteers for the agency. She says that while they’re waiting for more refugees, they’re certainly prepared, given the uptick in donations of clothing, furniture and household goods they’ve received since Trump’s election. They’ve also heard from a lot of people in Philadelphia who want to help. ”We actually just closed off our volunteer applications for the moment, just because we’ve sort of reached capacity,” Jenson says. In Lancaster, a group of leaders from different refugee communities recently met to discuss what more they can do. ”We, the refugees and immigrants that are qualified to vote, we have to show at the polling stations in numbers, because politicians look at numbers,” said Joseph Sackor, a former refugee who fled civil war in Liberia before he became a U. S. citizen. Sackor added that it’s time for more refugees to register to vote once they get citizenship and to reach out to elected officials  —   for themselves and for others hoping to build a new life in America."
925,"In fiction we seek a paradox, the familiar in the foreign, new realities that only this one particular author can give us. Pachinko, the sophomore novel by the gifted   Min Jin Lee, is the kind of book that can open your eyes and fill them with tears at the same time. Pachinko, for those not in the know, is one of the national obsessions of Japan, a dizzying cross between pinball and a slot machine, wherein small metal balls drop randomly amid a maze of brass pins. There’s a comic feel of Rube Goldberg to the device, but the final effect is oddly mesmerizing. The urge to play can quickly become an addiction, and of course the game is a perfect metaphor for the ricochet whims of fate. Owning pachinko parlors becomes a way for the clan depicted in the novel to climb out of poverty  —   but destiny cannot be manipulated so easily. We are in Buddenbrooks territory here, tracing a family dynasty over a sprawl of seven decades, and comparing the brilliantly drawn Pachinko to Thomas Mann’s classic first novel is not hyperbole. Lee bangs and buffets and pinballs her characters through life, love and sorrow, somehow making her vast, ambitious narrative seem intimate. ”History has failed us, but no matter,” she writes in the book’s Tolstoyan opening sentence, hinting at the mix of tragic stoicism that is to come. During the second decade of the 20th century, as Korea falls under Japanese annexation, a young   fisherman named Hoonie marries a local girl, Yangjin, ”fifteen and mild and tender as a newborn calf.” The couple has a daughter, Sunja, who grows to childhood as the cosseted pet of their rooming house by the sea in   a tiny islet near the Korean port city of Busan. As a shy, vulnerable adolescent, Sunja is the prey of a formidable   gangster named Koh Hansu. With features that make him look ”somewhat Japanese,” and elegant   fashions such as ”white patent leather shoes,” Hansu embeds himself deeply into the remainder of Sunja’s life. He’s a Godfather, but also something of a fairy godmother. Most importantly, he provides a financial buffer when the family relocates to Osaka, Japan. Lee deftly sketches a     but oftentimes harsh new world of a Korean immigrant in imperialist Japan. Sunja gives birth out of wedlock to Hansu’s son, her shame erased at the last minute by marriage to a patrician,   pastor. The entwined destinies of the gangster’s bastard and a second child, the son of a preacher man, become an engine that drives the story forward. Amid the nightmare of war, the people of Osaka deal with privations. ”City children were sent alone to the country by train to buy an egg or a potato in exchange for a grandmother’s kimono.” Sunja and her beloved    Kyunghee have set themselves up in business making the flavorful national specialty of Korea, kimchi. Pickled cabbage serves as mode of survival, rising to symbolic importance alongside the pachinko game itself, organic and homey where the other is mechanical and sterile. The cultures, Korean and Japanese, clash. Sunja’s son, Mozasu, who owns pachinko parlors, will level with his best friend over fried oysters and shishito peppers, in a passage that lies at the heart of these characters’ dilemmas: ”In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make, or how nice I am.” Lee is at her best describing complex behaviors and emotions with unadorned,    language. ”Isak knew how to talk with people, to ask questions, and to hear the concerns in a person’s voice and she seemed to understand how to survive, and this was something he did not always know how to do.” There are horrors in Pachinko  —   a lengthy prison term is marked by gruesome torture  —   but the core message remains ultimately one of survival and hope. ”Pachinko was a foolish game,” Lee writes, ”but life was not.” The reader could be forgiven for thinking that the reverse might also be true. This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja’s best kimchi. Jean Zimmerman’s latest novel, Savage Girl, is out now in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin."
926,"White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is known to have cultivated ties with   parties in Europe, like the National Front in France. He also seems to have forged an alliance with Vatican   who oppose Pope Francis’ less rigid approach to church doctrine. The New York Times reported this week on Bannon’s connections at the Vatican. Before becoming White House chief strategist, Bannon  —   who is Catholic  —   was the executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he called a ”platform for the  .” That’s a movement associated with white nationalism. During a visit to Rome a few years ago, Bannon struck up a friendship with the American Cardinal Raymond Burke, a traditionalist who has emerged as one of Pope Francis’ most vocal critics. Bannon hired Thomas Williams, an American former priest, as Breitbart’s Rome correspondent. Williams belonged to the conservative Legion of Christ, which was roiled by scandal when it was revealed its founder had been a pedophile. Williams recently told his own story on an Italian TV talk show: In 2003, he fathered a child, but he kept it secret until he was outed by a news report. He then left the priesthood and married the child’s mother  —   who is the daughter of the former U. S. ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon. In July 2014, Bannon addressed a conference that was held inside the Vatican but was sponsored by a conservative Catholic group. Speaking via Skype, Bannon painted an almost apocalyptic vision of the state of the Western world. ”We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which, if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.” A barbarity, Bannon added, that would completely eradicate ”everything we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2, 000, 2, 500 years,” and which he clearly spelled out a few minutes later: ”We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” This is language that Pope Francis has never used. The pope has repeatedly urged European countries to welcome migrants  —   who are, in the majority, Muslim  —   and he has championed the rights of the poor. A year ago, Francis criticized candidate Donald Trump for wanting to build a wall along the border with Mexico, saying, ”A person who thinks only about building walls . .. and not building bridges is not Christian.” But that’s not Bannon’s worldview. While most Breitbart reports on the pope have been neutral, headlines about the pope when Bannon was in charge included: While Breitbart and Bannon seem to be making common cause with Roman Catholics who are on the outs with this pope, these Vatican   are not very powerful. Nevertheless, Pope Francis’ supporters inside the Vatican worry that following Trump’s election victory, the pope is a little more isolated  —   a lonely progressive on the global stage. They say this has emboldened his critics both within and outside the Vatican, who have become more vocal. For example, just last week, mysterious   posters cropped up around Rome. The photo showed the pope looking uncharacteristically very grouchy, and the unidentified author  —   using a Roman street dialect  —   accused him of acting in an authoritarian manner and showing lack of mercy, despite the fact that Francis has made ”Mercy” the unofficial slogan of his papacy. Francis has not reacted. But in a surprising move, on Sunday, he issued the very first papal blessing for the Super Bowl. It was a video message in his native Spanish  —   not in Italian, which he usually uses for official messages  —   in which he said such a sporting event ”shows that it’s possible to build a culture of encounter and a world of peace.” The Italian media labeled the message ” .”"
927,"The racial wealth gap has been measured and studied for decades. One fact has remained the same: White families build and accumulate more wealth more quickly than black and brown families do. The reasons for this are multiple and  . They start at slavery and traverse the historical and deliberate exclusion of people of color from the economic institutions and government programs that helped white Americans build wealth and pass it on to successive generations. Segregation and redlining by banks made it impossible for many black and Latino families to secure mortgages, for example. The GI Bill, which helped establish an American middle class by helping veterans pay for college and buy homes after World War II, mostly excluded people of color. The results are stark. In 2013, the median white family held 13 times as much net wealth as the median black family and 10 times as much wealth as the median Latino family, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Just a decade earlier, the disparity was 7 to 1 for black families, and 9 to 1 for Latino families. A study released this week by the   think tank Demos offered new points of analysis on the disparity, one of which was particularly sobering. In comparing the wealth held by   white families to that held by black and Latino families with two parents, the authors found that: The median   white family had roughly twice as much wealth as the median black or Latino family with two parents. This ratio is interesting for a couple of related reasons. First, it demonstrates that the financial advantages that come with marriage, like having two earners, qualifying for tax breaks for dependents, and the ability to share expenses, are insufficient to close the racial wealth gap. Second, as the study points out, the data call to mind Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report ”The Negro Family.” In it, he attributed poverty among   to the structure of black families and the fact that many were headed by single mothers. Moynihan argued that the widening gap between black Americans and white Americans would persist so long as ”the deterioration of the Negro family” did. This premise has often been used to advance the argument that personal responsibility and social respectability are the solution to racial and economic inequity (see: Bill Cosby, et al. ). Yet decades of research have demonstrated that this is a faulty premise and cannot explain away the racial wealth gap. The Demos study reiterates this point. ”Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure,” the authors note. ”The benefits of intergenerational wealth transfers and other aspects of white privilege . .. benefit white single mothers, enabling them to build significantly more wealth than married parents of color.” The study uses available data to illustrate other ways that have proved inadequate to close the racial wealth gap. Attending college, working full time, spending less than whites  ” none of these have been enough to help black and Latinos even begin to achieve parity with white Americans in this regard."
928,"Two lawyers, three judges, thousands of ordinary Americans: On Tuesday night, oral arguments in Washington v. Trump attracted an unusually large audience for   legal proceedings. The case centers on President Trump’s controversial executive order that would temporarily bar all new refugees from entering the U. S. as well as visa holders from seven   countries. Those restrictions are currently not being enforced, after a federal judge granted the states of Washington and Minnesota a temporary restraining order blocking the travel ban from going into effect. It was that temporary restraining order  —   not the travel ban itself  —   that was being debated in the arguments Tuesday night before three judges on the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But along the way, the lawyers and judges raised a number of larger issues  —   some of which, for the many nonlawyers listening along, might require a little context or explanation. Here are a few key questions that were raised, directly or indirectly, during the arguments: How many Muslims would be affected by the travel ban? (And does it matter?) During oral arguments, Judge Richard Clifton suggested that the seven countries named in President Trump’s travel ban make up less than 15 percent of the world’s Muslim population. Clifton’s ”quick penciling,” as he described it during the hearing, is close. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen made up just more than 12 percent of the world’s Muslim population in 2010, based on NPR’s analysis of the latest data compiled by the Pew Research Center. During the hearing, Clifton questioned whether the travel ban could be considered religious discrimination against Muslims if the majority of Muslims worldwide were not affected. Here’s how Washington state Solicitor General Noah Purcell responded: ”Your honor, the case law from this court and from the Supreme Court is very clear that to prove religious discrimination, we do not need to prove that this order harms only Muslims or that it harms every Muslim. We just need to prove that it was motivated in part by a desire to harm Muslims.” Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, says there is case law that backs up Purcell’s argument. ”There is no precedent for the ridiculous suggestion that discrimination against members of a religious group becomes constitutionally acceptable whenever only a small percentage of that religious group is victimized,” Tribe tells NPR. ”The entire course of jurisprudence under the Religion Clauses is incompatible with any such arithmetic approach to the issue.” What rights do noncitizens have under the U. S. Constitution? As he wrapped up his initial remarks, August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, said that in some cases, noncitizens have ”no rights” that the state of Washington could try to protect. Cornell University Law School professor Stephen   says that’s basically true. He explains that the constitutional rights of noncitizens exist on a sort of spectrum. ”At one end of the spectrum someone who’s never been to the United States, even for visiting Disney World, really has no rights,” he tells NPR. ”On the other end of the spectrum would be somebody who’s been given a green card . .. they have a lot of constitutional rights.” But it’s more complicated than that. It matters where someone is. Someone in the U. S.  —   even illegally  —   has constitutional rights, such as the right to due process and the freedoms under the First Amendment,   says. Even people who aren’t in the U. S. and never have been might have ties to a U. S. resident or citizen who has rights of his own  —   as the state of Washington pointed out in its arguments. What are the limits of presidential power? The Department of Justice argues that the president has broad powers when it comes to immigration and national security. In court filings, and again in oral arguments, the DOJ suggested that it was inappropriate for judges to ” ” the president’s judgment on national security issues. But the judges seemed to be interested in the limits of those presidential powers, as well as when ” ” would be called for. ”Could the president simply say in the order, we’re not gonna let any Muslims in?” asked Judge William Canby. Flentje replied several times that that’s not what Trump’s executive order does. ”I know that,” Canby said. ”But could he do that?” He kept pushing for an answer to his hypothetical question. Flentje conceded that a different plaintiff  —   specifically, a ”U. S. citizen with a connection with someone seeking entry”  —   might be able to sue for religious discrimination in that situation. What proof is there that Trump’s travel ban is motivated by concerns over terrorism  —   and what evidence that it’s meant to block Muslims?  The Justice Department argues that the temporary travel ban on travelers from seven mostly Muslim countries is necessary to protect U. S. national security. But Judge Michelle Friedland pushed the government to support that claim. ”Has the government pointed to any evidence connecting these countries with terrorism?” Friedland asked the Justice Department’s lawyer. Flentje said that there is no such evidence on the record in this case. But he did mention   an Islamic militant group based in East Africa that the U. S. government considers a terrorist organization. And he pointed out that Congress and the Obama administration had already authorized heightened security for visitors from these countries. Meanwhile, when Purcell argued on behalf of the states, Clifton asked him to lay out evidence for the states’ allegation that the order, which doesn’t mention Islam or Muslims by name, is actually motivated by religious bias. Purcell had described the evidence of intent as ”rather shocking” but didn’t go into detail. Friedland pointed out that the state included evidence in its briefs  —   including remarks from Trump associate Rudy Giuliani about what he said was the administration’s desire to impose a Muslim ban ”legally.” What might happen next? While Tuesday’s hearing veered into questions of constitutional law, the federal appeals judges are deciding only whether to reinstate Trump’s travel ban while the legal battle over his executive order continues. The 9th Circuit panel said it won’t be making a decision on Wednesday, but the ruling could come later this week. If the   panel decides to bring the travel ban back, lawyers for Washington state and Minnesota could ask a lower court to grant a preliminary injunction to, again, suspend the ban, which could be issued as early as Feb. 18, according to this court filing. Regardless of what the appeals judges decide, the case is likely to end up before the U. S. Supreme Court."
929,"President Trump addressed the legal battle over his immigration ban on Wednesday morning, saying the courts ”seem so political.” Speaking to a gathering of sheriffs and police chiefs in Washington, D. C. Trump said he had watched television coverage of the oral arguments before the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday night ”in amazement” and that he ”heard things that I couldn’t believe.” A   panel of the appeals court is weighing a ruling by a lower court judge that blocked Trump’s ban while the case proceeds it is expected to issue its ruling later this week. ”I don’t ever want to call a court biased,” Trump said, adding, ”but courts seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.” Trump said he would not comment on the statement made ”by certainly one judge.” But, Trump said, ”right now we are at risk because of what happened.” He said that if the judges wanted to ”help the court in terms of respect for the court, they’d do what they should be doing.” Trump read parts of the statute that he says gives him authority to issue the ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim nations, as well as a temporary halt in refugee admissions. ”A bad high school student would understand this anybody would understand this,” he said. The executive order has been the target of dozens of lawsuits, including the one that prompted the stay. Addressing criticism that the ban was rushed with no notice to either the affected travelers or the federal agents who had to enforce it, Trump said he had suggested there be a   notice but that ”the law enforcement people said to me, ’Oh you can’t give a notice,’ ” because then people are ”going to pour in before the toughness takes effect.”"
930,"Customers who walked through the door of Everyman Espresso, a cafe in New York’s East Village, last weekend got a pitch at the   counter to support a fundraiser to help defend immigrants. ”We’re donating 5 percent [of our proceeds] to the ACLU in response to the travel ban,” Eric Grimm, a manager at the cafe, explained. Grimm was referring to the executive order issued by President Trump restricting people from seven   countries from entering the U. S. Over 800 cafes around the country participated in the weekend fundraiser, which was the brainchild of Sprudge, a coffee publication and event organizer. Organizers say at least $400, 000 was raised  —   though only   of the cafes have reported their tallies, so they expect that number to keep rising. ”I think it speaks to the wider moment we’re in right now,” Jordan Michelman of Sprudge told us. It’s a way of saying ”immigrants are welcome here,” says Sam Penix, the owner of Everyman Espresso. Penix says he wants to remind people that ”we’re a nation of immigrants, a city of immigrants.” And restaurants and cafes depend on immigrants as employees, too. The food industry is often the   to employment for immigrants. An estimated one in four restaurant workers are   according to an analysis done by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United using data from the Census’ American Community Survey for 2015. And the vast majority of farm workers are immigrants, many of whom are in the U. S. without legal authorization. The U. S. food supply depends on immigrants. Ben Hall, a chef and   of the Russell Street Deli in Detroit, says lots of people don’t realize this. ”We can’t run a business without labor,” says Hall. Hall has designated his deli as a sanctuary restaurant, which is a nationwide movement aimed at promoting   workplaces and helping protect workers from discriminatory acts based on their immigration status, gender, religion or other factors. It’s not just independent cafes and restaurants speaking up. Big brands have jumped in, too. Just After President Trump’s travel ban was announced, Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz wrote to all his employees assuring them ”we are doing everything possible to support and help” employees who are impacted by the travel ban. For example, Starbucks is offering free legal advice to employees with questions about immigration status. And the company announced plans to hire 10, 000 refugees over the next five years. The CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, who is   sent an email to her employees after the travel ban was announced. ”We are an incredibly diverse organization, comprised of men and women from all walks of life and every corner of the globe  —   including the countries impacted by this new policy,” Nooyi wrote. Her email affirmed the value of diversity. ”PepsiCo remains a place where everyone feels welcome and anyone can succeed. These are values we will never abandon,” Nooyi wrote. She pledged to remain ”steadfastly committed to the safety, security and   of all our associates.” As food companies decide how and whether to weigh in, some brands are finding that speaking up for immigrants and inclusion is good for business. ”This is a very important time and we really want to be part of this conversation,” says Sepanta Bagherpour, director of marketing at Nando’s   a chicken restaurant chain. (He’s South African.) The company is currently promoting its Everyone Is Welcome campaign. Nando’s has 38 restaurants in the U. S. and 1, 200 internationally. When I walked by one of the Washington, D. C. locations, I noticed a big, bold sign in the storefront window that read: ”Nando’s   is an immigrant employing, gay loving, Muslim respecting, racism opposing, equal paying,   restaurant.” Bagherpour says the Nando’s brand  —   which began in South Africa in the waning days of apartheid  —   is built on social commentary. And he says this campaign has been good for business. The company says that traffic and sales have jumped compared to the same time last year. But taking sides in this national conversation has its risks. ”We’ve definitely seen push back,” says Russell Street Deli’s Ben Hall. After he was featured in a national business story on the sanctuary restaurant movement, he was slammed on social media. There were comments such as: ”I’ll never ever eat in your restaurant,” and ”I only want my food [to be] made by an American.” Hall says he was taken aback, but he realizes this conversation elicits strong feelings on both sides. And, in the end, despite the negative comments on social media, his deli has been more crowded than usual for this time of year."
931,"School traffic never bothers Max Schneider. In the airplane he takes to class every day, his commute is pretty easy. It’s nearly 7:30 a. m. when a small,   Piper Saratoga plane takes off from the mainland in Port Clinton, Ohio. Pilot Bob Ganley is on his way to pick up students heading to school. His first stop is Middle Bass Island, about a mile away from the school. Instead of a bus stop, Max’s father is dropping him off at the Middle Bass airport to meet the plane. On Western Lake Erie, there are only a few inhabited islands. The school on Middle Bass closed in 1982. So Max and four other students go to    School, located on South Bass Island. Their school bus will be this Piper plane. Ganley has two students to pick up: Max, a   and Cecilia, a  . After landing in   ’s airport, Max and Cecilia walk to a large yellow van waiting in the airport’s empty parking lot. They join two teachers who flew over from the mainland earlier. In the summer, golf carts and bikes carry thousands of tourists across these streets. But this time of year, there are only about 400 people on the island. Max’s mother, Katie, teaches English here. Her family lives on Middle Bass, but during the winter, she rents a place near school just in case the plane is unable to fly. ”If they know there’s weather coming in, they’ll stay just because they don’t want to be late for school or miss out on school,” she says. A   flight to school on this island costs the Middle Bass school system nearly $100 per student each day. But Katie Schneider, who pays her own fare each week, says she and her husband have never considered making the move to   . ”Middle Bass is our home,” she says. ”That’s where he grew up that’s where he was raised. That’s where our family history is.”    School is much like any other school on the mainland. There are state tests,   clubs and even prom. But    Superintendent and Principal Steve Poe says it’s the smallest public school in the state. ”We have 81 students   through 12,” he said. ”Average class is about a   to eight students. That makes us unique with the individual attention our kids get.” Max’s   class has only three students. And his sister Lucy’s   class has just five boys and three girls. Because they live across the lake from most of their friends, Max says they try to make the most of their days at school. ”Living on the island, I don’t get to hang out with a lot of the kids a whole lot because I’m usually back on Middle Bass, and you can’t hang out when there’s a mile of water between you,” he says. Air transport also comes into play when it comes to the school’s sports teams. The entire community shows up for games to cheer on the    Panthers. It all seems like a normal school event until an announcer thanks people from the opposing team for bringing milk to the island. That’s right: milk. That’s something even more appreciated when living on an island three miles from the shore."
932,"Sunrise, sunset: light into darkness, darkness into light. This perpetual cycling through archetypal phases of yin and yang, light slapstick and dour melodrama, is what lends Batman his unique mutability. His fellow heroes are a more stolid lot. They tend to pick a lane and stick with it. Not Batman. Dude’s ephemeral. A veritable will o’ the wisp, that guy. For 78 years we nerds, devout students of his endless adventures, have witnessed him phasing through this   cycle on the comics page. But when it comes to shaping the idea of Batman  —   how he exists in the public consciousness  —   it’s TV and movies that matter. And it’s possible to see that same cycle at work there, too, if you know where and how to look for it. Every turn of the cycle occurs for a reason, as a reaction to the phase that came before. 1966: Camp Crusader, The ’60s Batman television series starring Adam West brought the Caped Crusader before the eyes of the wider world in a huge way. A huge, goofy way. The network and studio executives behind the series didn’t create the show out of any particular love for the character. In fact, they considered Batman  —   and superheroes, and comics themselves  —   to be disposable junk culture. They approached the creation of the series from the outside: producer Bill Dozier read a few Batman comics, and decided to reproduce them exactly  —   but with a tone that treated them like serious drama, like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in tights. They made him a square, a cop in a cape, a   representation of the Establishment. He drank milk, lectured Robin about pedestrian safety, and would never think of   the Batmobile. That tone, and the campy silliness it engendered, made the show a sensation, albeit a   one. Everything about the show’s approach angered Batman’s hardcore fans, however, and their resentment would live on long after the series went off the air. It was so strong, in fact, that it threw a long shadow from which Batman is only now beginning to emerge. 1989:   Throughout the ’70s and ’80s the Batman of the comics existed as a spirited refutation of everything the ’60 TV series had stood for. This new Batman was a brooding loner (Robin had shipped off to college) who haunted the urban night. It was this Batman that director Tim Burton picked up on, in creating the 1989 Batman film starring Michael Keaton. His Dark Knight was truly dark, and somber, and goth  —   and also, with respect to to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman  —   kinda kinky. 1990s: Camp Strikes Back, When director Joel Schumacher took over the series, he attempted to pull Batman back into the light, although the light in question was neon pink. In homage to the 1960s series, he upped the campy archness, restored Robin to the mix and  —   in a move that has enshrined him in nerd infamy  —   slapped some nipples on the sculpted musculature of the  . The reaction of the hardcore   was swift and savage. They took to the nascent internet to demand that future films treat the character as seriously (read: as grimly and grittily) as the comics had been doing for years. After a brief fallow period, they got their wish. 2000s: Batman, Bedimmed, Director Christopher Nolan’s   beginning with Batman Begins, seemed like a mission statement for the complete refutation of Schumacher’s Batman  —   and by extension, of the ’60s series as well. By leaning into a rugged,   vision that prized somber practicality over anything that smacked of stylization or  —   God forbid  —   flair, Nolan gave the hardcore fans the Batman they loved in the    comics. This was a Batman who would be taken seriously (read: who was very, very serious). The fans proved fiercely protective: Several critics who dared to suggest that the somberness of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, in particular, smacked of bloated pretension were greeted with death threats. 2017: LEGO My Ego, And so we come to The LEGO Batman Movie, which is just the latest attempt to bring the broody Batman out of his cave, into the light and sun of the upper world. But this attempt is fundamentally different. The creators of the 1966 TV series brought condescension to Batman. Tim Burton brought a determination to remake the character in his own,   outsider image. Schumacher brought camp and areolae. Nolan brought a grayscale dourness. Every one of them came at the character from the outside, and imposed their vision on top of him. The screenwriters and director of The LEGO Batman Movie, on the other hand, come at him with 1. a very specific comedic sensibility and 2. a deep, deep, deep knowledge of the character’s history that, it turns out, is indistinguishable from love. Their Batman is something else, as well  —   something important: a complete tool. He’s a jerk who takes himself far too seriously, a brooding loner who insists, at every opportunity, upon his own consummate awesomeness. This is not merely a characterization  —   a ”way in” to the character they’d teach in screenwriting classes. It is a pointed critique of the dour, sulky, militantly humorless Batman that has existed in the public consciousness for nearly 40 years. It is also, more to the point, a slap in the face of the hardcore fanboy culture around him, a culture that insists only one ”true” version of the character exists, and stubbornly clings to the conviction that they ”own” Batman. Which is to say: It’s a reminder  —   a not particularly gentle one  —   that this stuff was always supposed to be fun. Consider this, as well: The plot of this movie involves Batman learning that being a dark, disaffected, brooding loner isn’t enough. He needs to make human connections, needs to let other people in. In a very real sense, it’s about Batman transitioning from an arrested adolescence as a sulky goth, brooding alone in his room, into an adulthood that requires him to join society. Which is probably why, despite the movie’s deep, abiding and aggressive silliness, The LEGO Batman Movie stands as the most emotionally mature Batman film yet made. It’s also one that might  —   that just might  —   manage to end the eternal cycle of   Batman, once and for all. Because no matter how savagely it lampoons the Dark Knight as an egotistical jerk, it so clearly comes from a place of deep knowledge that even the   fanboy will have no choice but to respect it. Nolan, Burton, Schumacher, even the creators of the 1960s Batman TV series were outsiders looking in the team behind LEGO Batman are not. And that matters, because of a very simple, abiding truth first recorded, I believe, by Pliny the Elder, namely: Game recognize game. In other words: I strongly doubt that any     will be able to gin up much in the way of frothing nerdrage over a film that includes a frickin’   cameo."
933,"Used to be, you could count on two fundamental truths: 1. Superheroes were jocks. 2. People who loved superhero comics were nerds. Sweeping generalizations to be sure, and they grew steadily less and less true every time, over the last 75+ years, superheroes escaped the comic book page for radio, television and movies, where they found themselves embraced by a wider, less obsessive audience. Yet superheroes remain physically attractive, impossibly fit, and they tend to dress to highlight their low   .   global audience, on the hand, belong to a stubbornly   species that’s less hot, more indolent, and far, far lumpier. So while simple   explains some of the superhero’s appeal, there’s always been more to it. Because for as long as superheroes have been around, their creators have striven to make them relatable. Mostly, this takes the form of infusing these perfect specimens and their dazzling abilities with generous doses of     . That’s the Marvel formula, famously: great powers, great responsibility . .. and great agita. That approach quickly bled out to DC’s heroes as well. Today, on movie screens, DC’s heroes glower at one another from deep inside black clouds of shame and regret. And even on the comparatively sunny spate of DC superhero shows on the CW (Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow) beautiful heroes get put through familiar trials marked by guilt, jealousy, and feelings of inadequacy. That’s one way to make us care about superhero stories. It’s the default approach. Another way  —   one adopted by NBC’s sitcom Powerless, premiering tomorrow (Thursday the 2nd) at 8:30 ET  —   is to sideline the superheroes altogether, and instead focus on the mundane, lumpish humans who get caught up in their wake. Here’s To The People Who Flinch, From the genre’s earliest days, creators would often shift a story’s point of view from that of the title’s nominal star to a supporting character, bit player or background extra. The opportunity to tell a story entirely from the perspective of Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Alfred the butler or even an   doggedly working to defeat his city’s resident   served to add   variety to the formula. More recently, entire comic book series have featured these   views of worlds in which powerful beings fly overhead. In the ’80s, Marvel’s Damage Control by Dwayne McDuffie and Ernie Colon focused on the workers who repaired property damage caused by   brawls. The 1994   Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, examined the Marvel universe through the eyes of one newspaper photographer. In 1998 DC’s Chase by Dan Curtis Johnson and J. H. Williams III followed a government agency tasked with keeping humans safe from   threats, while 2002’s Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Michael Lark and others revolved around the detectives and beat cops who picked up the pieces left by Batman and his enemies. Powerless doubles down on this       narrative approach in a way that, while dutifully checking familiar sitcom boxes, manages to inject some   brightness into a genre long dominated by a steroidal glumness. The show’s opening credits serve as mission statement: On a series of iconic comic book covers, the camera pushes past the big jamoke in tights hogging the spotlight to find some hapless background bystander, scrambling for safety. Here, those hapless bystanders are represented by the jaded,   staff of Wayne Securities. Owned by the   Bruce Wayne but run by his preening, incompetent cousin Van (a twitchily funny Alan Tudyk) Wayne Securities is a tech firm losing the battle for market share against Lexcorp, whose products it habitually rips off. This is because the assorted lab techs in its Research and Development department (Danny Pudi, Ron Funches and the very funny Jennie Pierson, who’s not featured in the opening credits but deserves to be) have lost their competitive drive after years of having their ideas serially rejected. Enter: Emily (Vanessa Hudgens) the plucky but     new Head of Research and Development, determined to get her team to innovate  —   and to like her. Both prove uphill battles. The bones of this thing are familiar  —   there’s a lot of Parks and Recreation’s Leslie Knope in Emily’s dogged eagerness, a generous amount of The Office’s Michael Scott in Van Wayne’s doofy   and the whole         angle will seem very familiar to those still carrying a torch for the late, lamented Better Off Ted. But if you’re a new workplace comedy determined to find itself, you’d be well served to draft off those three shows in particular. The cast hasn’t jelled, yet, though there’s every indication that Hudgens’s Emily and Christina Kirk’s sardonic office assistant will fall into a nice chemistry. There’s pleny of Easter Eggs for the nerds in the audience: a   ’   cameo by Marc McClure (Superman the Movie’s Jimmy Olsen) as Emily’s dad a newspaper headline reading ”  Luthor Vows to Make Metropolis Super Again,” and a bit appearance by Starro the Conquerer (DC Comics’ resident giant  ). These elements work best when they’re breezed past, and work considerably less well when the show slows down to wink at them. There’s been some   behind the scenes (creator Ben Queen departed before production began) there’s a disjointed quality to the opening scenes especially (marked, unfortunately, by the   of main  ”I know what you’re thinking”   cliche that promptly, and mercifully disappears) and the show’s special effects are not, particularly. But that’s okay. Because the minute this show becomes about its special effects, it will be over. If this show is going to work, it’s going to have to stick to what this first episode does best: remain inside the office, with the people who staff it, and leave the    —   and the dour depressiveness  —   outside."
934,"Seattle’s City Council has voted to not renew its contract with Wells Fargo, in a move that cites the bank’s role as a lender to the Dakota Access Pipeline project as well as its creation of millions of bogus accounts. As a result, the city won’t renew its contract with the bank that expires next year. The unanimous vote will pull the city’s more than $3 billion in annual cash flow from the banking giant, the council says. Seattle says the bidding process for its next banking partner will ”incentivize ’Social Responsibility. ’” Not long after Seattle’s vote, the City Council in Davis, Calif. took a similar action over the pipeline. It voted unanimously to find a new bank to handle its roughly $124 million in accounts by the end of 2017. On the same day the two cities moved to cut ties with Wells Fargo, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement allowing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. As NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported, that clears the way for construction of the final 1. 5 miles of the nearly   pipeline. ”Protests in Seattle against the Dakota Access Pipeline project have been large and frequent, often organized by local tribal members,” member station KUOW reports. ”Protesters, many of them Native people from Washington state, share the concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which says the pipeline would threaten tribal water supplies, land and cultural sites.” Wells Fargo has been in the headlines since last fall over a scandal involving bank employees creating fake accounts in customers’ names to bolster performance results and boost bonuses. While other banks are also involved in the pipeline deal, Wells Fargo’s recent history seems to have helped make it a target once again. Seattle’s plan to stop its dealings with Wells Fargo comes months after the city canceled a $100 million bond deal between its electric utility and the bank. That took place last fall, when the treasurers of California, Illinois and other entities said they would freeze their dealings with the bank  —   in some cases, for a   period. Wells Fargo’s commercial banking manager for Washington state, Mary Knell, tells KUOW that she’s disappointed in Seattle’s new move, noting that the bank is bound by its contract with the pipeline project. Knell tells KUOW that the bank has ”enhanced our due diligence on projects such as this to include more research into whether indigenous communities are affected and that they have been properly consulted.” Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant, who spearheaded Seattle’s move away from Wells Fargo, says a rally against the bank is scheduled for this weekend. And after noting that Wells Fargo is ”one of the six primary financiers of the   private prison industry,” Sawant ended a statement about the bill’s initial passage earlier this month with a note of caution, saying, ”All of the big banks are terrible, and, as long as we have capitalism, our contracts will be with institutions that put corporate greed over human need.” Days before Seattle held an initial vote on divesting from the bank, Wells Fargo announced plans to donate $500, 000 to five of the city’s nonprofit groups that work to revitalize Seattle neighborhoods. When Seattle Council member Debora Juarez spoke of voting against Wells Fargo, she repeatedly cited a need for integrity  —   even as she acknowledged the small direct impact Seattle’s move will likely have. ”For a company whose deposits totaled more than $1 trillion last year, it’s a drop in a very big bucket,” Juarez said in a statement. ”But for Seattle, a City whose budget is approx. $4B. voting to withdraw our funds . .. money that covers the biweekly payroll of $30 million for about 12, 000 employees  —   is an opportunity to send a message.” In Davis, the city’s report on the possibility of cutting ties with Wells Fargo noted that Philadelphia and Minneapolis are also considering the same move. As for Seattle’s future options, KUOW reports: ”It’s not clear which financial institutions the city will work with in the future. More than a dozen other banks are connected to the pipeline, including CitiBank, ING, Chase and Bank of America. ”City Council members including Sawant, Mike O’Brien and Lisa Herbold are interested in contracting with a credit union or   public bank. Both of those options, however, would require a change to state law.” In addition to complaints about the pipeline and its business practices, Wells Fargo was hit with a lawsuit at the end of January that accused the bank of ”illegally denying student loans to young immigrants who are protected from deportation and allowed to work and study in the U. S. under a program created by former President Barack Obama,” as member station KPCC reported."
935,"The words were those of Coretta Scott King, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But they resulted in a rarely invoked Senate rule being used to formally silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  . On the Senate floor Tuesday night, Warren read aloud from a letter Scott King wrote in 1986, when King objected to President Reagan’s ultimately unsuccessful nomination of  . S. Attorney Jeff Sessions to a federal district court seat. Sessions, now a Republican senator from Alabama, is President Trump’s nominee for U. S. attorney general. Warren was speaking in the debate leading up to Sessions’ likely confirmation by the Senate on Wednesday evening. King wrote that Sessions used ”the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens”  —   and that was the line Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would later cite in his objection. ”I call the senator to order under the provisions of Rule 19,” McConnell said after interrupting Warren’s speech, in which he said she had ”impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama.” That objection came nearly 30 minutes after Warren was initially warned about impugning Sessions by Sen. Steve Daines,  . who was presiding over the Senate at the time. Rapping on the presiding officer’s desk, Daines had initially cut Warren off some 20 minutes into her speech. ”The senator is reminded that it is a violation of Rule 19 of the standing rules of the Senate to impute to another senator or senators any conduct or motive unworthy or becoming [sic] a senator,” Daines said, apparently reading from a note on his desk. ”Mr. president, I don’t think I quite understand,” Warren replied. ”I’m reading a letter from Coretta Scott King to the Judiciary Committee from 1986 that was admitted into the record. I’m simply reading what she wrote about what the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be a federal court judge meant, and what it would mean in history for her.” Daines said his interruption was a ”reminder” that didn’t necessarily apply to what Warren had just said. ”However,” he continued, ”you stated that a sitting senator is a disgrace to the Department of Justice.” Warren replied that the comment seemed to have been made not by King, but by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy  —   whom she also quoted  —   ”although I would be glad to repeat it in my own words,” she added. Without mentioning that the flagged statement had been made before Sessions was a member of the Senate, Daines  —   repeating the words of a female staff member who seemed to be reading aloud  —   sought to clarify the rule’s scope. ”The rule applies,” he said, relaying the staffer’s words, ”to imputing conduct or motive through any form or voice.” He added, ”Form of voice includes quotes, articles, or other materials.” Warren replied, ”So, quoting Sen. Kennedy calling   Sessions a disgrace is a violation of Senate rules? It was certainly not in 1986.” ”In the opinion of the chair, it is,” Daines said. As Warren began to speak, he added, ”And the senator is warned.” That formal warning set up the later interruption  —   and the forced termination of Warren’s remarks. Warren sought another clarification, as to whether she is allowed to ”accurately describe public views” and statements about Sessions. Again taking cues from the same staff member whose words he repeated, Daines replied, ”The chair has not made a ruling as respect to the senator’s comments. The senator is following process and tradition by reminding the senator of Massachusetts of the rule and the things of which it applies.” ”So, can I continue with Coretta Scott King’s letter?” Warren asked. ”The senator may continue,” Daines replied  —   granting a permission that would turn out to be  . Some 23 minutes later, as Warren spoke about Sessions’ vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, McConnell addressed the chair to object to Warren’s remarks  —   specifically, her earlier quoting of Coretta Scott King’s words. By that time, Warren had finished reading King’s letter more than 10 minutes previously. As The Associated Press reported: ”Quoting King technically put Warren in violation of Senate rules for ’impugning the motives’ of Sessions, though senators have said far worse stuff. And Warren was reading from a letter that was written 10 years before Sessions was even elected to the Senate. ”Still, top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell invoked the rules. After a few parliamentary moves, the   Senate voted to back him up. ”Now, Warren is forbidden from speaking again on Sessions’ nomination. A vote on Sessions is expected Wednesday evening.”"
936,"When Senate Republicans silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  . during debate over the nomination of Jeff Sessions to serve as attorney general, they sparked a furious response  —   but also used a rule that’s meant to encourage civil debate. Senate Rule 19 includes this prohibition: ”No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” While there is much room to argue Warren’s specific case, the rule itself is one that many of us would do well to live by. First, the facts. Warren spoke on the Senate floor. She criticized Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama and the nominee to lead the Justice Department. Warren read a letter from Coretta Scott King, written in 1986 as Sessions sought a post as a federal judge. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s widow had questioned Sessions’ work as a federal prosecutor: ”Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters.” As she read the letter, Warren was warned by Sen. Steve Daines,  . who was presiding over the Senate at the time. Warren asked Daines how it could be improper to quote a letter from the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. and she was allowed by Daines to continue reading the letter. Later in Warren’s remarks about Sessions, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, appeared in the chamber to stop Warren for violating Senate Rule 19 and the Senate, in a   vote, supported McConnell. Warren was silenced —  at least on the Senate floor —  though she was soon reading the letter again on social media. According to Senate Republicans, Warren impugned the ”conduct or motive” of Sessions, who is expected to be confirmed as attorney general Wednesday night. Warren’s supporters saw a stifling of dissent, and asked how the mere reading a letter could violate the rule. It’s a fair question: Can’t a senator refer to the public record? But set aside her specific case for a moment, just to focus on the purpose of the rule. Rule 19 forbids an especially corrosive form of verbal combat. Any student of interpersonal relations knows that questioning another person’s motives escalates an argument. Think about the difference between saying ”You’re wrong” and ”You deliberately lied.” Or consider the last two words of a line spoken by a furious husband in the comedy A Christmas Story: ”You used up all the glue . .. ON PURPOSE!” This reality applies to politics. Think of President Trump this week, who made a false claim about the media  —   that the media fail to cover terror attacks  —   and then suggested nefarious motives. ”It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” the president said, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. ”And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.” Rule 19 is meant to prevent this sort of   statement, at least on the Senate floor. Granted, such a rule can seem hopelessly outdated in an era of acid remarks on social media. It can also seem like a needless luxury at this moment when the political stakes are so high. We all need a full and ruthlessly honest debate. If there was ever a time to avoid tiptoeing around the issues, that moment surely is now. But we also need civil debate. And in the Senate, lawmakers have learned to sting each other within Rule 19. If they have an insult to fling at another member, they simply disguise it as a compliment. In 2001, as a reporter covering the Senate, I witnessed a particularly brilliant exchange on the floor between the late Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Kennedy fiercely criticized Hatch’s position. Hatch responded by saying Kennedy was wrong, and then adding a few lines of ”praise.” ”[Reality] doesn’t stop bombastic arguments, nor should it. I love them myself. I love to see the distinguished senator from Massachusetts get up there and everybody’s almost positive he’s going to blow a fuse before he’s through. He has a right to do that, and I admire him for doing it. I admire the way he supports his special interests. And I love my colleague, as very few in this body do.” Senators on the floor, and onlookers in the gallery, burst out laughing. Nobody missed Hatch’s point. Nor did anybody call out Hatch for a violation of Rule 19. Sen. Kennedy offered his own lines about Sen. Hatch. When the exchange was over, Kennedy  —   who was an old friend of Hatch  —   walked over and hugged him."
937,"A day after Senate Republicans invoked a conduct rule to end Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as U. S. attorney general, a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King urging the Senate to reject Sessions’ nomination as a federal judge is gaining new prominence. Warren was reading aloud from the letter by King, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when she was interrupted by the presiding chair of the Senate, who warned her of breaking Rule 19, which forbids members from imputing to a colleague ”any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” The warning mentioned Warren’s earlier quote of Sen. Edward Kennedy, who had called Sessions, then a U. S. attorney, a disgrace. But it was King’s letter that  —   more than 10 minutes after Warren finished reading it aloud Tuesday night  —   prompted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to call her out of order. That resulted in Warren being silenced on the Senate floor. In his objection, McConnell cited King’s accusation that Sessions had used ”the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens.” Consisting of a short introductory note and a formal statement, King sent her letter to Sen. Strom Thurmond, who chaired the Judiciary Committee, in March of 1986. In it, she urged senators not to confirm Sessions  —   whose nomination did indeed fail. King’s letter was posted online by The Washington Post. Early in her statement, King wrote, ”Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U. S. Attorney, from his   voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” Toward the end, she wrote, ”Based on his record, I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made everywhere toward fulfilling my husband’s dream that he envisioned over twenty years ago.” The contents of King’s letter have been circulating for some time now  —   it made headlines last month, as Sessions faced confirmation hearings for the post in the Trump administration."
938,"As part of our celebration of Black History Month and   culture, we turn this week to how the influence of Africa has been interpreted in various Latin and Caribbean cultures. The music of West Africa, where a majority of those enslaved in the Americas came from, was diffused through both an indigenous and Spanish filter to become the distinct sounds and rhythms that we know today. Cumbia, bachata, mambo and son jarocho are all quite distinct from each other and are still very vibrant expressions of tradition. But, more importantly, they also inform and influence a tidal wave of new expression, mixing with   electronic, rock and jazz to form the musical bedrock of Alt. Latino. In this week’s show, we dive into the vaults of Smithsonian Folkways, the   record label dedicated to American folk traditions of all kinds. Our guide is Folkways curator emeritus Dan Sheehy, who knows a thing or two about   music and culture: He has traveled extensively to produce many of the great recordings in the archive. Don’t think that this music and these recordings are dusty museum relics. Musicians throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and the U. S. make this a living, breathing document of where we come from and who we are today. And while the history and musicianship of these songs are certainly worthy of intense scrutiny, don’t forget that it is all basically dance music! So you can listen to the songs individually below, or boogie down with this funky mixtape, where the songs flow from one to the other for optimal dancing pleasure. But I suggest you loosen up a little first: That traditional merengue is quite fast and will definitely challenge your   skills."
939,"The International Committee of the Red Cross says six of its staff members were shot dead and two are missing after their convoy was attacked by unknown assailants in Afghanistan. The Red Cross workers were on their way to deliver livestock materials when they were attacked near the town of Shibergan in the northern province of Jawzan, close to Afghanistan’s border with Turkmenistan. Reuters reports that the area has been pounded by snowstorms in recent days. The ICRC says ”it is not yet clear who carried out the attack or why.” The provincial police chief, Rahmatullah Turkistani, tells The Associated Press that the attack ”was likely carried out by Islamic State militants, who have a presence in the area.” The news service adds that no group has claimed responsibility for the attack and that the Taliban says it was not involved. The ICRC has worked in Afghanistan for 30 years, NPR’s Greg Myre reports. He says its neutrality ”is widely respected, with rare exceptions. But the group says it’s putting aid operations on hold while it assesses the attack.” ”We need to understand more clearly what happened,” ICRC Director of Operations Dominik Stillhart tells the BBC. ”But. .. this is one of the most critical humanitarian contexts and we will definitely do everything to continue our operations there.” ICRC President Peter Maurer says, ”These staff members were simply doing their duty, selflessly trying to help and support the local community.” He adds: ”This is a huge tragedy. We’re in shock.” Greg reports that ”civilian casualties have been on the rise throughout Afghanistan, and this shooting came just a day after a suicide bomber struck at the Supreme Court in Kabul, killing at least 20.”"
940,"There’s no way to avoid it. As the cost of college grows, research shows that so does the number of hungry and homeless students at colleges and universities across the country. Still, many say the problem is invisible to the public. ”It’s invisible even to me and I’m looking,” says Wick Sloan. He came to Bunker Hill Community College in Boston more than a decade ago to teach English full time. He says it felt like he quickly became a   social worker, too. ”When I first got here, I was always told that we should never miss a chance to give students food,” he says. ”I foolishly thought at the time they meant Doritos and cookies. It’s protein that they’re after. It’s crazy.” Bunker Hill is home to one of 25 food assistance programs on Massachusetts’ public college campuses. That leaves just four public campuses across the state without one. One   student at Bunker Hill, whose name we aren’t using to protect her safety and privacy, was living in a shelter in Boston last summer when she first decided she wanted to enroll in classes here. But she says that shelter didn’t feel safe. ”If I wanted to get good grades, if I wanted to get a good education, I needed to be at a slightly safer shelter,” she says. She was put on a long waiting list for a bed at a youth home and finally got in after six months. That’s when she enrolled at Bunker Hill. Now she’s majoring in math. ”I knew that I really loved learning, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to fit into the education system.” She says she has been pleasantly surprised by Bunker Hill, though. ”This is a really good place to figure out where you might go with your education,” she says. Across the country, college administrators are increasingly seeing students like her. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin surveyed more than 4, 000 undergrads at community colleges across the country. The results? Twenty percent of students reported being hungry, 13 percent homeless. Sara   a sociologist who led the research team, says it’s not just that college students need to work while in school. ”It’s that they’re working, and borrowing,” she says, ”and sometimes still falling so short that they’re going without having their basic needs met.”   says she believes state and federal governments should work together to help college students find a place to live and something to eat so that they’re ready to learn and, eventually, graduate. ”Most people think, ’Well, if you’re really poor, and you really don’t have money to eat, you can get food stamps,” she says. ”What they don’t know is that for a college student, who doesn’t have children, to get food stamps requires that they work 20 hours a week.” And that’s exactly what the   student from Bunker Hill has managed to do. She’s putting in 20 hours a week at a physics lab close by and has recently saved enough to rent an apartment with two roommates. She says she still needs help affording tuition and transportation. ”I don’t really need a whole lot of this or that. It’s nice, but what helps me the most is people thinking that I’m going to make it.” And her classmates and professors, she says, who allow her to feel like a normal college student."
941,"Student parent. Ever heard that term? It’s used for a student who is also a parent, and there are nearly 5 million of them in colleges around the country. That’s over a quarter of the undergraduate population, and that number has gone up by around a million since 2011. It can be really, really expensive to be a student parent, especially if you need to pay for child care while you’re in class. In some states, child care for an infant can cost as much as $17, 062 a year, according to a report by Child Care Aware of America. Add that on to the   cost of college tuition  —   both private and public  —   and the financial strain of getting a college education becomes a huge burden for   parents. So much so that only a third of student parents get a degree within six years, often citing mounting debt as a reason for dropping out. ”What it comes down to is that college becomes a bit of an impossibility for a   parent who needs child care to go to school,” says Barbara Gault, vice president and executive director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, an organization that’s done a lot of research on student parents. The primary source of federal aid for child care nationwide comes from something called the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)  —   specifically for   parents and families. A block grant means that every state can develop its own eligibility requirements, which means it’s tricky to know if you qualify. States have unique   rules attached to the CCDBG  —   basically a bunch of extra hurdles student parents have to clear. Gault, along with a team of other researchers at IWPR, recently compiled requirements from all the states to get a snapshot of what student parents are up against. Here’s what they found: Gault says these restrictions are tough, but points out that even if they were revamped and a student parent could easily qualify, the demand for CCDBG money is really high. Student parents must spend time on waiting lists that can take months, even years. ”We need bigger solutions to these problems,” says Gault. ”These rules and restrictions in a way just exemplify how little we’re thinking about the educational needs of parents.” The landscape isn’t completely bleak for student parents. A few states have their own funding set aside specifically for   student parents  —   Minnesota has had a grant available for almost 30 years. A handful of colleges offer free child care. And if   Donald Trump follows through on his daughter Ivanka’s call for child care reform, that could help out student parents, too. But while grant and subsidy money can be helpful, it’s usually just a drop in the bucket. Even for student parents who are able to get federal funding for child care, most are still paying thousands of dollars out of pocket, Gault says. And where do college students usually get pocket money? Student loans."
942,"If President Trump wants to keep his promise to send new detainees to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, there’s plenty of room. ”We haven’t received any orders to take additional detainees in,” says Navy Capt. John Filostrat. ”But if given the order, we could go ahead and comply.” Filostrat, a spokesman for the island lockup, took reporters on their first tour of Guantanamo’s prison camps since Donald Trump became president. It was a ”windshield tour,” meaning journalists could only view the camps from outside the high,   topped and   fences that surround them. Still, this was a rare opportunity to see how things looked around the same prison that President Obama during his last months in office had raced  —   unsuccessfully  —   to empty. Trump wants the opposite. He warned during the presidential campaign that the U. S. is threatened by a lot of ”bad dudes” whom he’d send to Guantanamo if they were captured. And since his election, his administration has circulated a draft order that could pave the way for a new generation of inmates. The first thing that strikes you about Guantanamo’s officially designated ”Detention Center” is how provisional the place still looks 15 years after the first captives were brought there. Metal shipping containers and tents are the only housing for a rotating guard force that, despite the dwindled prison population, still numbers around 1, 100  —   about 27 guards per current inmate. ”This was an expeditionary mission,” Filostrat says. ”Expeditionary means overseas, so it’s a temporary overseas Joint Task Force that’s been going on for 15 years  —   that’s the conundrum.” The dilapidated state of things reflects conflicting policies. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama sought to shut down Guantanamo’s prisons. Congress, bowing to constituents who opposed any transfers of Guantanamo inmates to the U. S. passed laws making it all but impossible to do that. But far from winding down, Guantanamo’s prison complex these days is gearing up. Construction projects suggests its ”expeditionary” era is ending and the notorious prison complex may be there to stay. A new permanent dining facility for troops is being built to replace a ramshackle improvised chow hall. Part of Camp 5  —   a lockup with isolation cells for ”noncompliant” captives  —   is being converted to a hospital wing. Cement mixers ply the roadways. Another thing that jumps out is the stark contrast between the sprawling scale of Guantanamo’s prison camps, the staff who runs them and the relative handful of prisoners. Camp 6, which can house as many as 175 people, now holds 26. Five of them were deemed eligible for transfer to another country by an     board, but Trump has made clear he wants no more prisoners leaving Guantanamo. Camp 5, next door, is empty  —   but it could hold roughly 80 prisoners. So even though Guantanamo received its last new captive in March 2008, today it could accommodate about 200 more. U. S. government officials did not give a precise number of vacancies, and some people stuck in Guantanamo’s limbo do not believe Trump should try to fill them. ”I think it’s an awful, awful idea,” says Colleen Kelly. Her brother, William Kelly Jr. died at the Windows of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. For nearly five years, she has watched a newly constituted military commission so mired in pretrial wrangling that it has so far failed to bring to trial five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the attacks. If the U. S. does capture terrorism suspects under Trump, it should charge, hold and try them in the United States, Kelly said. ”We have a system of justice in this country that has been tried and tested,” she says. ”For more than 250 years, it has served us well. And the military commission, as much as there is an earnest effort by the prosecution, it’s all untested  —   and to have that continue on and on, it’s an awful idea.” The military commissions have led to only eight convictions. Three of those rulings have been overturned entirely three more, partially. Ten Guantanamo inmates are at some stage of a military commission proceeding. Seven of them have yet to see their cases even come to trial. All 10 of those who stand charged before a military commission are being held, along with five others, at a secret site known as Camp 7  —   not part of the windshield tour. Spokesman Filostrat says journalists are not allowed to view Camp 7, even from the outside. ”It’s classified,” he says. ”I can’t even tell you where it is. I’ve never been there myself.” All of Camp 7’s occupants have been designated ”high value detainees.” They share another dubious distinction: According to a synopsis of a Senate study of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program, all were previously held and harshly interrogated at ”black sites,”   clandestine prisons in various countries worldwide. As a result, while five men in Guantanamo are facing trial and possible death penalties for plotting mass murder, the U. S. government is now being pushed by the defense to provide classified evidence that those men were subjected to interrogation methods widely seen as torture. In short, as the government is prosecuting the defendants, the defendants are prosecuting the government. ”What this case has demonstrated, if it’s demonstrated anything, is that torture makes criminal cases virtually impossible to prosecute,” says James Connell, attorney for Sept. 11 defendant Ramzi bin  . ”In fact, it’s fair to say that torture and due process are mutually exclusive.” The case of the accused Sept. 11 plotters has paradoxically become the biggest criminal proceeding in American history and one of the most obscure and  . ”When cases involve torture, they are also going to be festooned with a lot of secrecy, in order to protect the people who engaged in the torture,” says David Nevin, lead lawyer for accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. ”That slows down discovery, it slows down investigation, it slows down the nature of the trial and the hearings and everything  —   it slows everything way down.” Other relatives of Sept. 11 victims are, like Kelly, frustrated with the slow pace of justice, but they stand by the military commissions process, which has been revised three times. ”They need to take as long and be as painstakingly thorough as possible,” says Marvina Baksh, whose brother Michael Baksh died in the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center. ”I guess that’s just something we have to, in this instance, wait for the fruit to ripen and then it’ll be all good.” Baksh was speaking at a news conference in Guantanamo after watching, as a guest of the prosecution, the war court meet for just three hours in a session that had been scheduled to last two weeks. ”Please know that justice will be done in the end,” Brigadier Gen. Mark Martins, the chief prosecutor, assured Baksh and four other victims’ family members. ”And until then, we will not rest.” Trump’s draft executive order on Guantanamo calls for ”swift and just trial and punishment” of the accused. That has not been the chief prosecutor’s experience. ”I believe that we’re going as fast as the statute, and the procedures we have, enabled it to go,” Martins says. Asked whether Trump wants him to remain as Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, Martins is laconic. ”I’m here indefinitely,” he says."
943,"A surprise winner has been declared in Somalia’s presidential election  —   Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, a former prime minister and the popular favorite who was running against the incumbent president. Somali lawmakers cast their votes in a heavily fortified airport in a country plagued by regular militant attacks. Twenty candidates were whittled down to three after the first round  —   including the incumbent, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who had been accused of  . According to the U. N. Assistance Mission in Somalia, Mohamud won the most votes in the first round, followed by Farmajo, a former prime minister and the eventual winner. ”And even though the process was rife with corruption from all sides, a vote for Farmajo is seen as a vote against corruption,” as NPR’s Eyder Peralta reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Mohamud has conceded defeat. This is not an ordinary presidential election, Eyder says. Parliamentarians cast ballots, not ordinary citizens. Security is a huge concern in the face of ongoing   militant attacks, and the capital Mogadishu is on lockdown, with major roads blocked to traffic. However, he adds: ”That this is taking place is still remarkable. The process has involved more Somalis, and in particular more women than even before, and it will put in place the final piece of Somalia’s central government. And that’s important, because Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central government since warlords overthrew the country’s dictator 26 years ago.” This is the culmination of a process that took months, as Reuters reports. It ”began with 14, 000 elders and regional figures choosing 275 members of parliament and 54 senators,” who then chose a president. The process has its critics. As Eyder reports, it’s been delayed four times because ”the security situation, corruption, political infighting, made sure that the government wasn’t ready to hold a nationwide election.” Eyder says   groups have accused parliamentarians of selling their votes  —   particularly to Mohamud, who allegedly used government funds to buy them. If he had won, Eyder adds, activists would say that ”would send the message that corruption still rules in Somalia.” The Associated Press describes Somalis crowded around TVs, watching the process unfold. ”I hope they will not choose bribes over the interest of the people.” Ahmed Hassan, a    university student, told the wire service. ”We need an honest leader who can help us move forward.”"
944,"Ever since Donald Trump was elected president in November, questions have been raised about the lease he signed to operate a luxury hotel in the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D. C. The lease specifically says the lease holder cannot be a federal elected official. So critics repeatedly have called upon the federal General Services Administration to enforce its agreement, and make President Trump walk away from his deal to run the Trump International Hotel. But Trump appears to have come up with his own way of trying to solve the lease problem: He has created a revocable trust  —   and parked his vast business interests in it. The purpose of the trust is to create a firewall against    allegations and to, in effect, remove himself from direct management of his businesses, such as the D. C. hotel. Documents now show that the president’s son, Donald J. Trump Jr. is the new president of the company operating the D. C. hotel. A GSA spokeswoman contacted by NPR had no comment on the status of the lease now that Trump has stepped back from direct management of his businesses and moved them into a trust. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But the new arrangement has only escalated the criticism because the trust’s tax ID number is Trump’s Social Security number, and Trump ”has the power to revoke the trust” to reclaim direct ownership. In other words, even if his sons or other business associates are named as the officers of the various businesses, the profits flow back to one person: Donald J. Trump. In fact, one of the documents says, ”The purpose of the trust is to hold assets for the exclusive benefit of Donald J. Trump.” Documents show that Trump resigned from positions in 488 entities as they were shifted into the revocable trust, and the trustees are his son Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. All of this has ethics experts fuming. Law professor Steven Schooner, who teaches government contracting law at George Washington University, says Trump is still benefiting from the lease, even though the hotel now comes under the revocable trust. Schooner says it’s ”far too easy to funnel money directly to the president and his family” via business deals involving the hotel. He raises another potential conflict: Under the lease, the hotel’s rent is to be renegotiated annually, based on financial performance. A GSA worker would calculate the new rent. The worker’s ultimate boss, the GSA administrator, is a presidential appointee. ”It’s an impossible position to put a GSA employee in,” Schooner says. Trump is unique among U. S. presidents in the extent of his businesses, an international array of buildings, golf clubs and merchandise emblazoned with his name. Sheri Dillon, an attorney for Trump, said at a Jan. 11 press conference that the president ”instructed us to take all steps realistically possible to make it clear that he is not exploiting the office of the presidency for his personal benefit.” Ethics experts say Trump’s actions since then have fallen short. ”Donald Trump is managing his affairs in a way that enables, and frankly invites, people and companies and countries to send money his way, through his businesses, in an attempt to influence him and thereby influence U. S. government policy,” said Kathleen Clark, who teaches governmental ethics law at Washington University in St. Louis. Richard Painter, who served as White House ethics counsel to President George W. Bush, said that foreign governments, U. S. corporate lobbyists and others may choose to do business with the Trump hotel, as well as other businesses, in an effort to curry favor with the White House. Painter says the revocable trust is no solution only divestment will work. ”The president does not seem to want to do that, and he’s going to have to deal now with the conflicts of interest that come with ownership of these businesses. And some of those conflicts are illegal.” Painter is involved in a lawsuit alleging that taking money from foreign governments would violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause."
945,"The official address of Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower is 325 Bay St. in the middle of the city’s financial district. Think of it as Canada’s answer to Wall Street. But the hotel’s entrance is actually around the corner. So instead of seeing a grand facade bearing the Trump name, what you see from the prestigious Bay Street side is a loading dock. This is just one of the many miscalculations that have undermined the Trump International Hotel and Tower, even before construction began in 2007. The soaring,   glass and granite building has been plagued by financial setbacks, construction problems and legal woes. Investors have lost millions of dollars and have sued Donald Trump and the hotel’s developers. The Trump project was developed by Talon International, a Toronto real estate development firm run by two   entrepreneurs. Alex Shnaider owned the company and Val Levitan ran the    operations. Back when the idea for the project was first hatched, Toronto did not have a   hotel. There was a growing demand for hotels with lots of marble and granite, fine linens, luxurious spas and restaurants, says Susan Pigg, a former real estate reporter with the Toronto Star who covered the saga of the Trump hotel. ”It looked great at the time because it was such a novelty for the city. Trump was a big, big name, it looked like it would be a huge success,” she says. ”But the whole thing was doomed to failure.” Pigg says right off the bat, there were problems with the site. The hotel plus tower is built on a small parcel of land wedged between two smaller buildings. She says the site was so rocky, construction crews couldn’t tunnel down as far as they would for building a   in another part of the city. The building needed to be tethered underground, Pigg says, and parking was shifted to the first few levels. Part of the problem is that neither Shnaider nor Levitan had experience in hotel operations or construction. So it’s not surprising there were problems, says Toronto City Councillor Josh Matlow. ”There were parts of the building itself that fell down onto the street and actually shut down parts of our downtown at times, because there were concerns about the structure’s integrity,” he says. The developers signed a licensing agreement with Donald Trump similar to the ones for other hotels the president has been involved in. Trump has no ownership stake in the Toronto building. But his company, the Trump Organization, has a   management contract for the property, and Trump licenses his brand  —   his name  —   for a fee. Investors bought condominiums in the tower that could be rented out by the hotel. The investors claim they were promised   occupancy rates and returns on their investment. Toronto lawyer Mitchell Wine says those never panned out. Collectively, the investors lost millions of dollars. Wine represents 27 investors, and many are members of Toronto’s Korean community who speak very little English. ”I remember asking them through interpreters, ’Why did you invest in this?’ And all they said back was ’Trump, Trump, The Apprentice,’ ” he says. Wine says his clients felt the sales pitch misrepresented the project. He says they looked at the glossy brochures. They knew about Trump buildings elsewhere and thought he had the Midas touch. ”He’s splashed all over the marketing,” Wine says. ”My clients thought he was building the hotel, because he certainly gives you the impression that it’s his hotel.” Wine’s clients sued Trump and the developers. A lower court threw out the suit. But an appeals court ruled last year that the lawsuit could proceed. The Trump Organization has maintained that President Trump is not liable because he never signed a contract with investors. If the lawsuit does proceed, it may be difficult for investors to recoup their money. The Trump hotel is now in receivership and up for sale. Journalist Susan Pigg says the development was built for about $500 million, and it’s going for far less now, about $300 million. ”I’m not even sure they’ll get that,” she says, ”because who would buy a hotel like that, even at a discount, with all these lawsuits outstanding and no idea how this is going to be resolved?”"
946,"President Trump’s approval rating with voters may be the lowest on record for an incoming chief executive. But in one way at least, his popularity is improving a bit. The value of Trump as a commercial brand, although still very low, has ticked up since August, according to the Reputation Institute, which measures the worth of various business brands. As a brand name, Trump’s ”reputation pulse score” went from 31. 7 in August to 39. 1 in   says Stephen   vice president and managing director for the United States and Canada. Trump, the brand, is seen as aggressive, selfish and ambitious but also friendly, stylish and elegant,   says. The pulse score attempts to measure the public’s emotional connection to various brands, by determining how much esteem, trust, admiration and respect respondents feel toward them. ”It’s a proxy for the degree to which you love the person or company,”   says. The improvement in Trump’s score since last summer appears to suggest that his presidency is having an impact on his business ventures. Seeing Trump in a presidential setting has solidified his support among those already predisposed to like him, especially men, Republicans and those over 70,   says. ”I think he’s probably benefited in many ways from the association with the presidential scene,” he says. ”[To] those individuals who really buy into brand Trump, it’s a further endorsement that he is very much a status symbol in what he represents to them.” Since his   campaign for president got underway in 2015, Trump has taken numerous opportunities to showcase his various properties, appearing often at Manhattan’s Trump Tower and the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D. C. During his transition period, he interviewed potential Cabinet officials at his golf club in Bedminster, N. J. This past weekend, Trump attended a Red Cross ball at his    resort in Palm Beach, and he watched the Super Bowl at the nearby Trump International Golf Club. The fact that Trump likes to frequent his own properties is no surprise to Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. ”He’s really a creature of habit, and is accustomed to living in this cocoon that he created a long time ago. He doesn’t really take the risk of encountering people and situations that are unfamiliar,” D’Antonio says. But it’s not lost on Trump that the publicity he receives as president is also very good for the brand he has spent years cultivating, D’Antonio says. ”I don’t think he’s let go of his interest in these brands at all. His supposed detachment from the business interests of the Trump Organization isn’t real. He’s very much invested in these enterprises. He remains the beneficiary of them. He’s a brand builder by habit, and the brand is his personality.” To be sure, Trump’s brand value remains very low outside his base. The Reputation Institute considers any rating below 40 as ”poor,” which means Trump’s pulse score is in the lowest category."
947,"It was a familiar scene for many in New Orleans East, part of the city’s Ninth Ward. ”As helicopters hovered overhead and emergency response vehicles streamed into neighborhoods, it reminded them of [Hurricane] Katrina,” reported Tegan Wendland of member station WWNO in New Orleans. ”The area was hit hard by that storm, and now many families will have to rebuild again.” ”This house looks like it belongs in a Third World country somewhere. If you was to walk through and walk around, you would think a bomb went off,” Terry Eubanks told Wendland, standing outside her apartment. Eubanks was at the nail salon when the storm hit. Her apartment was completely destroyed. Officials said at least seven tornadoes touched down in the state on Tuesday, the biggest of which hit New Orleans East. The   newspaper created this map. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Tuesday that more than two dozen people had been injured in the city, with additional injuries reported in other parts of southeastern Louisiana. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency on Tuesday. After an aerial tour over the affected area, he told reporters he was ”even more impressed that so few people were injured and there was no loss of life.” The National Guard is on the ground in the eastern part of New Orleans, helping clear roads of debris, prevent looting and protect returning residents from downed power lines, Maj. Gen. Glenn Curtis told reporters. Emergency responders were going house to house on some streets, checking for people who need help and marking homes with   x’s and o’s to show they had been searched. Cathy McGraw’s home was badly damaged, she told the  . She spent Tuesday night in a Red Cross shelter at a local recreation center and said she planned to return there on Wednesday night. ”Ain’t got nowhere else to go,” McGraw told the newspaper. Speaking to WWNO, Adriann Mitchell described the damage to her elderly parents’ home. ”The ceiling is caved in. The front window is out. And there’s just water all over,” she said. ”It’s just a mess.” Landrieu said at a news conference Tuesday that the affected area encompassed about 5, 000 properties, and that the city’s emergency workers would transition from rescue to recovery operations going into Wednesday. ”There are a lot of families that lost everything,” he said. As helicopters moved overhead on Tuesday, resident John Spears told the   he was not impressed with the city’s immediate response. ”The city is a day late and a dollar short,” he told the newspaper. ”They should have people out here picking up debris right now.” In addition to the tornado that damaged New Orleans, tornadoes also touched down in Livingston Parish, near Baton Rouge, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, and near four other southeastern Louisiana communities. National Weather Service forecaster Mike Efferson told WWNO that big storms are common in the South this time of year. ”It’s not extremely unusual,” he explained. ”The unusualness is just the strength of the tornadoes. We usually don’t get a lot of very strong tornadoes, but it looks like this one produced a lot of damage over a large area.”"
948,"Sure, the dictionary’s a resource designed to give an accurate accounting of words in all their many shapes and sizes, their definitions and their spellings. But whatever finality a dictionary’s thick binding implies, it’s destined to beg adjustment just as soon as it has been set, as words take shape, wither from disuse or simply fall in and out of favor. Case in point: With this week’s addition of more than 1, 000 words,   will likely have to plan on a few more pages for its next print edition. That means we’ll just have to make space on our shelf for such a big book made bigger by humblebrag  —   ”to make a seemingly modest,   or casual statement or reference that is meant to draw attention to one’s admirable or impressive qualities or achievements.” It also means we’ll finally see our   belief in truther  —   ”one who believes that the truth about an important subject or event is being concealed from the public by a powerful conspiracy”  —   finally vindicated by its addition. And while they may not add up to a fully fledged conlang  —   or an ”invented language”  —   a few decidedly   terms like snollygoster, bokeh and mumblecore have also found happy endings nestled among  ’s new entries. Though, not to throw shade on poor snollygoster, but the looping oddball of a word for ”a shrewd, unprincipled person” isn’t all that new once a regular in the dictionary, it ghosted from the pages of  ’s abridged Collegiate Dictionary more than a decade ago for its diminished use. It turns out even a word often used to call politicians dishonest isn’t everlasting. Credit Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly with its surprising revival,   says. ”This time, the lexicographers were wrong,” the dictionary admits in something of a mea culpa. But then, perhaps such a reversal shouldn’t be that surprising at all. ”This is a significant addition of words to our dictionary, and it reflects both the breadth of English vocabulary and the speed with which that vocabulary changes,” Lisa Schneider, chief digital officer and publisher at   says in a news release. To get a sense of that breadth, lexicographers ranged from the campus (safe space and microaggression) to the halls of power (SCOTUS and FLOTUS) from courts and rinks (airball and  ) to the teeming Petri dish of language that is social media (  and  ). Still, given  ’s recent penchant for political trolling, the most useful word for the dictionary may simply be an old  : snark. Here’s a glimpse of some more of the words, phrases and acronyms just added to the dictionary."
949,"This story is part two of a   investigation. Read part one here.  Shortly after Ed Howard’s father was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer and given six months to live, Howard and his sister Kathy   sat down and talked about what to do. One worry was their dad’s funeral arrangements. They decided Kathy would call around to some funeral homes to figure out how much their father’s arrangements would cost. ”I’d say, about three weeks later over the weekend I got a call from her nearly in tears,” Howard recalls. ”And she said that she had spent pretty much all day on the phone and on the Internet, simply trying to price funeral services, and she couldn’t do it. She actually just couldn’t get a straight answer about what products and services were being offered and how much they cost.” That’s not supposed to happen. A federal regulation called the Funeral Rule is supposed to protect consumers who have lost loved ones. Among other things, it requires funeral businesses to provide potential customers with clear price information. But an NPR investigation found that the rule goes only so far in protecting consumers, and that its promise of transparency often goes unfulfilled. After hearing his sister’s story, Howard confidently told her that he would take care of the price inquiries. After all, he wasn’t just any consumer. He’s a lawyer specializing in consumer issues for the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego. He’s also the group’s head litigator and lobbyist. Getting the information, he thought, would be pretty easy. It wasn’t. ”It took me as a longtime lawyer and a professional consumer advocate literally an   day just to get a solid list of what funeral services were offered by nearby funeral establishments and how much they cost. Eight hours,” he says. Howard’s problem may have been frustrating, but it isn’t new. The funeral industry has been consciously nontransparent since at least the 19th century, when the National Funeral Directors Association prohibited its members from advertising in the newspaper. As recently as the 1960s, the association barred members from advertising prices. It agreed to end the ban in 1968, only after being sued by the U. S. Department of Justice. That culture of secrecy persists in what’s now known as the death care industry. A kind of strategic ambiguity about prices is part of the business model. ”The consumer stands firmly in 1951, because that seems to be the technological level and the transparency level that the majority of American funeral homes are stuck at,” says Joshua Slocum, executive director of the death care watchdog Funeral Consumers Alliance. ”In an era when you can go online and look up the price range for products as trivial as eraser caps for a pencil to a new smartphone, good luck finding anything from your local funeral home websites,” he says. In the   days, the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule sought to fix that lack of price transparency, as well as rein in a variety of other abusive and   practices occurring in the industry. The Funeral Rule, enacted in 1984 after years of resistance by the industry, requires that funeral businesses give consumers an itemized price list when they talk to them in person, and give them clear price information when they ask for it over the phone. The itemized list, known as the general price list, is meant to help consumers pick and choose what they want and filter out what they don’t. In recent years, federal regulators shopping undercover have found about 1 in 4 funeral homes break the rule and fail to disclose price information. That’s even though they risk large fines from the federal government. Slocum and others say it’s time to bring the disclosure requirements into the age of mobile platforms, searchable data and social media. Price lists, they say, should be online. Mandating that on the federal level would require an amendment to the Funeral Rule by the FTC. ”Remember, the rule dates back to the 1980s it’s a   rule,” says Lois Greisman, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection division. In July, Slocum’s group and the Consumer Federation of America asked the FTC to revise the rule, which it called ”antiquated,” to require online price disclosures. But just as it did in the days of   and big hair, the FTC may once again get resistance from the industry if it considers the requirement. ”I have to think that most of this is going to be market driven,” says Scott Gilligan, a lawyer for the National Funeral Directors Association. The industry group represents more than 20, 000 funeral directors around the country. ”If people want price information on websites, funeral homes are going to respond by putting it out there,” Gilligan says. ”But I’d rather do that because that’s my business decision than do it because I’m afraid of getting fined $40, 000 by the federal government.” At least one entrepreneur believes there is demand for online price information. ”We’re hoping that we can disrupt the funeral industry,” says Will Chang, who heads a Silicon Valley startup that has collected thousands of funeral home price lists and posted them on his site, Parting. com. He put together a team of workers to pose as consumers and repeatedly call funeral homes until, he says, most of them turned over their price lists. ”Sometimes it took months, and sometimes we couldn’t even get the prices at all,” Chang says. ”But we were able to get about 75 percent of all the funeral homes across the United States. Chang says he was shocked that many funeral directors wouldn’t even use email and preferred fax machines. In NPR’s investigation, we found that, too. The resistance Chang faced in getting the price lists means it could be challenging to keep them up to date. So, his strategy is to persuade funeral directors to partner with his site and pay him a referral fee. Some have reacted badly, even threatening to sue him. But others have been receptive. ”A lot of these funeral homes now have, you know, younger funeral directors in their 30s or 40s, and they totally get what we’re doing, and they’ve completely embraced us. So we feel very good about the direction of where the funeral industry is heading,” Chang says. In looking at the data he has collected, Chang found wild swings in prices for similar services. In our analysis of prices in several NPR   markets, so did we. In the Nashville, Tenn. area, for example, the minimum fee for using a funeral home varied from less than $1, 000 to more than $4, 000. The cost of a simple cremation in that market started below $1, 000 and topped out at $2, 700. Surveys by Slocum’s group have also found large price swings in numerous markets. Since the Funeral Rule was last amended 23 years ago, there’s little evidence that the rule has made the industry more competitive or   for consumers, even as it has mandated price disclosures. U. S. Department of Labor data analyzed by NPR show that since the Funeral Rule was last amended in 1994, prices have been going up faster than the rate of inflation. As for Howard, the consumer advocate who suddenly became a consumer, he went to the California Legislature in 2011, a year after his father died at age 76. He lobbied to get the state to require funeral businesses to post general price lists online. At first, the California Funeral Directors Association opposed the move. But a compromise bill passed and took effect in 2013. California funeral homes now must either post their price lists online or at least post a list of their products and tell consumers that a price list is available on request. Slocum’s group has found that most California funeral homes chose to post their actual price lists. Both he and the industry’s Gilligan say it’s too early to gauge the law’s effect on pricing and competition. Howard wants the federal government to act as well. ”The FTC really, really, really needs to get off its south pole and bring itself into the 20th and 21st centuries, and make this modest requirement a national requirement,” he says. Riley Beggin of NPR, Brian Latimer and Emily Siner of Nashville Public Radio, Marisa Demarco and Ed Williams of KUNM, and Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma contributed to this story."
950,"He called himself an ”edutainer.” He had a knack for explaining difficult concepts  —   global inequality, climate change, disease and poverty. He used maps, humor and props like storage boxes and colored stones to tell the story of our world and to advocate for the poor: ”Health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health.” Hans Rosling, the medical doctor, professor of international health and statistician who found joy in hard facts, died on Tuesday from pancreatic cancer in Uppsala, Sweden, surrounded by family. He was 68. Rosling had a colorful way of teaching. ”I can show you! Let me show you the world,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013, using stacks of   bricks to show the narrowing gap between the world’s rich and poor. I had the privilege of seeing Rosling in person at a conference in Dar es Salaam in 2013. He gave an abridged version of the famous TED Talk he gave in 2006, which painted a positive view of development. He showed us that life is getting better for more people, if we only bothered to look at the numbers. ”Data is often better than you think,” he said in that TED Talk. In front of his PowerPoint presentation projected on the wall, he jumped and pointed from data point to data point, excited and breathless, like a tornado. His enthusiasm was infectious. The room was filled with global health bureaucrats and government workers who had probably seen it all  —   but he had captured their attention completely. And mine, too. Rosling, the   of the Gapminder Institute, a global development ”fact tank” in Sweden, definitely made statistics entertaining  —   but above all, he educated the world about itself. Here’s a collection of some of his most popular video presentations. The best stats you’ve ever seen  200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes, Global population growth, box by box, Where are the Syrian refugees? Why did Ebola spread in West Africa?  Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine, What’s your favorite Hans Rosling video? Share with us on Twitter at @NPRGoatsandSoda. "
951,"As Republicans move to overhaul the health law, should people bother paying the penalty for not having health insurance when they file their taxes this year? Or will they be able to sign up on the exchange for 2018 after their COBRA benefits end? Here are some answers to recent questions from readers. I didn’t have health insurance for part of last year and thought I’d get stuck paying a penalty. Now the new administration is talking about not enforcing the insurance requirement. Could I really be off the hook at tax time? As long as the   individual mandate  —   which requires most people to have health coverage or face a tax penalty  —   is the law of the land, you should pay the fine for not having coverage in 2016 unless you qualify for an exemption, said Tara Straw, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Straw also manages a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance site, part of an IRS program that provides free tax filing services for low and   taxpayers. Straw said she has heard that some tax preparers are advising people either not to pay the penalty or to delay filing because they anticipate changes in the law. Bad idea. ”It’s not a thing a reputable tax preparer would do,” Straw said. ”The requirement that people have health insurance or an exemption [from the mandate] is still in effect.” The confusion stems from uncertainty over Republican officials’ comments that they may do away with the individual mandate when they overhaul the health law. In addition, President Trump signed an executive order in January that required federal agencies to waive or exempt health   provisions that would impose costs or penalties on individuals, to the extent permitted by law. One strategy that has been discussed has been to broaden the hardship exemption so more people would qualify for it, which the secretary of health and human services has the authority to do. However, Straw says that approach might run into trouble. ”A hardship has to mean something, you can’t say that everyone has a hardship,” she said. ”Complying with the law is not considered a hardship.” Some experts say changing the rules now could create even more confusion, since some people have already filed their returns. Those taxpayers might have to file amended returns, an extra expense if they use a tax preparer. ”Since the 2016 tax season is already underway, I would think it unlikely that the Treasury Department would say, ’Don’t bother paying the penalty,’” said Mark Luscombe, a principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax  Accounting, an information services company. I’m currently on a COBRA plan that ends on Dec. 31, 2017. Then I was going to choose a plan on the exchange for 2018. If the exchange exists in 2018, do you think there would be a special enrollment period allowed for new   like me when my current coverage ends? Under the health law, people who have certain life changes, including losing other types of health insurance such as COBRA, are entitled to a special enrollment period to enroll in coverage on the exchange. But in your case, you wouldn’t actually need a special enrollment period because your COBRA will end during the regular annual open enrollment period that is scheduled to run from Nov. 1, 2017, to Jan. 31, 2018. (This coverage comes from a federal law that generally allows people who lose or leave their jobs to stay on the company insurance plan for up to 18 months if they pay the full price of coverage.) Republican proposals to replace the health law typically include provisions that guarantee people will be able to buy coverage when COBRA or other coverage ends, said Timothy Jost, a professor emeritus at Washington and Lee University Law School who has examined and written about the proposals. Insurers are skittish, however, about some of the Republican ideas, such as eliminating the individual mandate, and the continuing uncertainty about what the individual market will look like next year. At this point it’s unclear what type of coverage will be available. ”The question is: Are the exchanges in place, are the subsidies in place and will premiums be affordable for those who don’t have subsidies?” said Laurel Lucia, manager of the health care program at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. ”And will there even be an option to buy individual insurance in some parts of the country if no insurers are participating?” Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Michelle Andrews is on Twitter:@mandrews110."
952,"Colin   opens the door to his greenhouse in Mt. Vernon, Wash. and a rush of warm air pours out. ”Basically, it’s summer all year long here,” he jokes.   a PhD student at Washington State University, and WSU professor Steven Jones have developed a new species: a cross between wheat and its wild cousin, wheat grass. They call it Salish Blue. Their goal was to make something that’s like wheat but grows back year after year. ”What it has to do is it has to work well for farmers, and it has to work well in the rotations and then it has to provide some sort of economic and nutritional value to the community,”   explains. Normal wheat dies every year, and farmers have to till the soil and plant new seeds. Not only does that mean more work, but the process also causes erosion, which makes farmland less healthy and can carry sediment and agricultural chemicals into nearby waters. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union claimed it had created a plant exactly like wheat that kept regenerating itself year after year. ”It almost seemed like a superweapon,”   says, ”so the U. S. and Canada started their own programs to try to develop perennial grain crops based on wheat.” But the Soviets were bluffing  —   ”and here we are in 2017 and still no perennial grain crops on a wide scale,”   says. That’s where Salish Blue comes in. It’s a perennial,   grain that adapts to wet weather, and it’s different from previous attempts because it’s genetically stable, says Oregon State University researcher Michael Flowers, who was not involved in the study. ”The exciting part is we now have something,” Flowers says, ”and the breeders can start putting selection pressure and selecting for those traits that we want to keep.” Not far from Washington State University’s Mount Vernon lab, Dave Hedlin has a   farm where he grows vegetables and feed for organic dairy cows. He currently has a research plot of Salish Blue on his land. ”It’s kind of a   thing,” he says. ”It’s pretty leggy. Some will be four feet or five feet off the ground, and some will be three feet off the ground.” Hedlin says he could use something like Salish Blue as winter food for dairy cows. The grain is not yet ready for human consumption, at least not broadly. That said,   has made bread and cookies and shortbread out of it. And pancakes. ”Pancakes are my favorite thing to do with it,” he says. Because some of the seeds are blue instead of red or white like traditional wheat, the pancakes have a blueish tint to them. So, if Salish Blue takes off, we could all soon be eating blue pancakes. This story comes to us from member station KUOW and EarthFix, a public media partnership."
953,"To go to space we need math. Lots of it. Most of us look in awe at the towering rocket ship strapped to the launching platform and forget the tremendous amount of work it took for it to get there  —   and, from there, to get into Earth’s orbit and beyond. Engineering, math, physics, chemistry, computer science: It’s all there, waiting for  . Now, travel back to 1961, when the U. S. A. was behind the Soviet Union in the space race. It all started with Sputnik, a  . silver ball, 23 inches in diameter, launched into orbit by the Soviets on Oct. 4, 1957. Less than a month later, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, with the dog Laika as passenger. Getting to the moon and putting humans into orbit was the next logical step. A sequence of space flights from the U. S. and the Soviet Union followed. This was no friendly competition. At the height of the Cold War, space was seen as the new frontier, the place to dominate  —   or be dominated. The stakes got higher when the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth on April 12, 1961. This is where the hit movie Hidden Figures begins, in the heat of the race. NASA had been founded only three years earlier. The pressure, both political and public, to succeed was enormous. National pride was in the balance. Plus, in the midst of Cold War paranoia, who knew what the Soviets were planning to do ”up there?” The movie paints an accurate picture of the political expectations of the time, the widespread fear. But its beating heart is the science done by three   ladies, all brilliant at what they did. Aspiring engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) accidentally spots a fault in the   tiles of an experimental capsule. In the movie version, NASA was segregated in 1961. To go to the bathroom, human ”computer” Katherine Goble (played beautifully by Taraji Henson) had to scamper half a mile across the Langley Research Center facility. The amazing mathematician, the first ”colored” woman in the team, couldn’t even drink coffee from the same coffee maker as her peers. These people computed launching and   trajectories by hand! And Goble was an absolute marvel at this, to the surprise, and even disgust, of her envious   colleagues. Hidden Figures was deservedly nominated for best picture. Nice to see long mathematical equations flowing on a tall blackboard in a movie that has been so successful in the box office. I confess my embarrassment, while watching the movie, for not knowing any of this story. I mean, this is a true story every little boy and girl, especially girl, should know. How could I have missed this? The third in the group, Dorothy Vaughan, played movingly by Octavia Spencer, fought in vain to be promoted to supervisor, a job she was already doing in practice. Her break finally came when NASA bought an IBM 7090 electronic computer that no one, apparently, knew how to program. Dorothy, with a knack for mechanical contraptions (yes, computers at the time had many moving parts, levers, tapes, and connecting wires and plugs) learns how to set it up. A visionary, she borrows a book about FORTRAN at the public library, the programming language people still use today for launching rockets. (With some modifications of course.) She gains everyone’s respect and gets her promotion as supervisor of the programming department, bringing her other ”colored” girls with her. The movie builds up its narrative from connecting the three stories, playing with historical accuracy to get its message across. In reality, NASA wasn’t segregated when it substituted NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1958. Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor in computing in 1949. Mary Jackson completed her engineering degree in 1958, becoming NASA’s first black female engineer. Katherine Johnson had been in the Flight Research Division since 1953 and moved into the Space Task Group when it was formed in 1958. Her boss, played in the movie by Kevin Costner, was not Al Harrison but Robert Gilruth. John Glenn did ask her to check on the IBM   calculations. So, the amazing thing here is that the true history of these three women is even more remarkable and trailblazing than the one portrayed in the movie. What the movie does, and does beautifully, is weave their professional and personal lives together, humanizing them, showing how science and deep emotions and feelings are perfectly compatible, something many tend to dismiss. The movie is a celebration of the human spirit, of the power of individual determination and drive, and of the need for a nation to stand together, to look beyond racial and cultural differences in order to face a new challenge. There is much ugliness portrayed in the segregated Virginia of the early 1960s, a somber echo of a past that is still so present and, in a new incarnation, that threatens to destabilize this nation once again. If there is a central lesson in the movie, it is that united we win that what makes America great is not segregation and intolerance, but openness and inclusiveness. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer  —   and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for   Engagement at Dartmouth,   of 13. 7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser"
954,"FX’s Legion is a superhero TV show that resists admitting it is one. Which is both the most satisfying and frustrating thing about it. Here’s the setup: David Haller is a   guy who hears voices in his head. It’s driven him to drugs, occasionally criminal behavior and a suicide attempt. (Alert TV fans will recognize the actor playing David as Dan Stevens, who was   hunk Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey). Stevens cops a twitchy earnestness  —   and a pretty good American accent  —   as David, who has lived for years in a mental institution, but is ready to try life on the outside. We see him endure a visit from his sister and meet a cute fellow inmate whom he grows to like very much, even though she hates to be touched. Turns out, the voices in David’s head belong to other people. He’s a mutant who can hear others’ thoughts and control matter with his mind. The question that remains for David and the rest of the characters in Legion: Has he been fooled into believing he was schizophrenic by his unusual powers, or is he mentally ill in addition to being one of the most powerful mutants around? This is FX’s first collaboration with Marvel Television, and it takes place in the same fictional universe as the   franchise. It takes some kind of stones to partner with the leading purveyor of    entertainment and create a show which downplays its roots in the superhero world so thoroughly. As the first episode progresses, we realize David is in the clutches of evil government guys who may know more about his powers than he does. It’s a story we’ve seen many times before in movies like E. T. and Netflix’s surprise hit Stranger Things: An innocent with amazing abilities flees a brutal institution. Hopefully, David won’t have to escape on a flying bicycle. But Legion the TV show is created by Noah Hawley, the mind behind FX’s amazing adaptation of the movie Fargo. So the predictable nature of its plotting is often balanced by powerful visuals and unorthodox storytelling. In one scene, David destroys a kitchen with his mind, flinging utensils, food and appliances around in a detailed,   shower that the viewer  —   and several characters  —   can walk through like a   display. It’s a stunning sequence, in line with the show’s bold, seriously stylish visual sense. But it also looks a lot like ”freeze frame”   sequences seen in lots of commercials  —   and in films like The Matrix. Similarly, the pilot’s opening sequence shows David’s struggles with his powers, depicting his slide from a smiling kid winning soccer trophies to a teen who blows out the windows of a police car with his mind, as The Who song ”Happy Jack” plays as soundtrack. The scene is awfully reminiscent of the opening to another superhero movie, scored by another rueful ’60s tune: Watchmen. (That film’s credits were set to the Bob Dylan tune ”The Times They Are  ’ ”.) Unlike Fargo, which can sometimes feel like it is observing characters from a distance, Legion often puts the viewer squarely inside David’s head. But because of his mental issues, sometimes we’re not sure what we’re seeing. Is it a memory, or something happening to him now, or a vision of something happening elsewhere? That’s the same kind of confusing ”is it real or isn’t it” storytelling used in shows like Mr. Robot and Westworld. In the comics, the character Legion is the son of   leader Charles Xavier. He’s a powerful mutant with multiple personalities, and each one boasts a different power. Hawley seems to have charted a different course for his TV version, though I hold out hope that we may see Professor X on the small screen this season or next. FX’s Legion seems to want it both ways: to draw comic book fans with a story set in the   world, while avoiding some of the classic elements of the genre for people who don’t usually watch superhero movies and TV shows. Another new show, NBC’s Powerless, attempts a similar move, building a workplace comedy around the   people who have to cope with the smashed buildings and derailed trains left behind when superheroes clash with villains. It’s a tricky dance these shows are trying, because most of these stories are ultimately about the hero pulling it together enough to beat the bad guys. And you only need to look at Fox’s tired,   drama Gotham to see what can happen on a superhero show without the hero. Over its first three episodes, Legion seems very good, but not quite great. It’s a visually impressive program with a narrative style that just might revolutionize the superhero series on TV. But first, it has to elevate its core story above the kind of plots we’ve already seen so many times before. And it wouldn’t hurt to just admit it’s a show about superheroes, already."
955,"Seeing a great work of art might quicken your pulse, but now New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hoping you’ll break a sweat, too. The Met is currently offering a ”Museum Workout”  —   part performance, part workout, part art tour. On a recent morning, 15 of us gather in The Great Hall before the museum opens. We line up behind two tour guide dancers  —   both wearing sparkly cocktail dresses and sneakers. A guy with a portable speaker stands nearby. He presses play, and with disco propelling us forward, we power walk, we punch the air, we daintily jog through the otherwise empty Met at 9 in the morning. There’s a lot of light, a lot of antiquity . .. and some stink eye. Museum security looks like they’ve never seen anything like this. ”We were approached by the Metropolitan Museum to make a dance,” explains Monica Bill Barnes, one of the workout leaders. ”We counteroffered, and asked to make a led tour that’s a workout.” Barnes’ dance company wanted to get people moving in the Met  —   and jumping jacks and yoga poses seemed a lot easier than teaching amateurs a complicated dance routine. ”It’s one of the most expansive spaces in New York City,” Barnes says. ”And to be able to move through all the different galleries, and the rooms and the spaces that they’ve created felt like such an incredible opportunity.” We power through a hall of busts  —   some with heads, some headless  —   in the fastest tour of a museum you’ll ever take. Most of the workout is spent jogging past priceless, important artwork, but we do slow down a few times. We pause to do squats in front of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, a portrait of a beautiful, pale woman in a long black gown  —   and I can’t help but laugh. Barnes absolves me, though. ”We’re sort of purposefully combining things that you don’t naturally put together,” she explains. Laughter is part of what she’s going for. After all, when you laugh, she says, that ”opens you up to experience things differently.” Speaking of ”different,” it took Monica Bill Barnes  Company more than two years to get the Met on board with this idea. ”It’s really, ’How many inches are you from that work?’ ” Barnes says with a laugh. ”That’s where we had to do a lot of good, careful conversations.” The patience and planning paid off four weeks of the workouts sold out immediately. And I caught a few museum guards dancing along with us. Turns out, a little music and movement really can make you see things differently."
956,"Painter David Hockney once said, ”It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.” On Thursday in London, a major retrospective at Tate Britain will give visitors the chance to see 60 years of the English artist’s ”doings.” Oils, acrylics, sketches, photographs, smartphone drawings  —   Hockney has worked in every medium. He’s one of the   contemporary artists and his works sell for millions. To get to Hockney’s studio you go up, up, up a winding canyon road in the Hollywood Hills. It’s a neighborhood studded with stars’ homes  —   George Clooney, Kevin Costner and Marlon Brando back in the day. Hockney’s studio has five easels, some comfy armchairs and white walls brightened with his works. Never mind the ashtrays  —   the floor is carpeted with Davidoff cigarettes, chain smoked   down, then stubbed into dark brown smears. (To make sure it’s really out, ”I always stub it out with my foot,” he says.) There are some splotches of blue paint on the floor  —   and more on the artist’s khaki pants. Hockney stands at a table turning the pages of a brand new Taschen publication called A Bigger Book  —   a nod to his famous 1967 work, A Bigger Splash. Two feet tall and a foot and a half wide, the $2, 500 tome includes reproductions of 450 of his paintings. Inside you’ll see LA swimming pools, palm trees, flowers, his dachshunds, the Grand Canyon, portraits of rich and not rich friends, landscapes in the U. S. and Yorkshire, designs for opera sets. He won’t linger over any of them and doesn’t pause to answer questions. He keeps turning, leafing through a life’s worth of works in vivid blues, greens, oranges and fuchsias. This is art he made from age 16 through his late 70s. He’ll be 80 in July and he still paints every day. He probably can’t not paint. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, he says the Tate show will be the largest retrospective he has ever had  —   after all, this one includes 20 more years of work. And as for whether there will be a big party for him in London? ”I’m not that keen on parties,” he says. ”I’m too deaf for them. I can’t really go to them. I don’t like all the fuss being made. I like doing the pictures  —   that’s what I like. But once they’ve been done, that’s it.” He doesn’t go out much now. Crowds are too noisy. Losing his hearing has been an isolating experience. ”I’m not very good at listening now,” he says. When he was younger, he was a lively fixture at parties and friends’ gatherings. Not so anymore. ”I can’t stand it and I just have to leave and go home and sit in a quiet bedroom,” he says. ”That’s what I do. Then I read. . .. That’s my life now. That’s what it’s going to be.” This is a portrait of the artist as a    man  —   still with a twinkle in his eye, and plenty of joyous pictures left to paint. He still sees the world in the colors of Oz  —   hues so vibrant and alive that they look  . What creative person doesn’t question whether he or she has anything left to say? David Hockney goes into his studio every day and has   conversations on canvas, on paper, in photos, iPads. And art lovers across the world keep listening."
957,"Political statements are easy to see when they’re on signs or buttons or in tweets. But then there are those that are hidden from view, until you log in to the right place. For example, when you look for new   networks to get online. President Trump’s supporters and opponents have expanded their battlefield even to the choice of their own   names  —   identifying their networks according to what they think of the president. Examples range from the   followed by Trump’s name to the acronym ”MAGA ” which stands for ”Make America Great Again  .” Although some may dismiss the practice as irrelevant,   names could give a political statement to a far broader audience than sweater pins, bumper stickers or even tweets. After all, the average lifespan of a tweet can be just a few minutes. And these days politics is the kind of divisive topic that could easy ruin a family dinner, so many people decide to discuss it only with others who think the same. On the other hand, we constantly bump into perfect strangers’   spheres, either through their smartphones or routers. As any frequent flier knows, turning on the   search and browsing the names of available networks in a crowded waiting room can be a humorous diversion. Also, it’s not strange at all asking for the local   name and password when a friend invites us to come over. Answers may reveal something surprising, funny, or even shocking about our host. According to data from market research firm Strategy Analytics, 61 percent of U. S. households have   networks installed. Some owners like to choose witty (or wannabe witty) names for their network, such as ”Martin Router King” or ”FBI Surveillance Van.” Reddit has countless posts about this phenomenon.   names may refer to movies, music and pop culture, such as ”Routers of Rohan” (Lord of the Rings) ”Connecto Patronum” (Harry Potter) or ”  is in the air” (the song ”Love Is in the Air”). In other cases, people name their   to send messages to family members (”Mom, use this one”) landlords (”Kyle, fix our dishwasher”) or neighbors (”Get your own damn  ”). While some people get extremely creative while choosing their   name, others don’t miss the chance to send a clear political message. One recent example is ”Black   Matters,” spotted on Reddit after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2012,   wireless coverage mapping company OpenSignal built a database of almost 75 million routers worldwide and searched for the occurrence of the word ”Obama” in their names. The result was a map of the political sentiment about   Barack Obama, who at that time was campaigning for a second term. From ”Vote Obama in ’12” near Los Angeles to ”Obama Care Doesn’t Care” in Queens, New York, the   names were pretty revealing of their owners’ political views. In the case of   names, it all started far before Election Day. Last August, a   network named ”Clinton Email Server” popped out at a Trump rally in Austin, Texas. Ironically, the network didn’t require any password. Clearly, it called to mind Hillary Clinton’s controversial use of an unsecured server. A list of ”  ideas for Trump supporters” appeared on Twitter shortly after. On Election Night, the   provided for members of the press at Trump’s event at the New York Hilton Midtown also took a clear stand about the expected outcome. The name of the network was ”Trump2016” and the password ”DJT4thewin.” After Trump had become   a hotspot name was changed to ”Trump Won! HipHipHooray,” according to this tweet. In Colorado, a group of roommates renamed their network simply ”Trump!” At least one of them was not happy with the change, and tweeted her disappointment. Have you spotted a funny, a controversial or a political   name in your neighborhood? Tweet us! Lucia Maffei is an NPR business desk intern."
958,"Updated at 7:50 p. m. ET, A federal appeals court has unanimously rejected a Trump administration request to allow its travel ban to take effect. The   appeals panel declined to overturn a lower court’s order suspending the president’s ban against entry into the United States by refugees and travelers from seven   nations. The travel ban was put on hold by federal district Judge James L. Robart of Seattle, who issued a nationwide restraining order on Feb. 3. Robart said that the two states challenging the ban, Washington and Minnesota, had shown that their residents and universities were harmed by Trump’s action. The administration then asked the appeals court for an emergency stay of Robart’s restraining order. But the judges dismissed the administration’s request, saying that it had to show that it is likely to succeed in the trial court on the merits of its appeal. ”[We] hold that the Government has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, nor has it shown that failure to enter a stay would cause irreparable injury, and we therefore deny its emergency motion for a stay,” wrote the panel. President Trump tweeted his reply, indicating he will appeal. Trump also spoke briefly with reporters outside his press secretary’s office after the ruling was announced and, as reported by Reuters, called the decision political and predicted the administration would ultimately win. The result is a rebuke to the White House. In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, the panel vigorously quizzed attorneys both for the administration and for the state of Washington, the lead plaintiff, which originally filed the suit challenging the travel ban. The solicitor general for the state of Washington, Noah Purcell, argued that the travel ban is discriminatory and violates both federal statutes and the U. S. Constitution. He told the court that the judiciary’s role is to step in and check the abuses of the executive branch. But August Flentje, special counsel to the assistant attorney general, argued that the president has the ultimate authority to protect the national security and that his action in that regard  —   namely, the travel ban  —   was unreviewable by the courts. In their ruling, the judges were unequivocal. ”There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our democracy,” the court wrote. The judges also said that the administration had also failed to show it would suffer ”irreparable injury” if its travel ban were not allowed to go back into effect. Acknowledging the government’s interest in combating terrorism, the judges nonetheless wrote, ”The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States. Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the Executive Order, the Government has taken the position that we must not review the decision at all.”  The states challenging the president’s travel ban won on virtually every issue, says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law. ”The order was unanimous. The panel found that the states had standing, that the executive order was reviewable by the court, that the U. S. was not likely to succeed on the merits and that it had not shown that a stay was necessary to avoid irreparable injury,” said Tobias. In a news conference, Purcell declared victory. ”What we argued is it’s the role of the courts to say what the law is, and to serve as a check on the executive branch, and that’s what the court has done in this opinion, in this excellent opinion, with this   careful, thoughtful opinion that seriously considered all the government’s arguments and rejected them,” he said."
959,"Archaeologists from the U. S. and Israel say they have found evidence that a 12th cave was used to store Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient manuscripts dating back to the time of Jesus. ”This exciting excavation is the closest we’ve come to discovering new Dead Sea scrolls in 60 years,” Oren Gutfeld of The Hebrew University said in a statement about the discovery. ”Until now, it was accepted that Dead Sea scrolls were found only in 11 caves at Qumran, but now there is no doubt that this is the 12th cave.” Since the late 1940s, when the scrolls were found in caves in the cliffs along the Dead Sea, scholars have studied them for insights into the history of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity. As NPR has reported, ”The scrolls appear to have been hidden in the desert near Qumran in the West Bank by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes that existed around the time of Jesus.” Although the 12th cave, excavated by a team from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Liberty University in Virginia, had previously been mapped, this is the most detailed study of its contents. ”Although at the end of the day no scroll was found, and instead we ’only’ found a piece of parchment rolled up in a jug that was being processed for writing, the findings indicate beyond any doubt that the cave contained scrolls that were stolen,” Gutfeld explained. ”The findings include the jars in which the scrolls and their covering were hidden, a leather strap for binding the scroll, a cloth that wrapped the scrolls, tendons and pieces of skin connecting fragments, and more.” Looters also left behind flint blades, arrowheads and a stamp seal made of a stone called carnelian, which offers clues about when and how the cave was used over the centuries. ”I imagine they came into the tunnel. They found the scroll jars. They took the scrolls,” Gutfeld told the BBC. ”They even opened the scrolls and left everything around, the textiles, the pottery.” ”Thank God they took only the scrolls,” he told The Washington Post. ”They left behind all the evidence that the scrolls were there.” In 2011, Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem made five of the hundreds of Dead Sea manuscripts available to the public online, as we reported."
960,"Cary Dixon’s    son has struggled with opioid abuse for years. At first, Dixon says, it was hard to know how to support him as he cycled through several rounds of treatment and incarceration. She says her life revolved around his addiction. ”It’s kind of like you’re on a parallel track with them,” she says. ”You wait for the next crisis you wait for the next phone call. You’re upset when you don’t get a phone call. You’re just  —   you’re desperate, and you’re in a state of fear and anxiety so much of the time.” Dixon, 52, is a former nurse who now runs a contracting business with her husband in Huntington, W. Va. At a 2015 forum on addiction in Charleston, W. Va. she told   Barack Obama that addiction doesn’t just harm a person  —   it hurts a whole family. ”We neglect our marriages. We neglect other children in our home, who are thriving, because all of our attention is focused on addiction and substance abuse,” said Dixon, who later was invited by Obama to attend the 2016 State of the Union address as a special guest. The Dixons are not alone: They live in one of the cities hit hardest by the national opioid epidemic, in the state with the highest rate of   deaths. In 2015, Huntington’s fatal overdose rate was nearly nine times the national average. Now, Cary Dixon wonders what the Trump administration will mean for families like hers. She says she voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in November, and she’s worried about President Trump’s talk of repealing Obamacare. She’s especially concerned about preserving the law’s coverage for alcohol and drug addiction treatment. ”I know that the Affordable Care Act needs [to be] tweaked, but to be repealed and to lose the gains that we’ve made would be harder on our community,” Dixon says. ”We’re trying to dig out of this hole.” And then there is the question of who will be covered: West Virginia expanded Medicaid under the health care law, adding more than 200, 000 people to the public insurance rolls  —   a 62 percent increase over the state’s   Medicaid enrollment. If the law is repealed, and the expansion money goes away, those new enrollees could lose their access to basic health and mental health care. Dixon’s friend Bob Hardin, whose son has fought alcoholism for decades, shares her concerns. They met through a support group for family members of people struggling with addictions. Hardin, who is 73 and retired, has mixed feelings about the ACA, but he worries about any change to federal policy that would take away access to addiction treatment. ”It works sometimes, but sometimes it doesn’t. But at least it’s there,” he says. Hardin wrote in Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio on his ballot last fall, but he’s hopeful President Trump will deliver on his promise to put more Americans back to work. He wonders if more jobs also might help people here keep busy, and off drugs and alcohol. Hardin spent years working in Baltimore before returning to Huntington, and he has seen the   economy shrink while the addiction epidemic has grown. ”The change is phenomenal from when I left and when I came back,” Hardin says. ”It’s a tough place to get a job.” In addition to promising to strengthen the economy, Trump also campaigned on a promise to stem the flow of opioids into the United States by building a wall along the U. S.  border. Both Hardin and Dixon are skeptical of that idea. ”A wall is not gonna stop them from doing what they do. And if you build a wall, they will adapt,” Dixon says. As West Virginia continues to fight the opioid crisis, Dixon says the state will need practical solutions, like more beds in drug treatment facilities, and reliable access to health care."
961,"Decorations are sparse at Recovery Point, a residential treatment center in Huntington, W. Va. That’s why the bulletin board covered with photos of men stands out. The men spent time here, but didn’t survive their addictions. They’re all dead now. ”We keep a constant reminder in here for individuals who come into our detox facility. We have, ’But for the grace of God, there go I,’” says Executive Director Matt Boggs, pointing to the words on the board. Boggs, 35, would know. He started as a resident here five years ago, looking for a way out of addiction and homelessness. Recovery Point runs four facilities in West Virginia, offering nonmedical detox and   residential treatment to people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. In Huntington, about 100 men at a time live in this former elementary school building in a   neighborhood. There’s plenty of demand for facilities like this one West Virginia consistently leads the nation in drug overdose deaths. President Trump and other candidates addressed the nationwide addiction crisis many times on the campaign trail, sometimes with testimony from family members of those affected. Now, people who have been affected by the crisis, including the residents of Recovery Point, are looking to the president for help. Terry Lilly, 36, came to Recovery Point from Charleston, W. Va. Lilly was a computer programmer and then a manager at a nationally known company. He didn’t get hooked on heroin until his 30s, when he was playing music in bars and decided to give heroin a try, out of what he describes now as ”morbid curiosity.” ”It scratched my itch,” he says. ”It helped me deal with the emotional problems that I wasn’t dealing with, so it didn’t take long for me to give away my career, my house, my car.” Lilly’s recovery has been full of stops and starts. This time, he has been clean for four months. As he looks to the future, he’s worried about politicians’ talk of repealing the Affordable Care Act. He gets health insurance through the federal Medicaid program, which was expanded under the ACA and now covers more than half a million West Virginians  —   more than   of the state’s residents. ”I’m not in a position to pay for that right now, but I have been in the past and I would like to be in the future,” Lilly says. ”So I really feel like this time in my life is what those programs are for, when I need a helping hand.” Medicaid doesn’t pay for treatment at Recovery Point the facility is mainly funded by grants and donations, and run in part by residents like Lilly who have already completed several months of treatment. But Boggs, the program’s director, says Medicaid provides basic health care for many of the residents here, and essential mental health care for issues that can complicate their recovery. If Republicans repeal Obamacare as they’ve promised, Boggs says he hopes there’s an equivalent replacement ready to go first. Some residents are hoping the federal government will address the challenge of   society with a criminal record. For    Jarrod Book, of Akron, Ohio, an alternative sentencing program is giving him a chance to clear his drug conviction. He says he’d like to see the new administration champion sentencing reform. ”Like nonviolent drug offenders who maybe, you know, messed up a little bit in their life,” Book says. ”If it wasn’t for something like that, I wouldn’t be here.” Book says he hopes the attention presidential candidates showered on the opioid epidemic during the campaign will help to destigmatize the problem. Aaron Pardue, 28, of Pocahontas, Va. hopes the publicity will bring more funding for treatment in communities across the region that are overwhelmed with need. ”For me it just seems like it’s a shame that it takes the politicians and the celebrities and all the bigwigs in this country, for it to start happening to them personally, before it becomes an issue for them to start dealing with it,” Pardue says. But Pardue, who has been clean for 15 months, says he can’t think too much about what the politicians might do. He needs to focus on his recovery. ”I mean I haven’t been living on Saturn or anything,” he says. ”I know what’s going on, but that’s one less distraction that I need right now.”"
962,"After President Trump blocked U. S. aid money from supporting any group that provides or ”promotes” abortion in other countries, The Netherlands announced it would launch a fundraising initiative to support any affected organizations. Now, several other countries  —   including Sweden, Finland, Belgium and Canada  —   have signaled their participation. The ”She Decides” fundraiser is the latest development in an international aid dispute that  —   as NPR’s Nurith Aizenman explained  —   has been playing out for decades. It centers on the ”Mexico City policy,” which blocks U. S. aid from being sent to any international group that provides or ”promotes” abortion. That can include providing information about abortion. Since 1973, the U. S. hasn’t allowed international aid money to directly fund abortions. The only question has been if groups can receive funds for other initiatives. And that has depended on who is in office  —   Republican presidents enforced the Mexico City policy, while Democratic presidents didn’t. When Trump entered office one of his first actions was to bring back the policy. As Nurith wrote last month, he also appeared to expand it: Previous versions of the policy only stopped family planning aid from being distributed to affected charities, while Trump’s memorandum seems to apply to all global health funding. Nurith wrote that it’s far from clear exactly how much money is potentially affected. The U. S. spends more than $600 million specifically on reproductive health, but spends much more  —   billions of dollars  —   on global health overall. ”It remains to be seen how much of that goes to groups that currently provide or promote abortion as defined by the policy  —   and that would opt to give up U. S. aid dollars rather than falling in line,” Nurith wrote. Shortly after Trump reimposed the policy, The Netherlands launched the ”She Decides Global Fundraising Initiative,” soliciting donations for reproductive health care in developing countries. It was explicitly designed to counterbalance the effect of the U. S. policy change. Funds raised by the initiative ”will be made available to organizations affected by the Mexico City Policy,” according to a website for the effort. In addition to inviting private donations, the Netherlands also pledged more than $10 million and said it would be working with other governments to boost the available funds. Since then, Denmark and Belgium have also pledged aid, bringing the total to more than $30 million, Deutsche Welle reports. And on Thursday, Sweden joined those three countries to announce an international conference related to the initiative, scheduled for March 2. ”We will mobilize political and financial support and show that there is a counterweight to the worrying developments we are seeing in the U. S. and in other parts of the world,” Swedish deputy prime minister Isabella Lövin said in a statement. (You may remember Lövin from a tweet showing her signing legislation while surrounded by women, apparently as a rebuke to the image of Trump signing the Mexico City policy memorandum while surrounded by men.) Canada is also participating in the launch, officials confirm to NPR. Reuters reports that Finland, Luxembourg and Cape Verde have also signed on to the initiative. Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, tells NPR that other countries working to counteract the impact of the policy doesn’t change the key fact, for   groups, of American funds being withdrawn. ”Other countries are free to do what they want,” she says. ”The principle of the matter is that the United States is not endorsing abortion.” The ability of international aid groups to raise funds from other sources, in general, has been mentioned by   groups as a point in favor of the Mexico City policy, as Nurith reported last year. Nonprofit groups, meanwhile, say it’s ”enormously disruptive” to have a funding source cut off suddenly, even if other funds are later available."
963,"It’s President Donald Trump’s first official act on the abortion issue. On Monday, the new president signed a presidential memorandum reinstating the ”Mexico City” policy  —   barring U. S. aid from any group that provides or ”promotes” abortion overseas. The policy dates to 1984, when Ronald Reagan unveiled it at a United Nations Conference in Mexico City. The Trump version is even broader than the incarnations that previous Republican presidents have adopted. What does this mean in practice? To help make sense of it we’ve put together an FAQ. What were the rules on the U. S. funding of international abortion before Trump’s executive action? U. S. law has actually long prohibited the use of U. S. aid dollars to directly pay for abortions overseas. Specifically, in 1973  —   in reaction to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion  —   Congress adopted the   Helms Amendment to the law governing U. S. aid. That provision states that ”no foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” A foreign government or aid group that gets U. S. funding can still provide abortions overseas. But to do so it would have to use money from  . S.  sources. So what, exactly, is the Mexico City policy? The policy, as first implemented by Reagan, went further than the Helms Amendment in two key ways: First, it holds that if a group wants U. S. funding it must promise not to use monies even from other sources to provide abortions. Second, the group must also agree not to ”actively promote” abortion. In practice this has covered not just advocating for laws in favor of abortion rights but informational activities such as providing patients with referrals, counseling or information about the procedure. In contrast to the Helms Amendment, the Mexico City policy does not apply to foreign governments, only to nongovernmental groups that work overseas. So a   medical center could be eligible for U. S. funding even if it were to provide or ”actively promote” abortion. Since Reagan introduced the policy, every time the U. S. presidency has changed party hands, the incoming leader has reversed his predecessor’s position. In what way is President Trump’s version of the policy possibly more expansive?  The original version was specifically limited to family planning aid disbursed by USAID. Trump’s memorandum calls for extending the rules to ”global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies.” How much aid money is at stake? As of this writing, the full implications are not clear. The U. S. spends more than $10 billion annually on global health  —   including $607. 5 million specifically on reproductive health. And it remains to be seen how much of that goes to groups that currently provide or promote abortion as defined by the policy  —   and that would opt to give up U. S. aid dollars rather than falling in line. But opponents of the policy are already warning that many groups will be forced to give up their funding. Adrienne Lee, a spokeswoman for abortion rights advocacy group PAI, says there would be ”devastating” consequences for the impoverished women for whom these groups provide a whole range of health services, including many unrelated to abortion, such as access to contraception. If the consequences to the people they serve are so severe, why wouldn’t these groups just agree to the terms of the policy and keep their funding? Here’s what Allison Marshall, director of advocacy for International Planned Parenthood, one of the largest recipients of U. S. reproductive health aid, has told NPR. She says that even though the group stands to lose about $100 million over a   to   period, complying with the policy would compromise the care it can offer. ”We’d have to stop telling women and girls when they came into our clinic what their options are,” she says. ”And we can’t do that.” What do supporters of the policy say?   groups like the Family Research Council and the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops argue that aid organizations that are willing to comply with the policy will spring up to fill any gaps that result. And they say the policy is needed to ensure that U. S. taxpayers are not supporting abortions overseas. Arina Grossu of the Family Research Council says, ”There’s a fungibility factor. The only way to protect taxpayer money from going for abortion is by reinstating the Mexico City policy.”"
964,"It’s a policy battle that has been playing out over three decades. In 1984,   Ronald Reagan imposed an   rule  —   known as the ”Mexico City policy” after the city where he announced it. The rule blocked federal funding for international family planning charities unless they agreed not to ”promote” abortion by, among other actions, providing patients with information about the procedure or referrals to providers who perform it. Since then, every time the U. S. presidency has changed party hands, the incoming leader has reversed his predecessor’s position on the ban. President Clinton lifted it in 1993. President George W. Bush reinstated it in 2001. And President Obama rescinded it once more in 2009. Will   Trump continue the pattern by reimposing the policy? Trump hasn’t taken a public position thus far. But when it comes to several domestic abortion questions he’s aligned himself squarely with   groups. His pick for vice president, Mike Pence, is a staunch abortion foe  —   as is his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Georgia congressman Tom Price. Trump has also promised to appoint what he’s called ” ” justices to the U. S. Supreme Court, who presumably might favor overturning Roe v. Wade. And he has said he would sign legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and ending federal funding for Planned Parenthood’s U. S. activities. (Those federal funds go toward services that Trump has praised Planned Parenthood for providing, such as birth control and cancer screenings. But he’s said the organization should nonetheless be defunded because it uses other, nonfederal funds to perform abortions at its affiliated health centers.) Based on these stances, when it comes to the Mexico City policy, ”it’s widely expected that President Trump will put it back in place,” says Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of Global Health  HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. At issue is not whether the United States can use foreign aid money to fund abortions overseas. U. S. law has prohibited that since 1973, when Congress adopted the   Helms Amendment. Rather, with the Mexico City policy, President Reagan took that prohibition a step further: He issued an executive order that barred funding for groups that ”perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.” The term ”actively promote” has been defined to include both taking public positions in favor of laws and policies that protect abortion rights as well as informational conversations between health care clinicians and their patients, notes Alison Marshall, director of advocacy for International Planned Parenthood Federation, which stands to lose funding under the ban. ”When a woman or girl  —   and bearing in mind this could be somebody who suffered from   violence or who has been married as a child underage  —   would go to see a health provider it would mean the provider could not talk to them about abortion, could not provide information, could not provide a referral to another provider [to perform an abortion],” says Marshall. And so, she says, each time the policy  —   which opponents have dubbed the ”global gag rule”  —   has been imposed, a large share of the nonprofit groups that work in the field have opted to give up U. S. support. Among   groups, however, there is staunch support for the Mexico City policy. Deirdre McQuade is a spokeswoman for the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is among the   groups urging Trump to reinstate the ban. It ”embodies the modest, widely accepted proposition that abortion is not family planning and should never be promoted as such,” says McQuade. ”Without the Mexico City Policy in place, the U. S. is currently exporting the destruction of life as a solution to challenges faced by families in developing countries. Poor women in developing nations don’t want help aborting their children. They’re calling for food, clean water, housing, education and medicine for their families.” McQuade adds that organizations that provide ”authentic health care services that honor the dignity of poor women and their families,” including screenings for cancer and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, should have no trouble complying with the policy. And groups that choose to give up their federal funding could seek private support, she says. For instance, she contends that when President George W. Bush reinstated the policy, IPPF ”was able to raise millions of dollars from private sources quickly.” Marshall counters that ”it was enormously disruptive because we faced enormous budget cuts very suddenly. And not just for [our group] but for other nonprofit providers, clinics had to be closed, staff had to be laid off. We just weren’t able to offer the family planning services to the women and girls who needed them.” Obama’s reversal of the Mexico City policy was accompanied by a new U. S. focus on women’s reproductive health in poor countries. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, the U. S. budget for the 2016 fiscal year included $607. 5 million in funding for reproductive health internationally, enabling an estimated 27 million couples in poor countries to get access to birth control and preventing about 11, 000 maternal deaths. A large share of that money goes to IPPF. If the Mexico City policy were to be reimposed, Marshall says, the organization would lose about $100 million over a   to   period for services it provides to women in 20 developing countries. These services mainly include care that is not related to abortion. But Marshall says complying with the terms of the Mexico City policy in order to keep U. S. funding is not an option IPPF would consider. ”We’d have to stop telling women and girls when they came into our clinic what their options are,” she says. ”And we can’t do that.” The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment on this article."
965,"Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution, many of our worst infectious diseases didn’t exist. Here’s what changed. With the rise of agriculture, for the first time in history humans were living in close contact with domesticated animals  —   milking them, taking care of them and, of course, eating them. All that touching and sharing gave animal germs plenty of chances to get inside us. Take measles. Researchers think that up until about 5, 000 years ago, it didn’t exist. But its older cousin rinderpest, a cattle disease, did. When humans began spending so much quality time with cows, little rinderpest germs started jumping over into us. And a few of the germs had a mutation that allowed rinderpest to evolve from a cattle disease into measles, a deadly human virus. As if that weren’t bad enough, something else was happening around this time that supercharged the degree of damage this new measles virus could do. It has to do with the magic number of 500, 000. When the world’s first cities hit the   mark, it meant that there were now enough humans living together that measles and other germs had a steady and potentially endless supply of humans to infect. Along with measles, scientists think other nasty diseases such as mumps, diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough all evolved to live permanently in humans around 3, 000 B. C.  But our ancestors had no idea what the problem was  —   or how to fix it. See how humans finally get a clue, in Episode 3, coming Feb. 16. If you missed Episode 1, ”Early Encounters,” here’s your chance to catch up: What do you want to know about pandemics? Share your questions by submitting them in our special tool here. Our global health team will answer some of them in an upcoming story."
966,"Updated at 8 p. m. ET, Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to President Trump, may have violated federal ethics rules Thursday when she urged shoppers to buy Ivanka Trump’s retail brand, following the decision by several retail companies to drop the line because of poor sales. ”Go buy Ivanka’s stuff, is what I was [saying]  —   I hate shopping and I’m going to go get some myself today,” Conway said in an interview on Fox  Friends. ”This is just [a] wonderful line,” she added. ”I’m going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online.” Her comments drew sharp criticism from the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Republican Jason Chaffetz. ”That is absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong. It is over the top,” Chaffetz told reporters. Chaffetz and the committee’s ranking minority member, Democrat Elijah Cummings, asked the U. S. Office of Government Ethics in a letter to determine whether disciplinary action should be brought against Conway. ”Conway’s statements clearly violate the ethical principles for federal employees and are unacceptable,” the letter said. ”In this case, there is an additional challenge, which is that the President, as the ultimate disciplinary authority for White House employees, has an inherent conflict of interest since Conway’s statements relate to his daughter’s private business,” it said. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that Conway had been ”counseled” over her remarks. Conway, interviewed later Thursday, again on Fox, said she would have no comment on the counseling but had ”spent an awful lot of time with the president of the United States this afternoon and he supports me 100 percent.” Federal ethics rules bar executive branch employees from profiting off their positions, but the statute exempts the president. Conway, however, is a White House employee, and her comments urging people to buy the products appear to violate the rules, says Kathleen Clark, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. ”The ethics regulation says government employees must not endorse any product, service or enterprise,” Clark told NPR in an interview. She added: ”The broader rule is that government employees shouldn’t use public office for private gain. They shouldn’t use it for their own personal private gain or for somebody else’s private gain. Public office should be used for the good of the public, for the good of the country, for the good of the government, rather than singling out her boss’s daughter’s enterprise and encouraging people to shop Ivanka.” Clark also noted that Trump’s tweet Wednesday about his daughter was retweeted by someone from the official White House account @POTUS. ”That was a violation of the ethics regulation if it was done by anybody other than the president or the vice president. But even if the president himself did that, it was improper, because there he is using a government resource for his own personal vendetta,” she said. Meanwhile, the progressive group Public Citizen urged the U. S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether Conway’s comments violated the rules. ”Anyone harboring illusions that there was some separation between the Trump administration and the Trump family businesses has had their fantasy shattered,” said Robert Weissman, the organization’s president. ”Kellyanne Conway’s   advertisement for the Ivanka Trump fashion line demonstrates again what anyone with common sense already knew: President Trump and the Trump administration will use the government apparatus to advance the interests of the family businesses.” In the Fox interview, Conway suggested retailers are dropping the line because of politics. ”They’re using her, who’s been a champion for women in power and women in the workplace, to get to him. I think people can see through that,” she said. T. J. Maxx and Marshalls told employees last week to stop using signs promoting Ivanka Trump’s brand and mix in her products with others the store sells to make them less prominent. Nordstrom has also said that it would no longer sell Ivanka Trump jewelry and clothing because sales have been disappointing. Neither the company nor Ivanka Trump’s brand released any sales figures. The line is still carried by other retailers. After Nordstrom’s decision, President Trump himself tweeted that his daughter ”has been treated so unfairly” by the chain, and his son Donald retweeted an article Thursday about angry store customers cutting up their credit cards. It’s not clear how shoppers will react to the clothing controversy. Outside a Marshalls store in Washington, D. C. a housewife from Argentina wasn’t impressed by all the controversy. ”If I like it, I buy it. If I don’t, I don’t,” said Andrea Ponzio, 47. ”It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t buy it because of any politics.” NPR intern Lucia Maffei contributed to this report."
967,"A bit more than a decade ago, President George W. Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, found his credibility in tatters after it became clear he had misled reporters about the leaking of the name of a CIA operative. Even though he arguably had been set up by    White House aides, McClellan resigned some months later. Why? Establishing trust between the White House press secretary and the reporters he or she works with every day is critical. As former Bush speechwriter David Frum tweeted advice for the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer: ”The smart press secretary will remember: He is rationed one lie per career. Use it wisely.” ”So why do it?” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked, urgently, insistently, repeatedly on Sunday. Why send Spicer out there to pick a fight with the press in the first full day of the Trump administration? Why have him make so many easily disproved statements all at once? Todd sought answers in vain on Sunday’s Meet the Press from Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Trump. She suggested that the hostility from reporters may force her to rethink her relationship with the press. Yes, Time magazine reporter Zeke Miller, serving as a pool reporter during a quick visit to the Oval Office, wrongly reported that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. on display during the Obama administration had been removed it hadn’t. Miller retracted the report and apologized publicly, saying his view of the bust had been obstructed. But Spicer and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus argued the incorrect report proved the media’s intentional unfairness to Trump. Conway called that bust bust fake news, as in an intentional hoax by all available evidence, it wasn’t. It appears to have been a reporter’s mistake, and a sloppy one. Would that government officials or Trump aides correct and apologize so promptly for their accelerating number of untrue statements. Take it as a given that the new president doesn’t have thin skin  —   he has no skin at all. Trump proved that once more in his own tirade against reporters at the CIA on Saturday. Trump said journalists had falsely reported a schism between the president and his intelligence services, though Trump himself had earlier compared the agencies’ behavior toward him to the policies of Nazi Germany. And Trump, together with his aides, accused the media of understating crowd sizes, poll numbers and ratings for his inauguration  —   all to allegedly lessen his stature. Many White Houses resemble an extension of their campaigns. This White House has to date made little rhetorical accommodation in the shift to governing. Trump labored to prove his crowds and ratings exceeded those for Obama and for Saturday’s protest marches. This singular campaign endures in office. And I think that accounts for the blasts at the press, even more than the   reactions Trump brings to perceived slights. In the White House as during the campaign, Trump and his top aides attacked the press, attacked dissenters and attacked facts. Each fundamentally serves as an underpinning of democracy. Each attack agitates journalists and delights his most ardent fans. As Todd pointed out, Spicer’s complaints were largely petty: They were about crowd sizes. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace called the White House’s obsession with crowd sizes ”ridiculous.” But it put the press corps on notice in the most public way that the White House would treat it as an adversary  —   just as Trump did during the campaign. It serves to rally his core supporters. It sows confusion among the reporting ranks, as many journalists were sent to   such things as lawn mats and magnetometers. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple argued Sunday on CNN that the Trump strategy is to challenge the small assertions so that it can dispute huge exposés to undercut them. The media cannot afford to overreact. They cannot get lost in the minutiae. And yet reporters also cannot let one falsehood after another fly past unimpeded  —   especially ones that clearly carry such importance inside the Oval Office. McClellan lost his job amid a scandal that involved the invasion of Iraq, personally vouching that White House aides had not disclosed the name of a CIA agent married to a critic of intelligence used to justify the invasion. They had. Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff was ultimately convicted of federal charges. On Saturday, Spicer marched out to mislead reporters and the public about a topic of no real consequence. What he had to say wasn’t plausible from the moment he opened his mouth. It was about the attack, not the substance. CNN did not carry his remarks live, offering a detailed dissection of his misleading and untrue statements afterward. It’s what real reporting looks like (and is a sharp contrast to the long, live broadcasts of Trump’s primary rallies that helped fuel his nomination). Conway, for her part, told NBC’s Todd that Spicer was offering ”alternative facts,” though he did not make an argument based on other evidence but served up untrue information. Whether presidential delusions or strategic lies, these claims were made in the face of   countervailing evidence. But the real action is away from the assertions about crowd size and indeed away from the White House briefing room itself. The press, charged with helping the public make sense of those who govern, should pay close attention."
968,"Ask anyone about his or her health care and you are likely to hear about doctors, hospitals, maybe costs and insurance hassles. Most people don’t go straight from ”my health” to a political debate, and yet that is what our country has been embroiled in for almost a decade. A study published Thursday tries to set aside the politics to look at what makes or breaks health insurance markets in five states. Researchers from the Brookings Institution looked at state markets, thinking that if the goal is to repair or replace the Affordable Care Act with something better, then it would be good to know what worked and what failed. ”The political process at the moment is not generating a conversation about how do we create a better replacement for the Affordable Care Act,” says Alice Rivlin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spearheaded the project. ”It’s a really hard problem, and people with different points of view about it have got to sit down together and say, ’How do we make it work?’ ” The researchers looked at California, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, interviewing state regulators, health providers, insurers, consumer organizations, brokers and others to understand why insurance companies chose to enter or leave markets, how state regulations affected   and how insurers built provider networks. ”Both parties miss what makes insurance exchanges successful,” says Micah Weinberg, president of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, who led the California research team. ”And it doesn’t have anything to do with red and blue states and it doesn’t have anything to do with total government control or free markets.” Despite the political diversity of the five states, some common lessons emerged. Among them: Health insurance markets are local, Insurer competition varied widely within states, with the most dramatic differences between urban and rural areas. The more populated regions tend to have more insurance competition and   plans than rural areas. Fewer people live in rural areas, which means there are fewer hospitals, doctors and other health providers. As a result, insurance companies that do business in those regions have less power to negotiate prices with local providers, who are more likely to be the only game in town. ”Insurance companies don’t make money [in many rural areas] because they can’t cut a deal with the providers that will be attractive to the customers,” Rivlin says. ”And there just aren’t very many customers, so it’s not obvious what to do about that.” Republicans, including the Trump administration, have suggested that the sale of insurance policies across state lines is one way to boost competition. But that may be easier said than done, Rivlin says. ”The insurance companies would still have to have local providers,” she says. ”So a company in New York can’t easily sell in Wyoming unless it has providers lined up in Wyoming.” Consolidation kills competition  Consolidation includes hospitals buying physician practices and large medical centers, and big hospitals buying up smaller hospitals. California offers a prime example of this. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where consolidation has reduced competition among hospitals and physician groups, consumers have fewer choices and higher premiums than those in Los Angeles, where consolidation hasn’t yet gobbled up so many providers. Underestimating demand from sick people really hurt, Insurance companies did not have any idea who would buy policies through the exchanges in the early years. And as it turned out, a lot of those previously uninsured sick people  —   more than insurers and policymakers had expected  —   raced to get coverage. As a result, researchers found, many plans incurred losses, with some companies reporting claims that were 50 to 100 percent greater than the premiums they collected. Making matters worse, a mechanism in the health law to reimburse companies for such losses in the early years proved inadequate. That caused a lot of them to leave the marketplaces. Under Obamacare, insurance companies could no longer deny coverage or charge higher rates to those with   medical conditions. And during the first two years of the exchanges, insurers simply didn’t know how to price their policies because they’d rarely dealt with people who hadn’t been insured before, the researchers found. In Michigan, six of 16 insurers withdrew. And in regions of Texas and North Carolina, which had between five and nine insurers, only three remained. Some consumers may be ”gaming” the system, Three of the states  —   Florida, North Carolina and Texas  —   reported that generous special enrollment rules allowed many consumers to delay enrollment into a plan until they needed health care. And in Michigan and North Carolina, researchers found that some people signed up for a policy, used it, then dumped it when they had received the care they needed. That ended up leaving insurers stuck with expenses and fewer premiums than they’d anticipated. ”The challenge is some of the rules that were set up around the ACA made it easy to game the system, frankly,” says Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who was not involved in the study. Along with tightening the rules around special enrollment periods, Chen says he would like to see a return to   pools for the sickest Americans, the idea being that removing the most costly consumers from the general risk pool will allow carriers to lower premiums for everyone else. But   pools, which a majority of states operated before the ACA, are hugely expensive, Rivlin says. Another solution, she says, might be found by making sure a strong reinsurance mechanism provides payments to insurers that take on more costly customers. Narrow networks appear to be the new normal, By the third year of the exchanges, insurers in all five states are offering more narrow networks on the exchange than the plans that give access to more doctors and hospitals. These smaller networks of providers allow insurers to give more patients to participating providers in exchange for lower prices. But it also means consumers have fewer choices when choosing providers. It’s a trend that started before the Affordable Care Act, and one that appears to be taking hold in nearly every market as insurers search for ways to keep premiums down. The sky may be falling, but many carriers are still doing well  One   chapter in the Obamacare story involves those carriers that are making enough of a profit to reduce 2017 premiums. ”About half the insurers are making a ton of money on [the exchanges] and that’s how markets work,” Weinberg says. ”The idea that there should be winners and losers in a particular marketplace is something that Republicans should certainly feel comfortable with.” Medicaid   plans come out winners  Researchers found that regional insurers that originally went into business to care for those with Medicaid  —   the health insurance for the poor and disabled  —   are filling gaps after insurers fled in many markets. Molina Health in California, WellCare in Florida, Community Health Choice in Texas, ”appear to have thrived in the ACA marketplace environment,” the study says. Rivlin says the success of these plans is likely due to their experience caring for a   often very sick population. They already had   networks of local providers that allow them to provide care at a lower cost. As 2017 premiums went up, consumers became more willing to enroll in these more affordable,   plans. California leads the pack, In the Golden State, which fully embraced all things Affordable Care Act, competition remained stable with 11 insurers offering coverage and only one  —   UnitedHealth  —   dropping out completely. And 2017’s average premium increase, while about 13 percent, was about half of the national average. Part of California’s success, Weinberg says, is due to its   approach in deciding which insurers may join the market. And it got involved in negotiating the price of plans, which helped keep a lid on premiums compared with other states. This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR and Kaiser Health News."
969,"Premiums for Obamacare plans sold by New Mexico Health Connections could rise as little as 7 percent next year, said Martin Hickey, the insurance company’s CEO. Or they might soar as much as 40 percent, he said. It all depends on what happens in Washington. Such is the vast uncertainty about how the Trump administration and   Congress are approaching their promises to repeal, repair and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. There is ”pretty massive confusion,” said Hickey, whose   plan is one of the few nonprofit insurance   created by the ACA to still be in business. ”The more uncertainty they create, the higher the rates” will be for 2018, he said. Insurers have a hard enough time making the normal predictions of who will get sick and how much care will cost. Now the usual fog of rate setting is compounded by the possibility that basic rules of coverage could get overhauled or even disappear before anything takes their place. Consumers and patients could ultimately pay the price. The stakes include how much plans sold through the health law’s online marketplaces and similar coverage will cost in 2018  —   or even whether insurance will be available. Challenges during the recently completed enrollment period, in which some carriers canceled plans and rates rose 20 percent on average, increase the urgency, executives say. ”This is nothing less than a nightmare scenario for the carriers,” said Robert Laszewski, a former insurance executive and consultant who works with large plans. ”The Republicans don’t seem to understand that they’ve got to stabilize the market.” Coverage for 2017, which has already been finalized, won’t change. People covered through   insurance or the private Medicare plans for seniors won’t be much affected by the uncertainty. In some states, preliminary 2018 rates are due in less than two months. But prospects for policymaking clarity recede each day that Republicans deliver contradictory messages or fail to agree on a plan, industry officials say. While some in the party want to go slow on an overhaul and ensure they’ve thought out a replacement before abolishing the health law, others favor immediate repeal. If the administration and Congress scrap the ACA’s coverage requirement for most people or its subsidies helping people buy care, the market could deteriorate or collapse, say insurance consultants and executives. A month ago President Trump told The New York Times that Obamacare is ”a catastrophic event,” adding, ”we have to get to business” in repealing it. On Feb. 5, he seemed to advocate a more measured approach, telling Fox News that ”at least the rudiments” of a replacement would be in place by 2018. Even that could spook insurance executives contemplating plans for next year in the Obamacare marketplaces, also known as exchanges. They want to know the rudiments of a replacement plan now and details not much later. ”I don’t think there’s a real clear path to repeal or replace or repair or anything,” said Kevin G. Fitzgerald, an insurance lawyer with Foley  Lardner. ”Some of our clients will probably move forward on the assumption that something will happen to maintain the exchanges more or less the way they are. Others may pull out early.” Big, national insurers have said it would be hard to commit to the marketplaces next year unless they get a much better idea of what they’ll look like. Several had already scaled back coverage for this year, leaving many parts of the country with only one company selling through the marketplaces. Continued uncertainty could prompt even those holdouts to bail, said Fitzgerald. ”If in those states those carriers decide, ’We’ve lost enough and we’re going to sit this year out,’ there are no exchanges,” he said. ”And that certainly is a possibility.” The Trump administration has proposed regulations, initiated in the last days of the Obama regime, intended to steady the market. Tweaks may include crackdowns on sick consumers who join plans outside   periods and allowing insurers to charge slightly more for older members, Huffington Post and Politico have reported. Those changes  —   plus assumptions that Republicans will eventually have a replacement plan helping Obamacare patients maintain coverage  —   could reassure insurance companies, said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a consulting firm. ”I’m not saying it would be completely ” he said. ”You probably would see some plans get out of the market. But if plans start to believe there’s a   solution, they’re going to want to stay in because getting in and out of the market costs money.” What industry really wants is certainty government will continue helping consumers pay for coverage  —   one of the most contentious and uncertain aspects. For two years the   House of Representatives has legally challenged one type of subsidy  —   federal payments to reduce    costs for   income consumers. The Obama administration defended the subsidies in court, but insurers worry that Trump officials could drop the defense or that a judge could declare the payments illegal. Industry interest in the suit ”is incredibly high,” said Todd Van Tol, a partner with Oliver Wyman, a consultancy with many insurers as clients. The disappearance of those subsidies, he said, ”would likely trigger a fairly significant insurer pullback in fairly rapid order.” Even the most publicly minded insurers might cease offering individual Obamacare plans if an uncertain market threatened their financial stability, said Ceci Connolly, CEO of the Alliance of Community Health Plans, a trade group of nonprofit carriers. ”We want to be able to do this, but if there’s potential for significant losses it would be irresponsible to maybe do it,” she said. ”There seems to be a growing recognition of the challenge ahead and also the need for stability, but boy  —   this clock is coming up fast.” Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. You can follow Jay Hancock on Twitter: @jayhancock1."
970,"Updated at 2:49 p. m. ET, An Arizona woman who has lived in the U. S. for more than two decades was arrested Wednesday night after her regular   with immigration officials and has been deported to Mexico. She was sent to Nogales, Mexico, on Thursday, reports Katherine Fritcke of member station KJZZ. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos’ deportation  —   which has been protested by dozens of activists, some of whom were arrested late Wednesday  —   is a glimpse of how immigration enforcement is changing under the Trump administration. She had had a deportation order against her for several years but was not considered a priority for deportation during the Obama administration. But two weeks ago, President Trump issued an executive order changing deportation priorities Garcia de Rayos is believed to be one of the first people deported under that expanded enforcement. The New York Times reports that Garcia de Rayos, now 35, was just 14 when she ”sneaked across the border” from a poor district in Mexico into southern Arizona. Her lawyer tells Fritcke that she missed the cutoff for DACA status by four months. Garcia de Rayos married a man who is also in the country illegally, and they had two children, who are U. S. citizens. In 2008, Garcia de Rayos was arrested while she was working at a water park, during a raid carried out by   County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio’s workplace raids have been challenged in court as unconstitutional the case is ongoing.) In 2009, she was convicted of possessing false papers. In 2013, ICE says, an order for her deportation was finalized. But Garcia de Rayos was allowed to continue to live in Arizona, under supervision and with regular   with ICE, as member station KJZZ reports. You may remember that former President Barack Obama instructed the Department of Homeland Security to prioritize some deportations over others. He told immigration authorities to focus on people in the country illegally who were convicted of certain kinds of crimes  —   including aggravated felonies, terrorism or gang activity. Crimes directly related to immigration status weren’t a priority, he said. In 2014, Obama said the goal was to deport felons, criminal and gang members, ”not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” (Obama still deported more people than any previous U. S. president, and last year The Marshall Project reported that most of those deportations involved people with no criminal conviction or whose only conviction was  .) But on Jan. 25, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the secretary of homeland security to ”prioritize for removal” anyone in the country illegally who has been convicted of, or even just charged with, any criminal offense. That’s ”far broader” than Obama’s system, as The Atlantic reported. Garcia de Rayos realized the situation had changed when she walked into the ICE offices for her   on Wednesday. The Times reports that an activist suggested she could go into into hiding or find refuge at a church, but she ”decided to face the odds.” ”The only crime my mother committed was to go to work to give a better life for her children,” Garcia de Rayos’ teenage daughter said, according to the Times. Then Garcia de Rayos and her lawyer entered the building, as supporters gathered outside the building. They waited for hours. In the evening, a van attempted to drive away from the ICE office. Immigration activists identified Garcia de Rayos inside and sat on the ground around the vehicle,   the confrontation on Facebook. Several of the protesters were arrested. The group of demonstrators blocked the van’s movement for a while, but it later left the ICE office through a different route. On Thursday, Garcia was deported. Her daughter Jacqueline spoke at a press conference Thursday. ”To me it’s sad, seeing what this world has come to, seeing that this world has so much hate,” she said. ”Seeing my mom in that van, it’s unexplainable.”"
971,"Tuesday was a busy day for education policy. Betsy DeVos, you may have heard, was confirmed as secretary of education with an unprecedented tiebreaker vote. The House of Representatives also voted to throw out a lot of rules that were decided on just last year. These rules tell states how to comply with the new federal education law with regard to identifying and improving underperforming schools, as well as evaluating   programs in higher education. And Rep. Thomas Massie,  a Republican representing Kentucky’s 4th District, introduced a bill in the House as well. Here is the text of that bill, in full: ”The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.” Speculation about DeVos and what her leadership might bring has generated millions of clicks this week. For insight on these other two developments, I called up David Schoenbrod. He’s a professor at New York Law School and the author of several books about the congressional role in crafting law and regulation. Spoiler alert: The Education Department is unlikely to be eliminated, particularly by a bill that declines to specify who or what would take over its $68 billion annual budget and the functions of data collection, oversight, civil rights enforcement and student aid, among others. ”Whatever you think about the Department of Education, the idea you could eliminate it with a   bill is just posturing,” Schoenbrod says. ”Posturing is not something that’s just done by Democrats or by Republicans. It’s done by both.” This issue is personal for Schoenbrod. Back in the 1970s, Schoenbrod was staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, fighting for Congress to ban lead in gasoline  —   which made its way into air, water and the bloodstreams of children with harmful and deadly effect. Because legislators did not specify a timeline or a mechanism, he argues, enforcement was delayed by a decade. ”They voted for the symbolism but didn’t want to take responsibility for how it was done,” Schoenbrod says. In the field of environmental law, this form of kicking the can down the road is known as ”symbolic legislation.” The fate of these regulations, part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, is a slightly different matter. But it’s also something that Schoenbrod has experience with. The House is invoking an obscure power granted by something called the Congressional Review Act. As our colleagues at Planet Money recently explained, this 1996 law gives Congress the power to nullify any regulation passed in the last 60 days, with the president’s signoff. This basically comes into play only when there is a changeover of government, as we have now. President Trump has already paused the implementation of these ESSA rules, and the White House has reportedly said that he will sign the revocation if it passes the Senate. Will it? The lead senator on education issues is Lamar Alexander. The Tennessee Republican chairs the powerful committee that handles education. His office declined to say what he might do, but referred us to the public statements he made when these rules were finalized. He didn’t like the   one. On accountability, he said, ”I will carefully review this final version before deciding what action is appropriate.” Noted. Schoenbrod has long advocated for requiring Congress to vote on the details of how laws are implemented. ”The Constitution was against taxation or regulation without representation,” he argues. But the Congressional Review Act as it now exists is different. It just gives Congress the power to throw the rules out, not the responsibility for making new ones. In this case, if the House bill passes the Senate and receives the president’s signature, it will then be up to the states to decide how to fulfill ESSA when it comes to defining, and correcting, schools that consistently perform below expectations. This ”could disrupt the progress states have made over the past year to transition to ESSA,” says Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, ”unless the U. S. Department of Education acts quickly and provides states with the clarity they need around the implementation of the law.” Given the upheaval, most states will wait until September of this year to submit their final accountability plans, which will be unlikely to go into effect until the   school year, says Jeremy Anderson, president of the Education Commission of the States. Making their own policy, rather than simply enforcing federal rules, would be ”a big heavy lift for the states. It’s a totally different mindset.”"
972,"Updated at 3:20 p. m. ET  President Trump started the day by blasting a Democratic senator who revealed criticism of Trump from his nominee to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Judge Neil Gorsuch told Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal that he found President Trump’s recent attacks on judges to be ”demoralizing” and ”disheartening.” Gorsuch made the comments during a private meeting, and a member of the Supreme Court nomination team escorting Gorsuch through the   meetings also confirmed the remarks to NPR’s Tamara Keith. Even though Gorsuch’s team confirmed the comments, Trump says they were ”mischaracterized.” He also attacked Blumenthal for exaggerating his military service. While running for Senate in 2010, he was discovered to have falsely said that he had served in Vietnam. Blumenthal described his meeting with Gorsuch on Wednesday by telling reporters, ”He certainly expressed to me that he is disheartened by the demoralizing and abhorrent comments made by President Trump about the judiciary.” Gorsuch has been meeting with senators in preparation for confirmation hearings. Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska revealed even stronger comments by Gorsuch when they met. ”He got pretty passionate,” Sasse told MSNBC on Thursday. ”He said, ’Any attack on any of’  —   I think his word to me was  —   ’brothers or sisters of the robe is an attack on all judges. ’” Trump’s attacks on the judiciary are highly unusual for a sitting president. Gorsuch has been a member of that branch of government as a federal judge since 2006. Senators will be considering whether he will remain independent should he be on the Supreme Court. Trump began his latest attack last Friday with tweets disparaging federal Judge James L. Robart, who temporarily blocked the president’s ban on immigrants from seven   countries. Trump first called Robart a ”  judge,” called his ruling ”a terrible decision,” and then suggested Robart would be responsible if a terrorist attack should occur. At the Thursday afternoon press briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer doubled down on the assertion that Gorsuch wasn’t specifically talking about Trump’s tweet about the ” ” Judge Robart, pointing to a statement from former Sen. Kelly Ayotte,  . H. who is helping Gorsuch. ”The judge was very clear that he was not commenting on a specific matter,” Spicer asserted, though it’s unclear why the Supreme Court nominee would bring up criticism of judges unless to talk about the president’s recent statements that did just that. And the statements also contradict Sasse’s account of their talk. On Tuesday, three judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments about whether to lift Robart’s temporary block on the president’s executive order. Wednesday morning, Trump switched his attack to them, or at least one of them whom he did not name. The president told a gathering of chiefs of police and sheriffs that he doesn’t understand how any judge could rule against him. ”And I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I won’t call it biased. And we haven’t had a decision yet. But courts seem to be so political and it would be great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right,” Trump said. The statement Trump referred to is the federal law granting a president authority to restrict who enters the United States. Trump’s attack on Blumenthal refers back to a controversy during the senator’s 2010 campaign. The New York Times uncovered at the time that Blumenthal said at a 2008 event honoring veterans and service members, ”We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam.” Except Blumenthal had received several deferments from going to Vietnam, and served in the Marine reserves, though not overseas. Blumenthal later apologized and said he meant to say, ”I served during Vietnam.” Blumenthal responded to Trump’s tweet in an interview on CNN, and Trump was apparently watching. The president sent out another tweet falsely claiming CNN didn’t ask Blumenthal about the controversy over his military record. Jessica Taylor contributed."
973,"This is day six without police patrolling the streets in Espirito Santo, a state in southern Brazil. And hundreds of army troops have not been able to quell a spasm of deadly violence there that has reportedly killed more than 100 people. ”This is happening because the state’s police are  —   in effect  —   on strike because their family and friends are blocking access to their stations, in a protest over low pay and poor conditions,” NPR’s Philip Reeves reports from Rio de Janeiro. Police are prevented by law from striking themselves, according to the Wall Street Journal. ”Espirito Santo is generally seen as a safe, and fairly quiet, place   compared to Brazil’s big violent cities,” Philip says. But now, ”schools and shops are shut, and some residents are saying they’re too frightened to leave their homes.” The governor has requested hundreds of additional federal army troops to try to regain control. A spokeswoman for the police union told Reuters that the homicide rate now stands at six times the state’s daily average. In addition to the murders, ”merchants say some 250 stores have been sacked” and ”video has captured shootings and robberies in broad daylight on city streets,” the Journal reports. The state retailer association estimates the chaos has cost local businesses about $28. 87 million since the start of the crisis, according to Reuters. Brazil is in the middle of a major economic recession  —   as we’ve reported, it’s the worst in generations. That’s likely a root cause of this current lawlessness, according to the Journal. The state government ”has aggressively cut spending to offset lower commodity prices” and the shutdown of four   processing plants ”has exacerbated the budget woes.” Meanwhile, there are rising concerns that the breakdown of law enforcement could spread to other cities. ”If we don’t tackle this   it will be here today and across Brazil tomorrow,” Espírito Santo Gov. Paulo Hartung told reporters, according to the Journal. ”We need a lot of cohesion and firmness.”"
974,"Thousands more troops and billions more dollars are needed to break the war in Afghanistan out of a ”stalemate,” the top U. S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress on Thursday. Army Gen. John Nicholson also told the Senate Armed Services Committee that outside powers have increased their meddling in Afghanistan over the past year, especially Russia, in ways that make it tougher for the U. S.  government in Kabul to make and keep gains against insurgents. That’s why the U. S. and its allies must send more troops and spend more money to help the Afghan military become more effective at attacking and defeating its enemies and keeping control of the ground they capture. ”Offensive capability is what will break the stalemate in Afghanistan,” Nicholson said. He did not detail exactly how many additional troops are needed. The general’s testimony launched America’s     war back onto front pages. The conflict has been going badly but has been largely overshadowed by the historic presidential campaign and inauguration of President Trump. The new administration’s policy on Afghanistan is a question mark it seldom came up during the election. When Trump visited the military headquarters at U. S. Central Command responsible for the war on Monday, he did not mention it. Nicholson’s high profile warnings to Congress on Thursday put Afghanistan back at the top of the agenda for Trump and national security adviser Mike Flynn. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain,  . complained bitterly Thursday that the deadlock Nicholson described was the fault of former President Barack Obama. In 2012, Obama decided to settle for ”Afghan good enough,” leading to a steady withdrawal of American combat troops. There are still more than 13, 000 NATO troops  —   including 8, 400 U. S. service members  —   deployed to Afghanistan, but McCain said he’s been warning all along that the force is too small. What Nicholson called a stalemate, McCain said, ”was predicted  —   predicted  —   by those of us who know something about warfare.” Afghanistan is dealing with many of its same longstanding problems. Its weak, often shambolic central government cannot survive without heavy international financial support. Its military, which Nicholson said is improving, cannot win decisively against insurgents in key places or contested ground  —   and takes such heavy combat losses that it cannot get up to its full authorized strength. Nicholson urged Congress to increase support for Afghanistan’s U. S.  and trained air force, which he said would help it turn the tide. Even so, the Taliban’s leaders can still repair to their safe havens in the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan. They enjoy protection from the criminal Haqqani Network in places such as Quetta, out of the reach of major U. S. combat power. Some challenges are new, however: Iran has begun to support the Taliban in Western Afghanistan, Nicholson said, and it’s also recruiting Shiite Afghans to join its campaigns against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, ISIS also wants to spread roots inside Afghanistan itself. The Kabul government is fighting a nascent ISIS presence as it also fights the Taliban, but Nicholson said Russia has begun claiming that isn’t so. Moscow has begun ”a public effort to legitimize the Taliban,” Nicholson said, that is aimed at undermining Kabul among its own citizens and warning neighboring countries that ISIS could spill over into their nations as it did in the Levant. ”This is a false narrative,” Nicholson told senators. He alluded to ”reports” about Russia supporting the Taliban directly. Later, he added: ”I believe its intent is to undermine the United States and NATO.” He pointed out that U. S. and Afghan forces have killed a number of ISIS leaders in Afghanistan, as well as terror bosses from   who continue to use ungoverned spaces there to plot attacks as they did before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The counterterror mission is working, Nicholson said. That has the troops, drones and resources needed. But he said the U. S. and NATO need to send more troops to continue training Afghanistan’s regular troops, so they can resist the Taliban’s attacks, keep control of territory and reverse the ”stalemate.”"
975,"Updated on Feb. 10 at 1:40 p. m. ET. If President Trump were to call a meeting of his Cabinet today, he wouldn’t need a very big table. Or, he’d have to invite a bunch of Obama administration holdovers serving temporarily in acting roles. With the Senate’s confirmation this week of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Tom Price to lead Health and Human Services, Trump now has just seven members of his Cabinet confirmed. By this point in 2009, President Obama had 12 Cabinet members in place and President George W. Bush had his entire   Cabinet. The Senate confirmation process has been unusually slow. According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office, Trump has the fewest Cabinet secretaries confirmed at this point in his presidency than any other president at least since World War II. ”You can’t play in the Super Bowl if you don’t have your team on the field,” said Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that is tracking the Trump administration’s progress in getting staffed up. ”They are in the Super Bowl,” Stier said of the Trump administration. ”They are running the most important organization on the planet, and they don’t have their team on the field. They don’t have their critical people in place and that’s vital to being able to do their jobs appropriately.” The Trump administration would like to place the blame firmly on Democrats in the Senate. ”It would help if the Democrats weren’t working overtime to unnecessarily block our very qualified nominees so that we could put leadership in place at each of the agencies,” said White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an email. But that is only part of the story. Facing pressure from an activated base, Democrats have   Trump’s nominees. In remarks on the Senate floor, Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York described Trump’s nominees as ”a historically unqualified Cabinet.” Trump went with a number of picks who had little or no experience in the agencies they would be tasked to run. In some cases the nominees actively worked against the missions of the agencies. Another thing that slowed down the process: Candidates for Cabinet posts are typically   working with the Office of Government Ethics to identify and unwind potential conflicts of interest before their names are even announced. But that didn’t happen this time. Two   picks still haven’t completed that process. And that’s only talking about the very top level. ”There are an extraordinary number of appointed positions that require Senate confirmation that the Trump administration has yet to even name somebody on,” said University of Akron political science professor David B. Cohen. ”I mean, we’re talking about almost 700 key positions.” So far just 35 have been named, says Stier of the Partnership for Public Service. ”If they don’t focus on getting great people in place that understand how to use government effectively,” he says, ”they won’t get done what they say they want to do and they won’t respond well to the crises that will inevitably come up on their watch.” But Trump is about on pace with Obama in terms of naming people for those spots, and even ahead of other previous presidents. Stier says vacancies near the top of agencies are undesirable but certainly aren’t unheard of. In 2009, he says, the Treasury Department didn’t get its No. 2 official confirmed until May  —   which he wants to make clear was a very bad thing, in the midst of the financial crisis. A White House official tells NPR the administration is not behind in picking undersecretaries and deputies, pointing to the past two administrations where many   appointments didn’t happen until late February or March."
976,"For all the talk of Hollywood smut rotting the moral fabric of society, it’s worth noting that, when the public demanded the industry embrace a franchise whose only claim to fame was smut, it chose instead to keep things  . Fifty Shades of Grey, the first book in E. L. James’s massively popular trilogy of   erotica that began life as Twilight fanfiction, gave Universal Pictures a golden ticket to push the boundaries of sex in mainstream cinema. Lord knows the fanbase wasn’t clamoring for the story. Yet when Sam  ’s adaptation hit theaters in 2015, it submitted too much: to studio insistence not to push the film past an R rating to James’s limp, insipid plotting (though not, blessedly, to her grotesque ear for dialogue) and, ironically for a movie whose pivotal scene is a contract negotiation, to a stipulation in lead Jamie Dornan’s contract that the audience would never see laconic ubermensch Christian Grey’s  . In short, the film was impotent. Now the contracts are out again for the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, and they must have been   because it was filmed    with a concluding entry set to hit theaters next year. Dornan and Dakota Johnson, as the   now corrupted college grad Anastasia Steele, have returned, as have their mostly nude bodies  —   beholden to the same magic camera keeping her parts on full display while leaving his out of frame. But   is out, having reached a creative impasse with James that was likely far more emotionally intense than the chemistry between Johnson and Dornan. In her place is James Foley, whose varied filmography includes relevant romance thrillers like Fear and After Dark, My Sweet as well as Glengarry Glen Ross, another film about folks desperate to, shall you say, get down to business. The second film is marginally better than the first, because it’s marginally kinkier. Whereas in more innocent times Ana ran out on her billionaire beau as soon as he exposed her to his whipping side, here she lets him guide her (and us) to far more insidious activities, including a bit with beads at a masked ball recalling the far smarter recent arthouse hit The Handmaiden. True deviance may remain outside the range of shades visible to this franchise, but at least Foley gets to shoot these escapades coherently, without the endless   and   that flogged the first entry’s attempts to titillate. (We still have to make do with Johnson’s parade of arched backs and flabbergasted   as our only roadmap of the actual dirty deeds, but hey, it beats hearing about Ana’s ”inner goddess. ”) After walking out on her man at the end of the previous film with a gesture that redefined ”anticlimactic,” Ana has landed an assistant job at a Seattle indie publisher. But she slowly allows herself to be pulled back into Christian’s orbit, once the businessman makes clear he no longer has any interest in the dominance contract he spent the entire first movie pestering her to sign. As Ana lets Christian back into her life, despite her efforts to maintain her stature as an independent woman, she can’t put a cork on his need to dominate her every move: The man deposits large sums into her bank account without permission, has his company buy hers to give himself power over her place of work, and provides her with an endless wardrobe of   designers for the aforementioned masquerade. Even when she fends off her boss’s advances and takes his place as the publisher’s fiction editor, she only does so with Christian’s aid: one male CEO calls another, and suddenly the young woman’s sexual harassment horror story can be believed. These tweakings of relationship power dynamics are intriguing, especially once Ana internalizes all this and still chooses to venture into her boyfriend’s infamous ”Red Room” herself. But the film soon sidelines them for a    look into Christian’s past, a. k. a. ”Why am I turned on by weird stuff? There must be a simple psychological reason.” All the burn marks on his chest, the entirely unconvincing moans he makes in his sleep (Dornan remains as charismatic as an ironing board)  —   they point to a childhood characterized by paternal abuse, an addict mother who died young, and an icy older friend who saw fit to molest him as a teenager, thereby informing his lifelong approach to women. This   Elena Lincoln, is given the obvious nickname ”Mrs. Robinson,” and is played with a small flicker of Anne   camp by Kim Basinger. ”He needs a submissive in life, not just in the bedroom,” she growls at Ana, words of true emotional heft if ever any existed. Mixing elegance with filth onscreen is not an easy feat, and production designer Nelson Coates is to be commended for deftly balancing both. The   silliness of a masked ball blends with the infantilizing sensation of doing the nasty on your man’s childhood bed the   wonders of a boat sailing through Puget Sound clashes with the full, lurid kink arsenal of the Red Room. But none of this can cover up the essential thinness of James’s books, already stretched like gruel by the halfway point, when the narrative starts sagging uncontrollably. (The screenwriter this   Niall Leonard, is James’s husband.) False dramas perk up, then fade away. One of Christian’s former submissives (Bella Heathcote) appears, then vanishes, to demonstrate how this bad boy drove all his old lovers mad. A death scare in a helicopter is far too silly to be anything other than a  . This series, we are learning, is not truly for adults. If it were, we could do away with the     tendencies more common among the   book adaptations (like, er, Twilight). So Darker, like its predecessor, barely qualifies as a movie. But it’s not meant to be a movie, is it? What we have is   softcore: Story of O with a Taylor Swift theme song. And while the sequel may be dirtier than the first one, in the world this series seeks to inhabit, it’s still child’s play. Perhaps Fifty Shades Freed will venture even more into the world of smut, but the good money’s on Universal getting out of the game without fully giving into its inner goddess. Might as well hang up the whips now."
977,"President Trump met with airline executives on Thursday morning and had a message they were happy to hear, vowing to roll back regulations, lower corporate taxes and modernize the air traffic control system. Trump said his private pilot, ”a real expert” and a ”smart guy,” has told him that the government has been buying the wrong type of equipment in its   effort to upgrade the current control system. He said U. S. airports ”used to be the best, now they’re at the bottom of the rung.” He also said there are no fast trains in the U. S. ”but if you go to China, you go to Japan, they have fast trains all over the place.” The Obama administration pushed to invest in   rail in the U. S. but was met with resistance from Congress and several state governors. Trump said the U. S. has an obsolete ”plane system, obsolete airports, obsolete trains, we have bad roads,” vowing his administration will change all that. ”You’re going to be so happy with Trump,” the president said. Airline CEOs have long expressed frustration with the country’s airports, an airline expert told NPR’s David Schaper ahead of Thursday’s meeting. ”Airlines have been voicing complaints for a long time about the taxes their passengers pay and infrastructure falling behind, you know, but today’s meeting is a little unprecedented,” Joe Schwieterman of DePaul University said. [They’ll] actually have a new president’s ear who’s made some comments that he’s willing to think big.” The president reiterated past remarks that the U. S. has spent trillions in the Middle East and ”got nothing”  —   not even ”a little tiny oil well.”  Trump also announced he would unveil his tax reform plans in the next two or three weeks, vowing, ”It will be phenomenal.”"
978,"Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrives Thursday in Washington for talks on Friday with Donald Trump, an effort by this longtime Asian ally to get a better read on the way forward with the unpredictable new U. S. president. The trip comes just a week after the Trump administration made its first appearance overseas. U. S. Defense Secretary James Mattis traveled to South Korea and Japan to reassure them of the security alliance between the U. S. and the Pacific countries. ”We had very candid, frank, but very warm discussions,” Mattis said. He struck a friendly tone with leaders in Japan and South Korea and his   positions diverged from Trump’s comments during the campaign, when he criticized the amount Tokyo pays for hosting some 50, 000 U. S. troops. ”Why don’t they pay 100 percent?” Trump said last August. ”Japan has been a model of   of burden sharing,” Mattis said. He also played down the possibility of any U. S. military action over contested islands in the East and South China seas, saying issues should be ”left up to the diplomats.” ”I don’t see any reason right now to think we cannot maintain stability in the   region, especially with China,” Mattis said. While Mattis was making his   trip, his boss, President Trump, was criticizing Japan in the press and on Twitter. In an interview, Trump accused Japan of manipulating its currency to help its exports, and took aim at Japanese carmaker Toyota for planning to build a plant in Mexico. ”There’s always this thing in the Trump team of the good cop and the bad cop. Mattis is the good cop and Trump can be the bad cop, so maybe it’s all for theater. Who knows?” says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Tokyo’s Sophia University. ”Trump tweets something and the whole conditions are going to change. So we are getting into a situation that is really not accountable. Trump is not held accountable to anybody in any significant way at the moment.” Japan denies deliberately devaluing its currency, the yen. Abe said ahead of his Washington trip that he would explain Japan’s monetary policy in this week’s talks. It’s part of a summit that’s expected to be heavy on trade issues. ”What Abe has to impress [on] President Trump is basically money, basically jobs. We in Japan will invest X amount of money in the U. S. as long as you have our back in Asia. You have our back against North Korea, you have our back against China,” says William Pesek, the   editor of Barron’s Asia. To get the security Japan wants, Abe will present a package of ideas for investing as much as $150 billion into U. S. infrastructure, including   rail projects. President Trump made improving infrastructure a key campaign pledge. ”We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports. That, believe me, folks, is what our country deserves,” Trump said in a speech last August, But some of Abe’s ideas are expected to be projects that are a tough sell in the U. S. Trump may want to see   rail, but buyers in American states and cities are skeptical. ”Americans have never been all that interested in   rail,” Pesek says. ”This is a repackaging of what we’ve seen before. There’s nothing new or innovative here. What’s different is you have a very transactional government now in the U. S. You have a transactional [Japanese] prime minister, and it will be interesting to see the extent to which they can strike deals.” The   will be conducted in a traditional setting  —   at the White House  —   but will move on to Trump’s private golf resort in Palm Beach, Fla. That’s where the two leaders are expected to continue their discussions over a round of golf."
979,"With the Dakota Access Pipeline now cleared to cross under a reservoir in the Missouri River, one of the two Native American tribes fighting the pipeline has filed a legal challenge to the plan, according to the Associated Press. The Cheyenne River Sioux ”filed a legal challenge in federal court in Washington, D. C. on Thursday,” the AP says. Along with the Standing Rock Sioux, the tribe has taken a stand against the pipeline on the grounds that it poses a risk to their water supply and would infringe on sacred land. The move comes one day after Energy Transfer Partners, the builders of the pipeline, formally received an easement from the Army Corps of Engineers. That prompted the company to start drilling beneath Lake Oahe, the reservoir in the heart of the disputed area. ETP spokeswoman Vicki Granado says the company expects to complete work in that portion of the pipeline within two months  —   and that it could be in service within three months. The pipeline consists of some 1, 172 miles of   diameter pipe that will carry crude oil from North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois. As NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported this week, the Army’s public statements about the pipeline changed markedly after President Trump was inaugurated: ”In a Jan. 18 notice published in the Federal Register the Army had said it would accept public comments on the project through Feb. 20, still nearly two weeks away. ”On Jan. 24, President Trump signed a memorandum encouraging the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the review and approval process, and last week the Army said that it had been directed to expedite its review of the route.” After the Army Corps of Engineers granted the easement, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s chairman, Harold Frazier, issued a statement that promised to carry on the legal fight. ”It is clear that the coyotes which have been hiding in the shadows are taking advantage of this full lunacy,” Frazier wrote. ”We will have to renew our fight and spend more of our precious resources resisting this onslaught yet again.” The heated dispute over the pipeline has resulted in   at its proposed path  —   along with a campaign calling for people and public entities to cut ties with the banks that are funding the pipeline project. As we reported Wednesday, that campaign led two cities  —   Seattle, Wash. and Davis, Calif.  —   to pull more than $3 billion in annual business from Wells Fargo."
980,"Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says the U. S. needs to ”do a better job to vet” residents of seven   countries that the Trump administration has temporarily banned from entering the U. S. In an interview with Morning Edition host Rachel Martin, the retired Marine Corps general said the ban, which has been blocked by a district court order that is now being reviewed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ”is not based on religion in any way.” He said the seven countries  —   Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Somalia, Libya and Yemen  —   are unable to vet their citizens and ”provide us with information that we’re comfortable with.” Kelly said the administration is considering requiring residents of the seven countries to provide lists of the websites they’ve visited and their passwords, to enable officials ”to get on those websites to see what they’re looking at.” Kelly said some of the other ”ballpark things” that his department is considering include looking at applicants’ social media use ”to see what they tweet,” as well as financial information and cellphone contacts so that officials can check the numbers against databases kept by the U. S. and the European Union. Kelly took the blame for the rocky rollout of the travel ban, and as he said in a hearing on Tuesday, he admitted he should have prepared congressional leaders ahead of the policy’s implementation. He told NPR that in the future he will tell administration officials, ”OK, give that to me and I will roll it out and I will tell you how I’m going to do it.” Kelly said the rollout will include notification to select members of Congress and the press. Kelly showed a willingness to work with the news media that has not been evident from some other members of the Trump administration. It is ”very important to engage the press,” he told NPR, ”because if you engage the responsible press, they will help you write an accurate story.” It may ”not be the story you want,” Kelly said, ”but it will be an accurate story.” Kelly said ”the great success” of the U. S. has been people from diverse backgrounds coming here ”following every kind of religion,” or ”not following any religion at all.” Asked about President Trump’s comments that his promised border wall was ”getting designed right now,” Kelly said he is traveling to the Southwest this week to speak with Customs and Border Protection agents. He said those he has spoken with so far have asked for a barrier they can see through so they can react quicker. ”You can’t build it all at once,” he said, but the administration is deciding ”where to put it immediately given financing” and construction capacity. Kelly said any wall ”has to be backed up by people, and it has to be reinforced, if you will, by technology.” As the former commander of U. S. Southern Command, Kelly said it ”breaks my heart” when he hears about people from Central America who have lost their lives trying to enter the country: ”It’s a humanitarian thing to me to somehow create an environment that deters them from leaving.” Kelly said the U. S. ”has a moral responsibility” to help people in those nations economically, with investment. He also said the drug demand in the U. S. is creating most of the problems in countries to the south, and even ”if we don’t care about” drug use here, ”we ought to care about what it does to other countries.”"
981,"Luther Strange will go from being Alabama’s attorney general to being the state’s junior senator, as Gov. Robert Bentley says he will appoint Strange to the seat vacated by Sen. Jeff Sessions  —   who’s slated to be sworn in as the new U. S. attorney general Thursday morning. ”I am greatly honored and humbled to accept the appointment to Alabama’s Senate seat vacated by Senator Jeff Sessions,” Strange said in a news release from the governor’s office. ”Senator Sessions’ commitment to public service is nearly unparalleled in Alabama history and his departure from the Senate leaves tremendous shoes to fill.” In choosing Strange, Bentley is making the pick many had expected. But the situation has also been a topic of talk both inside and outside of Alabama, because Strange has worked on several prominent legal cases  —   including an inquiry into allegations that Bentley had an affair with an aide and possibly used state funds to either facilitate the relationship or cover it up. Those allegations led to an effort to impeach the governor last year  —   an effort that was put on hold in November at the request of Strange, who said his office was conducting its own investigation. A special election to choose the permanent holder of Sessions’ vacated Senate seat will take place in 2018. Bentley and Strange are planning to address the media at 10 a. m. ET Thursday, the governor’s office says. Strange ”is expected to be a conservative voice in the Senate much like his predecessor,” NPR’s Debbie Elliott says. ”He’s chairman of the Republican Attorneys General Association, and has been active in   fights against federal environmental regulations, Obamacare and transgender bathroom directives.” Strange filed Alabama’s appeal against federal court rulings that made   marriage legal nationwide  —   although the state’s chief justice at the time, Roy Moore, was the most outspoken public critic of that change. In addition, Strange served as the   coordinating counsel for the Gulf Coast states in the litigation and   settlement stemming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Both Strange and Bentley were first elected in 2010. There have been calls for Bentley’s resignation since last March, when allegations of an affair were made by the recently fired head of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. As Debbie reported last spring, ”Bentley, who is 73, denies a physical affair. But he has admitted to making inappropriate remarks to his    former senior political adviser, Rebekah Caldwell Mason. And tape recordings of those conversations have been made public.”"
982,"The Senate has confirmed President Trump’s nominee Jeff Sessions to be the next attorney general, bringing an end to a bitter confirmation fight that has dredged up past accusations of racism against the Alabama senator. The vote was largely along party lines,   with only centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia voting yes. Sessions himself voted ”present” on his own nomination. During the past month, Democrats have brought up the past allegations of racism against Sessions, which sank his nomination by President Ronald Reagan three decades ago to be a federal judge. The  . S. attorney admitted he had made insensitive remarks and called some top civil rights groups such as the ACLU ” .” In his confirmation hearing, Sessions pushed back, saying that his comments were taken out of context. ”I did not harbor the kind of animosities and   discrimination ideas I was accused of. I did not,” Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee, though he admitted that, ”I didn’t know how to respond and didn’t respond very well” during his first failed confirmation. However, his nomination had drawn some strong and unprecedented rebukes from his colleagues across the aisle. Sen. Elizabeth Warren,  . was formally silenced by the Senate after she read a letter Coretta Scott King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1986 objecting to Sessions’ ultimately unsuccessful nomination to the federal bench. The unusual rebuke came because of a rule barring senators from using ”any form of words impute to another Senator.” Last month, Sen. Cory Booker,  . J. became the first sitting senator ever to testify against a fellow senator’s confirmation, arguing he has concerns regarding Sessions’ commitment to defending minorities, the LGBT community and voting rights. Rep. John Lewis,  . the legendary civil rights leader with whom Trump got into a spat just before his inauguration, also testified against Sessions. Sessions is the former Alabama attorney general and was first elected to the Senate in 1996. He is one of the most conservative senators in the GOP conference and has been an outspoken opponent of illegal immigration. It was that shared worldview that led Sessions to become the first senator to endorse the billionaire real estate mogul back in February 2016. One of Sessions’ former top aides, Stephen Miller, left his office to work for Trump’s campaign and is now a senior White House adviser for policy who has had a heavy hand in crafting many recent executive orders. With Sessions’ confirmation, Trump will have one of his closest allies at the Justice Department at a critical time when the president needs help defending his controversial immigration and travel ban in the courts. Last month Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, after she announced she would not defend his executive order on immigration, replacing her with Dana Boente, the top federal prosecutor in suburban Virginia. Now, Sessions will assume the role of overseeing the defense of the executive order that halts people from seven   countries from coming into the U. S. and stops any resettlement of Syrian refugees. Over the weekend, a federal judge temporarily blocked the ban from taking effect. On Tuesday night, Washington v. Trump was heard before the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the Department of Justice argued that the president has wide purview over immigration and implementing national security measures and that the ban should be reinstated."
983,"Updated at 6:35 p. m. ET, On Thursday, a   panel of the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that upheld a lower federal court’s decision to temporarily block a Jan. 27 executive order on immigration. The order suspends   admissions for 120 days, bans Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocks travelers from seven   countries  —   Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia  —   for 90 days. The order also capped the total number of refugees allowed into the country this year at 50, 000, far lower than the 110, 000 that the Obama administration had allotted, as we’ve reported. In a tweet, President Trump signaled that his administration would appeal. On Friday, an administration official told NPR’s Tamara Keith that the White House is reviewing every option, including a possible appeal to the Supreme Court on the lower court’s temporary restraining order, and the administration is confident it will win on the merits of the case. The official also says the White House expects to issue other executive orders ”that will keep the country safe from terrorism.” Here are five key takeaways from Thursday’s   ruling: 1. White House DENIED,  From the judges’ ruling: ”[We] hold that the Government has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its appeal, nor has it shown that failure to enter a stay would cause irreparable injury, and we therefore deny its emergency motion for a stay. . .. ”For the foregoing reasons, the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal is DENIED.” Lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the ban on travelers from the seven countries needed to be reinstated as a matter of national security. The 9th Circuit panel did not accept that argument, writing, ”The Government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States.” 2. Administration’s ”shifting interpretations” didn’t help, The judges said the court could not ”rely upon” statements by White House officials about how the executive order would be implemented, given the changing initial statements about whom the order would affect. From the ruling: ”At this point, however, we cannot rely upon the government’s contention that the executive order no longer applies to lawful permanent residents. . .. Moreover, in light of the government’s shifting interpretations of the executive order, we cannot say that the current interpretation by White House counsel, even if authoritative and binding, will persist past the immediate stage of these proceedings.” Since the executive order was signed, different officials have offered varying guidance about whom it affects. For example, the initial word was that green card holders, those who are permanent legal residents in the U. S. would be barred, but the Department of Homeland Security later said green card holders could come and go if they obtained waivers. Last week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced that White House Counsel Don McGahn had issued ”authoritative guidance” and that green card holders ”no longer need a waiver because if they are a legal permanent resident they won’t need it anymore.” The judges also questioned how the federal government was making decisions on the implementation of the travel ban, writing, ”The White House counsel is not the president, and he is not known to be in the chain of command for any of the executive departments.” 3. Judiciary has authority to review Trump’s order, Attorneys for the Justice Department said both in briefings and during Tuesday’s oral arguments that courts lack the authority to review the president’s travel ban, as NPR’s Joel Rose reported. But the court wasn’t swayed by the argument that the president’s order is unreviewable. From the ruling: ”[T]he government has taken the position that the president’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections. . .. There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy. ”It is beyond question, that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action.” 4. States can challenge the ban, The states of Washington and Minnesota argued in their lawsuit that individuals, businesses and universities were directly hurt by the travel ban. ”For example, professors from the state university system who were overseas when that order took effect . .. could not get back into the country,” NPR’s Joel Rose reported. The judges agreed that the states had a right to challenge the president’s executive order on those grounds. An attorney for the Trump administration had argued on Tuesday that the states do not have standing to challenge the executive order because it was ”well within the president’s power.” From Thursday’s ruling: ”We therefore conclude that the states have alleged harms to their proprietary interests traceable to the executive order. The necessary connection can be drawn in at most two logical steps: (1) the executive order prevents nationals of seven countries from entering Washington and Minnesota (2) as a result, some of these people will not enter state universities, some will not join those universities as faculty, some will be prevented from performing research, and some will not be permitted to return if they leave.” 5. Religious discrimination claim wasn’t considered, The issue before the   panel was fairly narrow: whether or not to overturn the lower court’s temporary restraining order. The lower court’s decision was based in part on the states’ claim that the executive order discriminated against refugees on the basis of their religion, and in so doing violated the Constitution. While Thursday’s ruling didn’t really consider that issue, the   panel did acknowledge what it called the ”serious nature” of the religious discrimination claim: From the ruling: ”Washington also alleged that the Executive Order was not truly meant to protect against terror attacks by foreign nationals but rather was intended to enact a ’Muslim ban’ as the President had stated during his presidential campaign that he would do. ”The Government has not shown that it is likely to succeed on appeal on its arguments about, at least, the States’ Due Process Clause claim, and we also note the serious nature of the allegations the States have raised with respect to their religious discrimination claims. We express no view as to any of the States’ other claims.” Here’s the full text of Thursday’s ruling."
984,"President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will be spending their weekend getting to know each other at    in Palm Beach, Fla. And that’s really the purpose of the     club: to allow people to socialize at a spectacular estate built nearly a century ago by a wealthy heiress. The White House says the president will personally pick up the tab for his guest’s visit, thereby avoiding a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. That clause forbids U. S. officials from taking payments from foreign governments. Still, Trump will get something from the Abe visit: global attention to his exclusive club, which has fewer than 500 members. Robin Bernstein has been a member since the Trump club opened in 1995. ”It’s exquisite,” she says. ”Everything is done to perfection, from the imported stones from Europe. I don’t think Marjorie Merriweather Post spared any expense when she designed and had it built.” The magnificent home was built in the 1920s to be a  . With its   roof, arched doorways and soaring tower, it’s been described as a ”Moorish fantasy.” When Post, whose family made a fortune in the cereal business, died in 1973, she left her home to the federal government for use as a ”winter White House.” Several years later, the high expense of maintaining the property led the government to return it to Post’s foundation, and it was put up for sale. In 1985, Donald Trump became the buyer, picking up the estate and an adjacent beach property for some $10 million. Darrell Hofheinz, who covers real estate for the island’s paper, the Palm Beach Daily News, says Trump got a deal. ”If you can imagine 17 acres that has been really beautifully maintained,” he says. ”The house itself  —   the estimates ranged 124 rooms  —   the rooms have soaring ceilings. The stonework from the exterior is amazing. Plus, it has a tower.” From the tower, the view extends from the Intracoastal Waterway to the ocean, hence the name   . In Spanish, it means ”sea to the lake.” In 1995, Trump converted the residence into a private club with tennis courts, its own beach, a dining room and guest rooms for members. Recently, the club doubled the price of memberships to $200, 000. Trump also put in a ballroom, helping make the club a prime venue for Palm Beach society. Bernstein says, ”I’ve been to concerts there  —   Bocelli, Beach Boys, Kenny G, Jay leno. Throughout the years, it’s just been really fun.” Charities pay a hefty fee to hold their events at   . Hofheinz, of the Palm Beach Daily News, says, ”I think sometimes people forget that private clubs are open to make money, and that’s what President Trump opened the club to do.” For groups that hold fundraisers at    Trump’s presidency has created problems. The American Red Cross had to defend its decision to hold its event last week at the club. The   Cancer Institute is going ahead with its fundraiser later this month but is promising to avoid ”controversial venues” in the future. For Palm Beach residents, Trump’s decision to make    his ”winter White House” is a turning out to be a headache. Trump’s visit last weekend shut down the island’s main thoroughfare, paralyzing traffic and hurting businesses during the tony enclave’s peak season. The town’s former mayor, Jack McDonald, says locals are starting to understand what hosting a president means. ”I’ve actually seen some comments from members of the club who are very upset about what this has become. And it’s going to get worse,” he says. Palm Beach officials say they’re working to improve traffic when Trump is in town. And he’s doing his part. He’s putting in a helipad to get him from the airport to his estate without a motorcade."
985,"Updated at 2:30 p. m. ET, At a joint news conference Friday, President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought to shed any perceptions of mistrust between two countries that have been longtime allies. In no uncertain terms, both leaders upheld their friendly relations  —   both diplomatic and personal  —   as an alliance with a bright future. The U. S.  friendship is the ”cornerstone of peace and stability in the Pacific region,” President Trump told reporters gathered in the East Room at the White House. The news conference capped a morning of discussion between Trump and Abe in the Oval Office, and it anticipates a round of golf they plan to play Saturday at Trump’s    resort in Palm Beach, Fla. During Trump’s second visit from a foreign leader since taking office, both men covered some of the lingering questions Trump has raised about their countries’ alliance  —   from security agreements to monetary policy. ”Bilateral cooperation is essential,” Trump said  —   a point echoed later by Abe, who promised to ”deepen bilateral relations” by establishing a   dialogue by their respective   . Key to that cooperation, both leaders asserted, will be Japanese investment in the United States. That includes a promise from Abe that Japanese automakers will create jobs stateside, and that Japanese money and technical   will help the U. S. infrastructure spending promised by Trump  —   including a lighthearted pitch for the maglev trains that have become iconic in Japan. As NPR’s Elise Hu reports, that promise is part of a    Japan hopes to effect with regard to another key issue. ”To get the security Japan wants, Abe will present a package of ideas for investing as much as $150 billion into U. S. infrastructure, including   rail projects. President Trump made improving infrastructure a key campaign pledge.” Those issues of security, mentioned by Elise, were also brought to the fore Friday by both leaders. ”Thank you for hosting our armed forces,” Trump told Abe at one point  —   a shift in tone from his presidential campaign, during which Trump lamented that Japan and other allies ”do not pay us what they should be paying us, because we are providing a tremendous service and we’re losing a fortune.” Elise notes that U. S. Defense Secretary James Mattis also took a friendlier tack in his visit to the country last week, when he said that ”Japan has been a model of   of  .” On Friday, Trump similarly emphasized Japan’s security in the region, mentioning his ”very warm conversation” Thursday with Chinese Xi Jinping  —   and the good relations that may come of it  —   as being of   benefit to Japan. He and Abe both asserted the importance of ”freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, where Japan has been unnerved by perceived Chinese encroachment. Of course, even at a conversation nominally about   relations, Trump could not escape questions about his travel ban, which has been put on hold while a lawsuit works its way through federal court. On Thursday night, the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a temporary restraining order that suspended the ban. ”We will continue to go through the court process and, ultimately, I have no doubt we will win that particular case,” Trump told reporters Friday. He also suggested the administration would be announcing something related to ”additional security for our country”  —   though he did not clarify. Meanwhile, however, he was content to laud the ”good bond, good chemistry” he is developing with Abe. ”I’ll let you know if it changes,” Trump added, ”but I don’t think it will.”"
986,"Updated at 3:45 p. m. ET, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U. S. in December included a discussion of U. S. sanctions imposed by   Barack Obama, according to new reports that contradict what the White House has said about the matter. The sanctions included the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats when they were announced in late December, they drew a notably muted response  —   and no retaliation  —   from Moscow. Citing current and former U. S. officials, The Washington Post reports, ”Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were interpreted by some senior U. S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.” The question of the contacts’ legality largely rests in the Logan Act, which bans unauthorized U. S. citizens from communicating with a foreign government ”with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government . .. in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” The Logan Act was passed in 1799  —   but there are no recorded prosecutions under the law. It’s been known that Flynn had contacts  —   text messages and at least one phone conversation  —   with the Russian ambassador before President Trump’s inauguration. The White House has said nothing improper took place, although its explanations for those contacts have shifted. In an interview this week, Flynn twice flatly denied discussing sanctions with Kislyak, the Post says. But the newspaper adds that Flynn’s spokesman later gave a more nuanced response, saying that Flynn ”indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” The topic has evolved over time: When NPR’s Tamara Keith reported on the issue on Jan. 13, she said, ”Sean Spicer, the spokesman and incoming White House press secretary, insisted all of this contact happened before President Obama announced the retaliation, and, as a result, Obama’s move to expel 35 Russian diplomats wasn’t a topic of conversation.” Those sanctions were announced on Dec. 29 within hours of saying all of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak had taken place on Dec. 28, Spicer clarified to NPR that a phone call between Flynn and Kislyak had taken place ”around the same time” the retaliation was announced. As to whether the two discussed the U. S. sanctions   a potential Russian response, Spicer told Tamara it was ”doubtful.” After Obama imposed the sanctions, a retaliation seemed certain. Russia’s Foreign Ministry mocked the U. S. president online and recommended an   expulsion of 35 American diplomats. But Russian President Vladimir Putin said, ”We will not expel anyone”  —   and invited the children of U. S. diplomats to visit the Kremlin’s Christmas tree, as NPR’s Lucian Kim reported. Lucian added, ”Putin said in his statement he will work to restore  . S. relations based on the policies of incoming President Donald Trump.” On Sunday talk shows last month, when Vice President Pence was asked about the controversy, he said on CBS’s Face the Nation that it was ”strictly coincidental” that Flynn and the ambassador spoke around the time the sanctions were levied  —   and, he added, ”they did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.” Today, an administration official tells NPR and other news outlets that Pence had based his response on conversations he had with Flynn as he prepared to appear on the show. Responding to the most recent reports about Flynn, California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the allegation that Flynn might have secretly discussed ways to undermine U. S. sanctions ”raises serious questions of legality and fitness for office.” And if Flynn or other officials have misled the public about the matter, Schiff said, ”his conduct would be all the more pernicious, and he should no longer serve in this Administration or any other.” As the story of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak emerged last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence announced it would investigate allegations that Russia meddled in the U. S. elections the FBI has also been looking at the charges. The ranking Democrat on that Senate panel, Sen. Mark Warner, released a statement Friday saying the new reports ”underscore both the gravity and the urgency” of its investigation. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, who’s filing a story on the Flynn allegations for today’s All Things Considered, says she has reached out to senior Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence committees. Rep. Devin Nunes of California declined comment through a spokesman. As of Friday afternoon, she hadn’t heard back from Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina. Pence and others in the incoming administration dismissed reports that members of the Trump team had been in touch with Russian officials during the presidential campaign. Shortly after the election, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was quoted telling a news agency, ”I don’t say that all of them, but a whole array of them, supported contacts with Russian representatives.” Flynn’s relationship with Russia has drawn questions before  —   particularly after the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency shared a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala in Moscow for the   news channel Russia Today. On Friday, the Kremlin delivered a rather unenthusiastic denial of the Post’s story. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reports   TASS media, ”said his understanding is that ’there were certain conversations (between Flynn and Kislyak)’ though ’it is better to double check the information in the Foreign Ministry.” ”Other than that the information is not correct,” Peskov added, according to TASS. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly contributed to this report."
987,"President Trump and his top aides can’t seem to shake the Russian bear that follows them around. It put its paw on the scales of the U. S. presidential election last year, according to the U. S. intelligence community. It cost Trump his   manager, Paul Manafort. And now the connections between Trump’s camp and Moscow might mean that another top aide, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, could be sent off to Siberia  —   metaphorically. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff of California, said Friday that if reports are accurate about Flynn’s contact with Russia’s ambassador ahead of sanctions imposed by President Barack Obama late last year, ”he should no longer serve in this administration or any other.” If more Democrats  —   or, critically, Republicans  —   join Schiff in calling for Flynn to step down, Trump could have the first big staff crisis of his new presidency. How did we get here? What might happen next? Here are the five things you need to know about the unfolding imbroglio over Trump, Flynn and the Kremlin. 1. Mike Flynn’s conversation, The story begins before the Trump administration even took office, as the outgoing Obama administration was wrapping up a last bit of ugly and difficult business. Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered his intelligence agencies to wreak havoc in the U. S. presidential race, America’s top spies concluded. They did so by hacking into the email accounts of Democratic and former national security leaders and releasing what they stole. With the investigation concluded and the case made in public, Obama was under pressure to retaliate. He did so by expelling some Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover, closing sites they were using outside Washington and New York, and imposing economic sanctions on Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU another spy service, the FSB and their top leaders. Meanwhile Trump, Flynn and     Mike Pence and the administration in waiting were getting ready for the inauguration and their own assumption of responsibility. On Christmas Day, before Obama announced his punitive measures against Russia, Flynn communicated with Russia’s ambassador to the U. S. Sergey Kislyak. That they talked is not in dispute. The issue is what they said. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that their discussions included, if not a warning by Flynn about the pending new sanctions, a promise that whatever Obama did, Trump could undo once he was in office. If Flynn was negotiating with the Russians on behalf of an administration not yet in power, that could technically be against the law  —   though it’s a law no one has ever been prosecuted for breaking, the Logan Act. The conversations also expose the Trump administration to more charges about secret collusion with Moscow. A spokesman for Flynn told the Post that he didn’t remember all of what was discussed and that it’s possible sanctions might have come up. But on Jan. 15 Pence said categorically on CBS’s Face the Nation that Flynn and Kislyak did not talk about sanctions. 2. The Watergate rule, One of the oldest saws in Washington runs like this: ”The   is worse than the crime.” A senior administration official told NPR on Friday that Pence’s comments on Face the Nation were based entirely on the vice president’s discussion with Flynn  —   in other words, that Flynn owns the substance of what the White House said publicly in explaining his contact with the Russian ambassador. America’s intelligence services monitor the communications of foreign agents, and the detail about Flynn’s communication with Kislyak was reported (also in the Post) even before Trump took office. The Trump transition team said Flynn had only wished the ambassador Merry Christmas. Then the Trump camp said the two were making   arrangements for a phone call between Trump and Putin. The Trump team talked about an invitation from Moscow for the U. S. to join   peace talks about the war in Syria. The timing of the conversations, as Pence explained on television on Jan. 15, was ”strictly coincidental.” Now Flynn has said they may have talked about sanctions, but he doesn’t remember, and Pence is taking himself out of it, saying all of this is on Flynn. What also isn’t clear is what Trump might have known or when he knew it. Did Trump order that these conversations take place? Or was Flynn acting on his own? 3. What we don’t know, What hard evidence exists about any of this? The Washington Post and New York Times quote unnamed current and former national security sources who say they know what Flynn and Kislyak discussed  —   is there a transcript somewhere? A recording? Flynn’s explanation to the Post that he doesn’t remember the full discussion only raises eyebrows given that Putin responded to Obama’s démarche by taking the high road. Instead of retaliating by expelling Americans or taking other such measures, Putin did nothing. Is that because he knew he would get a better deal from Trump? ”It is regrettable that the Obama administration is ending its term in this manner,” Putin said at the time. ”Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family.” Trump weighed in on Twitter with praise for Putin, calling him ”very smart!” If the White House knows there is a recording, or a transcript or other information about Flynn’s contacts that substantiates the news accounts, Flynn could become too hot to handle. If it believes he can ride this out, it does not want to hand Democrats any kind of victory. 4. Palace intrigue, Trump’s White House team is still getting its sea legs. Trump is the unique president to never have held a government or military job and is still learning the basics of how the federal behemoth works even as he also tries to wield it to achieve his goals. Part of that unsteadiness is a scramble inside the president’s inner circle to determine who gets access to him and who has his imprimatur when acting with people outside the White House. Flynn, who had Trump to himself as national security aide during the presidential campaign, now has more competition from Defense Secretary James Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, chief strategist Steve Bannon and others. The leaks, responses and counterleaks in the press and on TV are the public face of an internal struggle for power. Compounding the difficulties for Flynn are resentments that may still be simmering against him across the Potomac River in the U. S. intelligence community. Obama fired Flynn after a chaotic run as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, during which he is said to have made enemies with his   in the Defense Department and at least one rival spy service: the CIA. Flynn appeared to get the last laugh when he befriended a presidential hopeful who won a surprise victory and brought him into the White House. But to the degree there are unsettled scores within the intelligence community, his troubles might not be over. 5. Where does it all lead?  Trump has never hidden his admiration for Putin or his public desire to improve America’s relationship with Russia. He  —   and voters  —   knew that Flynn had traveled to Russia after leaving his DIA job and had appeared on Russia’s   propaganda arm, RT. Americans accepted the outcome of the election as legitimate and many supporters welcomed what they viewed as the   disclosures by WikiLeaks of information stolen by Russia’s hackers. The political dilemma for Trump, however, is that Russia turns into a bad penny, popping up everywhere and never giving him room to maneuver on his own. Separately this week, Reuters reported that Trump didn’t know about the 2010 New START (strategic arms treaty) when he spoke to Putin on the phone  —   then denounced it anyway. The top U. S. commander in Afghanistan warned Congress about Russian meddling in Afghanistan, which he said was intended to undermine NATO. Russia has increased its military attacks in Eastern Ukraine. Trump risks appearing as though all he does is react to initiatives taken by Putin. The other political danger for the White House is losing control of the story. Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the news reports ”underscore both the gravity and the urgency” of his committee’s investigation into ties between Trump and Russia. And his colleague Chris Murphy,  . said separately he is glad at least one other investigation is taking place  —   the one being done by the FBI. NPR correspondents Tamara Keith and Tom Bowman contributed to this report."
988,"The sudden deportation Thursday of an Arizona woman who had regularly checked in with U. S. immigration authorities for years has prompted a stark warning from Mexico’s government. Mexican nationals in the U. S. now face a ”new reality,” authorities warned in a statement. ”The case of Mrs. [Guadalupe] Garcia de Rayos illustrates the new reality that the Mexican community faces in the United States due to the more severe application of immigration control measures,” the statement reads. ”For this reason, the entire Mexican community should take precautions and keep in touch with the nearest consulate, to obtain the necessary help to face this kind of situation.” Mexico is urging its citizens in the U. S. to ”familiarize themselves with the different scenarios they may face and know where to go to receive updated guidance and know all their rights.” Garcia de Rayos, 35, had lived in the U. S. for more than two decades and her two children are both U. S. citizens. The   has reported on the details of her case: ”In 2008, Garcia de Rayos was arrested while she was working at a water park, during a raid carried out by   County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. (Arpaio’s workplace raids have been challenged in court as unconstitutional the case is ongoing.) In 2009, she was convicted of possessing false papers. In 2013, ICE says, an order for her deportation was finalized. ”But Garcia de Rayos was allowed to continue to live in Arizona, under supervision and with regular   with ICE, as member station KJZZ reports.” That changed when she appeared for a   on Wednesday, as activists and supporters rallied outside the ICE office. The next day, she was deported to Nogales, Mexico. Her deportation is seen as a sign of President Trump’s more aggressive deportation priorities compared with Barack Obama. The former president had prioritized the deportation of people who were convicted of crimes such as aggravated felonies, terrorism or activity in a criminal street gang.   offenses were deemed lower priority. But Trump’s executive order on immigration, issued on Jan. 25, significantly broadens the government’s deportation priorities. It includes people in the U. S. illegally who ”have been convicted of any criminal offense,” ”have been charged with any criminal offense,” ”have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” or ”are subject to a final order of removal,” among other criteria. ”So certainly the scope of the executive order, if interpreted broadly, would be large enough to encompass most if not all of the unauthorized population,” Randy Capps of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute tells NPR’s Adrian Florido. Immigration advocates like Marisa Franco from the advocacy group Mijente fear that this is the start of a pattern. ”The battle lines have been drawn. We know that this case will be replicated in many places across the country,” Franco told reporters on a conference call. ”And we think it’s critically important for communities to take a stand.” Lawyers and activists say Garcia de Rayos’ deportation could make others in her position scared to speak with immigration authorities. In fact, her attorney Ray Ybarra Maldonado told Adrian that he will advise clients in the same position to seek sanctuary in a church. ”Or if you do show up, this is what’s going happen to you. But that’s gotta be the advice, because it’s no fun walking someone to the slaughter,” he said. Garcia de Rayos, flanked by her children, spoke to reporters in Nogales late Thursday. ”I’m doing this for my kids so they have a better life. I will keep fighting so they can keep studying in their home country,” she said, according to The Associated Press. ”We’re a united family. We’re a family who goes to church on Sundays, we work in advocacy. We’re active.” ”It’s a nightmare having your mother taken away from you,” her son Angel tells Fronteras. ”The person who is always there for you. Seeing her taken away in a bunch of vans like she was a huge criminal. It feels like a dream. But it’s reality and we have to face it. We have to keep on fighting for what we want. And yeah, we’re going to support our community and our mother. We’re going to keep on fighting.”"
989,"Migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean are sending more money to their families back home than ever before. These annual ”remittances”  —   as they’re called by analysts  —   topped $69 billion in 2016, according to central bank data compiled in a new report by the   Dialogue, a Washington, D. C.   . The money has been a lifeline for the national economies of many countries in the region since at least the 1990s, when Manuel Orozco, a political scientist who authored the report, first began tracking remittances. They climbed steadily since then, only to plummet when the Great Recession hit the U. S. economy in 2008. But they began to rise again in 2012. The 2016 tally is the highest amount on record and an increase of nearly 8 percent over 2015. About 40 percent of the money goes to just one country  —   Mexico  —   practically all of it sent by migrants in the United States. The recent surge is all the more notable because migration from Mexico has slowed to a crawl  —   with the number of migrants in the U. S. increasing by just 1 percent between 2010 and 2016 to a total of 11. 8 million. Also, says Orozco, the median amount that any given Mexican migrant sends hasn’t changed  —   about $300 at a go, 14 times a year, most commonly through a money transfer company such as Western Union. So what accounts for this surge in cash to Mexico? Orozco explains that a much larger share of Mexicans already in the United States are now wiring money back. In 2010 fewer than half of Mexican migrants sent money home. Today   do. Orozco can’t be sure why. Though he regularly does   surveys of Mexican migrants, ”I haven’t asked that question,” he notes. A possible explanation, he says, is that many Mexican migrants who would have gone back to Mexico are now staying put in the United States. His survey research indicates that from 2011 to 2016, the median length of time a Mexican migrant has lived in the United States increased from seven years to 12. Some migrants are deterred by rising violence back in their hometowns, says Orozco. Also, he says, for migrants who are in the United States illegally, stricter U. S. border enforcement under the Obama administration has raised the stakes of going home. Many now worry that if they leave the United States they’ll never be able to get back in. Whatever their reasons, Orozco posits that the fact that more Mexican migrants are remaining in the United States means many people who previously would have simply brought cash home in their pockets may now be sending it via money transfers. The growing importance of remittances is particularly significant in light of proposals that President Trump has floated to confiscate or otherwise target this flow in order to pressure Mexico into paying for an expansion of the border wall. During the campaign, Trump discussed various versions of the idea  —   including some that could potentially impact remittances to all countries, not just those to Mexico. As much as such a move would affect Mexico  —   for which remittances account for just over 2 percent of GDP  —   the ramifications could actually be greatest for the region’s poorest, most   countries. Remittances make up nearly 20 percent of GDP for Honduras and El Salvador, for instance. And in the case of Haiti they account for  ."
990,"When author Viet Thanh Nguyen was 4 years old, he and his family fled South Vietnam and came to the U. S. as refugees. That’s about the same age his own son is now  —   and Nguyen wonders if his child will ever know the feeling of ”otherness” that he knows so well. ”I think it’s a very valuable experience,” Nguyen tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro. ”I wish, not only my son, but everybody, had a sense of what it is like to be an outsider, to be an other. Because that’s partly what gives rise to compassion and to empathy  —   the sense that you are not always at the center of the universe.” The refugee and immigrant experience is central to Nguyen’s fiction, and he weaves pieces of his own story into his new short story collection The Refugees. Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2016. On how Americans didn’t want to accept Vietnamese refugees either, Every new refugee to a society  —   whether it’s to the U. S. or some other place  —   is subjected to fear. They are the new outsider population, the new other. People of all backgrounds have a short memory  —   so when it comes to the Vietnamese, Americans now tend to think of [them] as being a particularly successful minority or refugee population that’s assimilated fairly well. They forget that 40, 50 years ago Americans . .. did not want to accept these Vietnamese refugees who they saw as completely foreign. Now there are new foreigners, Syrians and other people from the Middle East, people of Muslim backgrounds and the sense among many Americans is: Wow these people are completely different from us and they are not like the Vietnamese who are much more assimilable. And I think that’s very, very doubtful. I think the majority of these new foreigners, if given the opportunity, will . .. be able to assimilate and deal with American culture. Right now we are subject to a kind of new xenophobia that prevents us from seeing that. On the two lives that all immigrants live, There’s that sense of duplicity  —   the sense that there’s something happening within the community, the ethnic community within the family home  —   and there’s a different life that’s being lived outside among Americans. You have to wear a different face when you’re interacting with the larger culture and you can be more of yourself at home, or in the local market, or in the local church, speaking your own language. That was my sense growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in San Jose, that I could totally see that my parents were different at home versus how they had to speak and how they had to comport themselves when they were with Americans. On his family’s immigrant experience, There’s one short story in The Refugees that is based on my family’s life and it’s the only piece I’ve written up until that point that incorporated anything autobiographical. . .. The story ”War Years,” about the child of refugee shopkeepers and what happens to that family  —   that is drawn very much from my life and the lives of my parents. It was a very difficult story to write because I think my parents lives are worthy of writing about. I don’t think my life is worthy of writing about. It is a dark story and that was pretty much what it was like to be a Vietnamese refugee in San Jose in the 1980s that the politics of the war was not won, the war was not finished. People might like to think the war is done when a ceasefire is signed, but for most people who live through a war, it goes on for decades.  On how politics follows immigrants to their new countries, In the 1980s the struggle in the Vietnamese refugee community was still very much over the fact that people thought the war could still be fought again. People were suspicious of the possibility of Communist infiltrators and that meant that there was a lot of fear in this community that your neighbor might be a Communist, that you better not be seen as a Communist. And on top of that, again, people were just trying to build their lives and yet they were still struggling under the shadow of trauma and the legacy of violence that they brought over with them. On how his son’s experience will differ from his own, I came over when I was four . .. my journey, my initiation into memory, into consciousness happened in the refugee camp in the United States in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa. So I’m very much defined by this refugee experience, of this sense of loss  —   of losing a country, of being separated from my parents once I came to the United States, and living a life of that I felt to be a life of privation even though my parents provided so many material things. I look at my son and he has pretty much everything he could possibly ask for and want for and I don’t wish to deny him those kinds of things  —   but that means he will have a vastly different sense of security, of place, of identity than I had when I was his age."
991,"The Environmental Protection Agency’s presence at an environmental conference in Alaska this week was cut in half, after the Trump administration’s transition officials ordered the change. The agency had helped to plan the Alaska Forum on the Environment  —   but days before it was to start, word came that half of the EPA’s 34 planned attendees wouldn’t be making the trip. ”We were informed that EPA was directed by the White House transition team to minimize their participation in the Alaska Forum on the Environment to the extent possible,” forum director Kurt Eilo says. The change has created awkward scenes at the conference, particularly at events meant to highlight the EPA’s role in Alaska, a state known for both its pristine ecosystems and its oil production. More than a thousand people attend the multiday event in downtown Anchorage each year, and the EPA is normally a major partner. This year, agency officials were scheduled to take part in about 30 sessions on everything from drinking water and sanitation in rural Alaska to climate change adaptation. In an emailed statement, EPA transition official Doug Ericksen says the decision to cut back is an effort to limit excessive travel costs. He says a review last week found that EPA spent $44 million on travel last year, including sending employees to 25 outside conferences. When officials learned that 34 employees were slated to attend the Alaska event, they slashed the number to 17. ”This is one small example of how EPA will be working cooperatively with our staff and our outside partners to be better stewards of the American people’s money,” Ericksen said. Some EPA staff whose plans to attend the conference were revoked would have come from Seattle or Washington, D. C.  —   but Eilo said others are based just blocks away from the downtown Anchorage site. Eilo himself was an EPA enforcement officer when he founded the Alaska conference two decades ago. He says this is the first time he can recall this happening. While he understands the impulse to review travel spending, he says the cutbacks also raise a red flag. ”There’s a lot of uncertainty among folks here at the forum,” Eilo said. ”There’s concern about the tribal programs, there’s concern about how we’re going to address things like climate change in the next upcoming administration.” As the Alaska Dispatch News reports, one panel discussion that was to feature six EPA staffers Tuesday instead included two EPA representatives. While the topic had originally been planned to center on the agency’s grant system, the officials instead fielded questions about changes at the EPA. The order to reduce staff numbers at the conference is the latest sign of a shift in priorities for the EPA under a new president. Days after President Trump’s inauguration, Ericksen said the agency’s scientists will likely need to have their work reviewed on a ”case by case basis” before it can be made public. On Thursday, the fourth day of the weeklong conference in Anchorage, attendees kicked snow off their shoes as they walked into the Dena’ina Center. Many were unaware that the EPA presence had been slashed. Organizer Elio acknowledges that the agency worked hard to minimize disruption from the change in plans. In the end, only one of the conference’s more than 100 sessions had to be canceled. The conference drew attendees who had flown in from Alaska’s rural communities where the EPA works with tribes to fund programs on drinking water, sanitation and trash collection. Breakout sessions focused on issues such as brownfield cleanup, emergency response and dealing with coastal erosion due to climate change. Billy Maines is the environmental coordinator for the Curyung Tribal Council in Dillingham, Alaska, who also serves as an adviser to EPA Region 10 on its tribal programs. He said the agency’s direct assistance to Alaska’s rural communities is vital. ”They’re trying to take up and clean up their dumps, landfills, trying to recycle and get what waste goes into their communities, out of their communities,” he said. Maines and others worry the cutback on conference attendees might be a sign of broader, and more painful, budget cuts to come. Trump’s nominee for EPA chief is Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general who has criticized  —   and repeatedly sued  —   the agency he’s now in line to lead. Pruitt’s nomination was advanced to the full Senate last week, after Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee refused to attend meetings that were meant to hold confirmation votes on Pruitt. During his confirmation hearing weeks earlier, Pruitt said his past actions had been made out of concern for his home state and that if he were to lead the EPA, his decisions would be dictated by ”the rule of law.” Pruitt, who has questioned climate change, also sought to answer critics who have faulted him for that stance, saying in a January hearing: ”Let me say to you, science tells us that the climate is changing and that human activity in some matter impacts that change. The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue. And well it should be.” Rachel Waldholz reports for Alaska Public Media."
992,"Science is knowledge. The practice of science is nothing more, and nothing less, than the earnest and thoughtful work of figuring things out, of trying to understand, of learning how things work. Scientists are people committed to this practice, or to a community of shared practice. They work together to understand. And understanding is a thing of immense power. If you understand why the car has stalled, for example, you can fix it. And if you know when the tide will ebb, you can escape the harbor. Science, thought of this way, is plural. It has shared tools, to be sure, such as observation, testing, the use of math and statistics. But science is as varied as the different phenomena that there are. The actual work of scientists in different fields  —   from protein crystallography to epidemiology to conservation biology to astrophysics  —   is splendidly varied. Some scientists I know are concerned about the generally   of scientific knowledge in America today. And they are downright   when they encounter, especially among politicians, people who challenge the value of science as a source of knowledge and, so, as having a role to play in policy deliberations. How can you decide what to do  —   how can you know where, when or how to intervene  —   if you don’t understand what’s going on? Science is knowledge. Why would you reject the good faith effort to understand? There is, however, a second meaning of the term ”science.” I am thinking of the industry of science and its institutions. Let’s call this ”Big Science.” Big Science is not just simply knowledge or the good faith pursuit of knowledge. Big Science is not only the handmaiden of policy, ready to serve in an advisory role. Big Science is, itself, the product of policy decisions. After all, funders choose to support some areas of research and not others. Moreover, a lot of research is not entirely disinterested. For example, a good deal of science is done in the pursuit of profit (e. g. in the drugs industry). I think we need to keep this in mind when we try to understand the widespread mistrust of science. I know many people, for example, who don’t trust research funded by the tobacco industry, or by the pharmaceutical industry. These doubters are not   they are not   in that sense. They question whether the science that is getting pushed is trustworthy, whether it is really the result of the   pursuit of knowledge rather than the ambitious drive to secure patents, for example. I know people who use homeopathic medicines. When I bring to their attention the fact that there is no good science supporting the effectiveness of such remedies, they respond with general anxiety that the drug testing industry is dominated by vested interests in the pharmaceutical industry. Again, it isn’t that they challenge science they mistrust Big Science. Big Science has somehow gotten a bad name. Again, this is what drives the   anxiety. While there is no doubt that there are ”science doubters” who irrationally speak out against vaccines, outright ignorance is playing a bigger role, as well as a general lack of education on risks. I wonder whether behind the irrational doubt, ignorance and fear of vaccines, there isn’t something  —   like a fundamental mistrust in the people in white coats  —   telling them it’s OK. Perhaps the problem is less the belief in bogus science about vaccines and this harm or that  —   and more the doubt about the impartiality of those who insist that there are not any such links. Ditto for genetically modified foods. Mistrust of Big Science seems to flourish at both extremes of our political community. I suspect that the mistrust that drives skepticism about GMO food, vaccines, and claims made on behalf of drug companies is the same mistrust of Big Science that leads some to dispute the claims of climate science, for example. The issue isn’t science. The issue is trust. Now, I am an unabashed admirer of science. Science is knowledge. Knowledge is good. I celebrate the culture that makes it possible to educate people to do what scientists do. And there is no doubt that science is of immense cultural value. Economic, military, commercial, medical. The U. S. is the power it is today in large measure thanks to its achievements in science and engineering since the middle of the last century. So, how do we combat popular mistrust of science? An obvious first step, it seems to me, is that science, or Big Science, would do well to own its past failings. There are ample examples of bad science, dangerous science. Race and gender have been allowed to play an insidious role in the history of medicine, even the very recent history, for example. From the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the use of black soldiers to test the effects of mustard gas. Or consider the case of Walter Freeman, inventor and popularizer of the transorbital (” ”) lobotomy as a treatment of mental illness he travelled around the country performing more than 3, 000 of these procedures. His mentor, Egas Moniz, who was one of the inventors of what came to be known as the lobotomy, was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine on the basis of this work in 1949. And we know that claims made on behalf of drugs by their manufacturers must be viewed cautiously. Also, the last few years have seen numerous scandals in science  —   from the Harvard psychologist who fabricated results to the growing appreciation that, at least in some regions of science, it has proved difficult to replicate findings. And then there is the fact that there are simply open problems. The problem of consciousness, for example, is widely thought to be one of the major outstanding problems facing science. The problem of consciousness, obviously, is a problem for biology. So there are mysteries at the heart of even an established science. And as my colleagues Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser here at 13. 7 have written, there are profound and unsettled questions about how to move forward and make progress in fundamental physics. This is not a bad thing! God forbid there were no more open questions. My point here is that we need to offer a   view of the fact that science has a history: It is a human endeavor and it is not without blemishes. But probably the best thing we can do to gain trust in science is just to do more science, to do it better, and to carry on. Science requires no apology. Science is not a special interest. Science is the honest pursuit of knowledge, after all. The alternative to science is ignorance. Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe"
993,"Updated at 7:40 a. m. ET, By the time Ceree Morrison found hundreds of pilot whales washed ashore on a remote beach in New Zealand 250 to 300 of them were already dead. The rest remained alive on Farewell Spit, a long strip of land that hooks from the country’s South Island into the sea. The scene was devastating. ”You could hear the sounds of splashing, of blowholes being cleared, of sighing,” Morrison told The Associated Press. ”The young ones were the worst. Crying is the only way to describe it.” All told, about 416 pilot whales had stranded at Farewell Spit before they were found Thursday night, the New Zealand Department of Conservation said in a statement. Even in a country with one of the highest stranding rates in the world  —   about 300 dolphins and whales a year beach themselves, according to marine conservation group Project Jonah  —   the DOC says this is the third largest single stranding ever recorded in New Zealand. Farewell Spit, in particular, is ”sometimes described as a whale trap,” the AP notes. ”The spit’s long coastline and gently sloping beaches seem to make it difficult for whales to navigate away from once they get close.” As the tide rolled in Friday, hundreds of volunteers in the region attempted to send the surviving whales back to sea, pushing them out as the water rose high enough to do so and forming a human chain to try to block them from returning to the beach. Of the survivors, about 50 successfully swam back into the bay, while about 80 to 90 were restranded, the DOC says. No single cause for strandings is known, Project Jonah says, though the group explains that some factors are thought to include navigational errors, injuries from sonar blasts or fishing nets, and strong social bonds that can draw whole pods to follow wayward individuals into danger. The AP reports that volunteers were able to refloat about 100 whales on Saturday. The wire service notes that some whales that were refloated on Friday beached themselves again, but the Saturday morning tide may keep the latest group at sea."
994,"In New Orleans, hundreds of families are trying to put their lives back together after a tornado touched down in New Orleans East on Tuesday. It tore up homes and businesses in a predominantly black neighborhood that was hit hard by Hurricane Katrina. People like Aretha Conley are hoping it will be easier to rebuild this time around. Conley and her husband saved for years to buy their house on Read Boulevard. They each worked two jobs and took out loans. Conley’s favorite place in her small,   home is the backyard. ”I love to barbecue,” she says. ”I love to give parties.” But now, her backyard is decimated. Tuesday’s tornado smashed down her fence, and pieces of her neighbor’s house are stuck in a tree. Half of her roof is gone, and the windows are busted out. She’s just thankful no one died. As cleanup workers drive loaders through the street, scooping up debris and fallen trees, Conley takes stock of the damage. ”Got up Tuesday, bring my granddaughter to school, going to work, thinking everything’s going to be OK,” she says. ”And come home to this.” When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Conley’s house took four feet of water. But she and her husband fixed it up and stayed put. They loved the neighborhood. There are a lot of people like her here it’s about 95 percent black. And that’s something State Sen. Wesley Bishop is proud of. He was at an emergency shelter where victims were sleeping on cots and picking up hot meals, water and cleaning supplies. ”Basically our black   you’ll find a lot of folks concentrated in New Orleans East,” he says. ”Mostly homeowners and things along those lines, who’ve just worked extremely hard.” But life changed after Hurricane Katrina. Many people moved away and never returned. And many businesses in this part of town never reopened. That makes life difficult for people like Conley. ”Like, the weekend when I want to go out to eat  —   me and my husband  —   we have to travel so far to go to eat because there’s nothing out here,” she says. There’s a   and some strip malls but not much else. And Bishop resents that. ”People shouldn’t have to go outside of this area to try to get the basic goods and services that they need,” he says. He’s worried after this recent tornado because he says his district didn’t get enough help from the government following Katrina. They got a few nice things, like help rebuilding schools and a big, beautiful sports and recreation facility. But the facility has been put to use as an emergency relief center, overflowing now with displaced families. Conley is staying with her daughter for now. They’re hoping it will be declared a federal disaster. ”I hope it’s better this time,” Conley said. ”I hope it’s real better.” And she hopes this time, it’s different. This time, she hopes New Orleans East gets the   help it needs."
995,"President Trump is defending the Jan. 29 Yemen raid, in which an American Navy SEAL was killed, as a ”winning mission.” He is also lashing out at Republican Sen. John McCain, who called the raid a ”failure.” Trump chastised McCain for talking to the media about it, saying it ”only emboldens the enemy,” and whacked McCain for not knowing ”how to win anymore.” The tweets come after almost a week of debate on the success or ”failure” of the raid. U. S. officials say they were able to gather helpful intelligence and that 14   militants were killed. But there were also multiple problems: The operation, the first authorized of the Trump presidency, also raises serious questions about the planning and   of the current occupant of the Oval Office, as well as the truthfulness of information coming out of the White House. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Feb. 2 that the raid was planned last November  —   under the Obama administration  —   and that the goal of the mission was to get information. But neither is true, NPR’s Tom Bowman reports. Rather, the specific place of this eventual raid was identified in November as one to focus on. (Other potential places were also identified.) ”The goal of the raid was ” Spicer said Tuesday, ”and that’s what we received, and that’s what we got. That’s why we can deem it a success.” But the U. S. would not send in SEAL Team Six, the premiere   commandos, to pick up some cellphones and computers, a U. S. official told Bowman. Part of the effort was to get top   in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, leaders. While more than a dozen militants were killed, a top target, Qassim   either slipped away or was not at the location. Rimi is the leader of AQAP, seen as a top recruiter and the    terrorist in the world. Bowman confirmed that Rimi was ”one of the objectives,” along with disrupting planning and plotting, in addition to collecting material. What’s more, a U. S. official expressed concern that Trump made the decision over dinner. This should have been decided with rigorous debate in the Situation Room, the official said. Many remember the iconic photo released by the White House of former President Obama surrounded by advisers during the raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. The concern with the Yemen raid is the impression that this decision was made too cavalierly. ”Everything that could go wrong did” Last week, the New York Times reported that ”almost everything that could go wrong did” in the raid. NPR reported that it was ”described as chaotic” by local residents and it is under investigation by the U. S. military. Spicer, however, said it was ”a successful operation by all standards.” McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, though, characterized the raid as a failure. That led to another defense by Spicer on Tuesday. He called it ”highly successful. It achieved the purpose it was going to get  —   save the loss of life that we suffered and the injuries that occurred.” On Wednesday, he went further, swatting at McCain, and claimed an apology was due. ”I think anybody who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and [does] a disservice to the life of Chief Owens,” Spicer said. McCain responded with an anecdote from his time serving during the Vietnam War, during which he was held as a prisoner of war for more than five years: ”Unfortunately, the prison had been evacuated. But the brave men who risked their lives in an effort to rescue us prisoners of war were genuine American heroes. Because the mission failed did not in any way diminish their courage and willingness to help their fellow Americans who were held captive. Mr. Spicer should know that story.” McCain’s daughter Meghan leapt to Twitter to defend her father Thursday. Trump has taken on McCain before, showing little respect for McCain’s service. Despite McCain’s years as a tortured POW in Vietnam, Trump questioned McCain’s American hero status. ”I like people who weren’t captured,” Trump said in July of 2015, shortly after announcing his run for the presidency. The New York Times, citing U. S. officials, also reported, ”Yemen has withdrawn permission for the United States to run Special Operations ground missions against suspected terrorist groups in the country. . ..” The AP, however, citing an official statement from Yemen’s foreign minister,     didn’t go as far. Mekhlafi called for a ”reassessment” of the raid, but he said it was ”not true” that there was a demand for a halt in U. S. operations. ”Yemen continues to cooperate with the United States and continues to abide by all the agreements,” Mekhlafi said. Spicer contended at Wednesday’s briefing, ”American lives will be saved because of it. Future attacks will be prevented.” That may be how the raid is ultimately judged. The binary choice of success or failure in this instance is a false one. But the raid clearly did not go as planned  —   and the public posture of the White House does not indicate it sees lessons to be learned for the future."
996,"When last spotted in his indigenous habitat, John Oliver was sharing his perception of 2016 and what was to come: a dystopian hellscape. All for laughs. Or largely for laughs, anyway. The    British comedian is host of HBO’s   Last Week Tonight, and he embarks on a new season on Sunday night after a   layoff. In an interview with NPR, Oliver reluctantly concedes that President Trump will define the shows this season. Oliver carries a distinctly liberal sense of humor and a distinctly serious sense of purpose about his satire in an age when politics, journalism and entertainment have often not just blurred definitions but have swapped numbers, apartment keys and Netflix passwords. Which leads him to such topics as opioid abuse, sketchy credit report company practices, pharmaceutical pricing, school segregation, Brexit, corruption in international soccer. ”If you described that, you wouldn’t watch it,” Oliver says. ” ’Look, here’s 20 minutes on civil forfeiture.’ That’s a hard pass for me.” Oliver says he’s trying to make comedy out of worthwhile subjects, generally apart from the politics in play. ”We want to look at the issue and its components first, and then much later on, maybe cast an eye on the politics attached to that issue,” he says. In the interview, Oliver talks about the ”alchemy” that occurs when he knits together the work of his comedy writers and his researchers (drawn from such journalistic outfits as The New Yorker magazine and the investigative site ProPublica) why facts matter more to him as a comedian than the president he’s about to lampoon the importance of Jon Stewart to his career (”the L. Ron Hubbard to my Tom Cruise”) and what truly gives him joy on the air. On what’s funny, There are some things that will always be funny. Teenagers falling off skateboards: funny. Nut shots: funny. Breaking wind: funny. The world cannot change those. Those three things are columns upon which humor is built. . .. When I heard that Hitler had problems with flatulence, it’s funny. Does that make him a funny man? No. It means he had funny moments when his rear end was speaking louder than his mouth. Now in terms of what is funny in terms of politics, that is a much more complicated question. . .. Sure, that’s going to be my world for the rest of this year. On facts and Trump  I care about facts the way I care about oxygen and imbibing enough water a day to live. Everybody should care about facts. That is something all of us should agree on. That is what we’re wrestling with at the moment [with President Trump] right? It feels interminable to kind of talk about in theory other than to say we’re trying, we’ll give it a go, and we’ll see. It affects everything. . .. [There] is a long, revolting history of politicians wanting to use facts in a misleading way, or in the best way to advance their agenda. This I think is different. This isn’t just misleading, this is turbocharged. And the thing I’m much more concerned about is his sweeping dismissal of the press, which is not us, right? It’s not comedy. . .. Because the media is a very convenient scapegoat at the best of times. But it is going to need to be rigorously defended because we are about to need it more than we have done in quite a long time.  On what works for the show, We generally traffic in things that are not immediately funny, right? We will bring a joke to something. So lots of the stories that we have focused on are not funny at the first, second, or 34th glance. Really, you know, whether it’s like chicken farmers or encryption or multilevel marketing  —   these are not immediately funny stories. Our job is to make them funny. . .. When we feel we’re doing what do what we do best, it’s highlighting stories that perhaps are   or have been   and where we can show people things they haven’t seen before. . .. One of the things that we looked at last year was the fiduciary rule in retirement savings, which, again, sounds like not a half an hour of television that you would be anxious to fall over yourself to watch. . .. Lots of the issues that we’re most attracted to are relatively timeless, right? They’re not necessarily issues that have been thrown up that week. And the problem with the electoral process being so long is that everything is presented as being a binary choice between two political parties. And that’s obviously absurd. But issues are far more complicated and there’s often much more overlap between two sides that could occasionally be diametrically opposed.  On why Oliver delayed satirizing Trump in the 2016 election cycle, The problem is it’s  . A presidential campaign sucks all the oxygen out of people’s attention span. And there was a lot more interesting things happening than presidential politics in 2014. . .. We didn’t want to get sucked into just reacting to what people were lazily talking about on the television because it was easy  —   the horse race. So the Sunday before Super Tuesday we wanted to make the case that if Donald Trump wins Super Tuesday, history points to the fact he will be the Republican candidate, at which point he is a significant political figure. We need to reckon with that. . .. Then we wanted to start engaging seriously with his policies. So we did a episode on the wall [along the border with Mexico]. He said he’s going to build a wall. You should take that seriously. This is now a significant political figure. How much is that going to cost? It’s going to cost a lot more than he says it’s going to. How effective it’s going to be? It’s going to be a lot less effective than he claims. . .. Right now, you might think he’s not going to build the wall. I don’t know what would make you think he’s not going to do it. On why his comedy fails without reporting, [It’s] like alchemy. That’s the ingredients with which we make this show. . .. At its best, you’re taking depth of research and then writers who can find a way to articulate that immensely complicated information in a funny, palatable way. . .. We rigorously   absolutely every single thing in the show. Not just the things that you see over my shoulder, not just any statistic that you see in a clip on screen, but, you know, we independently   everything that appears as a fact. So if there is someone saying on TV, ”I was screwed over by a car loan company because I signed this loan,” we will speak to the local news source to say, ”Does the person have documentation for that? Did you get it? If they don’t, or they don’t know, we will try and find that person and if we can’t back it up we won’t use it. So we are we are   so deeply, down the process  —   way more deeply than anybody needs to care about, other than the fact that it matters to me, and to all of us that we do it because you can’t build jokes on sand or they collapse. . .. If you’re talking about important things that’s the very baseline of what you should be doing. . .. Any joke is worthless if it’s built upon a lie. . .. Sometimes we’re taking swings so big that if we get something wrong we’re in serious trouble. . .. If we get something wrong there that’s going to be the last show we ever do. On Jon Stewart’s influence, I started doing   in college and writing comedy and I loved it. And then at some point I wanted to start blending what I really cared about and what I loved doing the most. And so that was politics  —   not necessarily in the party politics sense of the word. One of the people I admired most in the world at that point was Jon Stewart. And so he was the gold standard in my head of what you could do with comedy about the news. . .. There was a lot of horrendous versions of The Daily Show in England, but not resembling what he was doing in terms of . .. quality. And so to get hired by him was kind of to be hired by like some version of a hero or a mentor. . .. I kind of learned at his feet. He is the L. Ron Hubbard to my Tom Cruise  —   let me immediately retract that comparison. On being called boring by Trump, By any rational metric, I am boring. [He claimed] we invited him multiple times to be a guest on our show and he would never appear on our very boring, very   show and the second half of that is an opinion. Again, I’ll probably agree more than I disagree with him there. But the first half is just demonstrably a lie. And I think even in one of our stories last year, we tried to articulate just how confusing it is to be on the receiving end of a lie that confident, because he seemed absolutely sure. And I was as sure that I had never invited him. But then I wanted to check. . .. It was just a totally empty lie which doesn’t matter at all, except for the fact that person with the tendency, the tenacity and the confidence to make that lie is now leader of the free world and has the ability to lie about things that matter a lot more than appearing as a guest on someone’s very boring, very   show. On what brings him joy, The most joyful our show ever gets I think is when we traffic in   stupidity. So whenever we’re able to waste HBO’s resources to a borderline shameful extent, that is where we’re really happy. . .. Building an entire   Supreme Court for dogs, that made me so happy that so many adults with real talent and applying real time to that decided to build this for no reason other than the fact that we thought it was funny. And . .. that set was so beautiful  —   I can’t tell you how intricate and beautiful it was and how long it took to get each dog in the outfit and get the fake paws out. And it was so funny. So I guess at its root that is where we are the happiest: whenever we do something so magnificently silly that you can’t quite believe you’re getting away with it."
997,"On Wednesday morning, a Red Cross staffer in Afghanistan pushed his vehicle’s panic button. Three Red Cross vehicles were heading to meet up with a convoy of trucks carrying ”winter feed”  —   food for livestock  —   in the remote northern province of Jowzjan in Afghanistan. The plan was for the Red Cross staff to help distribute the 1, 000 tons of feed, which is critical for farmers. In the winter, there’s nowhere for their animals to graze. Before the vehicles got to the distribution point, they were ambushed by armed men. The panic button sent an alert to Red Cross offices in Kabul, but efforts to reach the staffers by satellite phone and other means failed. ”We couldn’t get hold of them,” says Thomas Glass, head of communications for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan. Eventually, community elders, who keep in touch with the Red Cross office in Kabul, reported what little information they had. Six Afghan nationals were shot and killed  —   the driver of each vehicle and field staff accompanying them. Two additional field staff are missing the Red Cross is ”desperately” searching for them, says Glass. To learn more, we spoke to Glass, age 37, a Swiss national who’d worked in the country from 2010 to 2012 and returned to Kabul for his current tour of duty in October. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. What do you know about the attack? It’s extremely hard to have exact information. We don’t know the number of men, we don’t know the motives, we don’t know who is behind this. An Afghan official in the area said it was a group with ties to ISIS. We actually don’t know. We don’t have confirmation. Is there any chance this was just a random occurrence, that the attackers didn’t realize they were attacking Red Cross vehicle? The vehicles are clearly marked. This has all the signs of a deliberate attack. Red Cross workers have been attacked before in Afghanistan. But the loss of 6 lives at one time seems like another level of violence. It’s definitely a step further. We have 30 years of continuous presence in Afghanistan. So we are   we are respected for our work. To have such a despicable attack, it’s shocking. We’re completely devastated. We’re having a hard time understanding why and how this happened. How do you decide if it’s safe to send out staff in an area where there’s conflict? We communicate with all parties in the conflict, all the weapon bearers. We notify them. We receive security guarantees. If it’s not safe to go, we don’t go. If it is deemed safe enough, we will try. The Red Cross has a full plate in Afghanistan, supporting health care,   work, sanitation efforts and much more. The ICRC has now issued a statement that activities are suspended until Tuesday  —   and possibly longer. Certain activities, such as the treatment of patients at medical facilities, will continue. But any movement in the field, including the transfer of   to hospitals, is on hold. Do you think the Red Cross might pull out of Afghanistan? We have to regroup, to get a sense of what happened  —   and how to continue our work without jeopardizing the safety and security of our staff. It’s clear that we’re not leaving Afghanistan. We are here for the Afghan people. So many innocent people are trapped by this conflict. We can’t leave them behind, that’s for sure. NPR experienced a loss in Afghanistan last year, when photographer David Gilkey and interpreter Zabihullah Tamanna were killed. And Afghanistan has the most attacks on aid workers per year  —   101 attacks in 2015. What do you make of this?  It’s not just in Afghanistan. War and conflict brings out the worst in people. And the work of humanitarian workers and journalists has become increasingly not just difficult but dangerous. We’ve seen more and more deliberate targeting of aid workers and journalists. Does a tragedy like this make it hard to sleep? These last few days have been so incredibly intense that as soon as my head hits the pillow I’m out. But I’m up at 4. The six victims were Afghan nationals. What has the reaction been among Afghans? What strikes me most is the resilience of the Afghans and the Afghan colleagues. This attack reinforces the belief that we need to continue our work, in the name of our deceased colleagues we need to persevere. Is there any one interaction with an Afghan that stands out? I went to a shop, and the shop owner come up to me, shook my hand and embraced me, shared his condolences and told me, ”This is not the true Afghanistan.”"
998,"There’s a vibrance to the current music of Esmé Patterson that I wasn’t expecting, having listened to her previous band Paper Bird. Gone are the banjos and remnants of folk music, and in their place are electric guitars  —   sometimes fierce and, here at the Tiny Desk, somewhat understated. She’s a relative newcomer to the guitar, making it part of her songwriting only since leaving Paper Bird. But all of this instrumentation is meant to be supportive, not  . At the heart of these songs, from her album We Were Wild, is a reach for independence: I can’t sit still ’cause I’m no mountain, I can’t sit so still ’cause I’m no mountain, I can’t sit still forever, I’m no mountain, I’m human, I’m human  If there’s a thread that ties Patterson’s songs together, it’s discovering who you are and standing strong. She’s doing that well  —   with a powerful and sensitive band that’s got her back. We Were Wild is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon) Esmé Patterson (vocals, guitar) Alex Koshak (drums) Jeremy Averitt (bass) Jake Miller (lead guitar) Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin Videographers: Niki Walker, Morgan Noelle Smith, Bronson Arcuri Production Assistant: A Noah Harrison Photo: NPR. For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast."
999,"Like many awards shows, the Grammys are about more than just honoring artistic achievement: They’re also about anointing ambassadors for a music industry that’s forced to evolve as quickly and constantly as trends and technology mandate. Of course, the awards also attempt to represent dozens of   genres, from traditional pop to EDM to country to jazz to Latin music to classical to rap and beyond. The farther the Grammys stray from artists who dominate the mainstream cultural conversation   Top 40  —   your Adeles and Beyoncés and Chainsmokerses  —   the more narrowly they’ve historically cast their lot. Which is how an artist like modern bluegrass   Alison Krauss can become the most awarded singer in Grammy history with 27 trophies to her name when the Grammy voters think of bluegrass and   music, they think of Krauss and a handful of others rather than beating the bushes or scanning the press for discoveries. Same goes for Bonnie Raitt and blues in the early ’90s, or Metallica and metal for decades. When the Grammys decide that an artist qualifies as a genre ambassador  —   and, by extension, an industry ambassador  —   the trophies tend to pile up by the literal armload. Nowhere is the phenomenon of ambassadorship more easily spotted than in country music, which typically  —   but not always  —   merits at least one annual spot in the   Best New Artist category. There, it’s possible to get a clear read on whom the industry at large views as the face   future of country. In the past five years, the category has produced nominations for The Band Perry (2012) Hunter Hayes (2013) Kacey Musgraves (2014) Brandy Clark (2015) and Sam Hunt (2016) and this year features two choices in Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris. (No country artist has actually won the award since the Zac Brown Band in 2010.) Less frequently, an anointed country    —   setting aside Taylor Swift, who used to more evenly straddle the worlds of country and pop  —   turns up as an Album Of The Year nominee, like Lady Antebellum in 2011 and Chris Stapleton last year. But in 2017, Album Of The Year offers up the Grammys’ grandest country surprise in recent years. Many could have predicted Best New Artist nods for Morris and Ballerini  —   both of whom share some pop crossover appeal  —   but few anticipated Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth competing against four of the year’s true juggernauts: Adele’s 25, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Justin Bieber’s Purpose and Drake’s Views, all of which dominated A Sailor’s Guide To Earth (and most other records, for that matter) in sales, airplay or streams last year. Though Bieber got the lion’s share of the blame  —   as Bieber so often does  —   for keeping David Bowie’s Blackstar out of contention, Simpson’s record is the real dark horse here. Given how often the Grammys’ chosen genre ambassadors meet at a safe midpoint between critical acclaim and sales success, Simpson’s nomination  —   for a record that’s barely nudged country radio’s playlists, and for an artist who’s taken hard public swipes at the Nashville establishment  —   is a remarkable and welcome surprise. Maybe the Kentuckian’s philosophical and occasionally psychedelic musings drift far enough afield from country to qualify as rock and roll his Metamodern Sounds In Country Music was, after all, nominated for Best Americana Album in 2015. (For what it’s worth, A Sailor’s Guide To Earth is up for Best Country Album this year, nominated against Brandy Clark, Loretta Lynn, Maren Morris and Keith Urban.) But if Sturgill Simpson has become this year’s topmost anointed country ambassador, he’s done so without the full embrace of the Nashville establishment  —   and that makes his Album Of The Year nomination truly, well, bold. Ballerini or Morris could just as easily have taken that spot, and it wouldn’t have shocked very many people. So, can Sturgill Simpson  —   already arguably the Grammys’ biggest surprise this year  —   pull the biggest upset of all and actually close the night with an Album Of The Year trophy in his hand? It’s unlikely, but it sure isn’t impossible. Consider the last time Beyoncé was up for this award, back in 2014: She was up against three other massively popular   in Sam Smith (like Adele this year, considered a frontrunner) Ed Sheeran (like Bieber, a massive pop star) and Pharrell Williams (like Drake, a ubiquitous   presence). The winner that year? Beck’s Morning Phase, a languid dark horse with appeal for the Grammys’ older and more   voters. Given the likelihood that Adele, Beyonce, Bieber and Drake cannibalize each other’s voting blocs, history could well repeat itself Sunday night. If he pulls off that upset, Sturgill Simpson will be more than just country music’s latest   ambassador. He’ll become, at least for a while, the biggest story in music."
1000," ’s relationship with the Grammys began with a mutual dis. The year was 1989 and the Recording Academy, in recognizing the genre for the first time, decided rap’s revolution would not be televised. Will Smith, then known by his stage moniker the Fresh Prince, took it as a ”slap in the face,” the rapper said at the time. He and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s cuddly hit ”Parents Just Don’t Understand” went on to win the inaugural rap performance category, beating out industry peers J. J. Fad (”Supersonic”) LL Cool J (”Going Back to Cali”) Kool Moe Dee (”Wild Wild West”) and    (”Push It”). But they weren’t present to collect their award. Along with LL and    Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince boycotted the big show. Nearly 30 years later, the Grammy Awards have yet to get hip (replacement surgery). The bad rap is warranted when it comes to the Academy’s   failure to acknowledge the genre’s most deserving acts. The only thing worse than the blatant omissions over the years has been the clueless inclusions  —   particularly in the   history of the best rap album category. Exhibit A: It took OutKast three classic LPs to earn a nomination (not including the group’s debut, released before the category was introduced in 1996) yet in 2015 the   Iggy Azalea got a nod fresh out the box. And poor Macklemore. The dude is still living down his 2014 win over Kendrick Lamar’s classic   debut, Good Kid, M. A. A. D. City. He apologized to Lamar for that win this year, he declined to even enter the race for his   album, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, for consideration. Swayed by commercial juggernauts and great white hype more often than critical acclaim or street fame, the stars rarely align to produce such undisputed winners as Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP) Kanye West (College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy) or Lamar (To Pimp a Butterfly). But this year may be different. Despite a wack record of consistency, the rap albums category casts a wider net than years past. Plus, it summarizes one of the biggest trends in the industry. In wildly divergent ways, five of the six nominees  —   Drake, Chance the Rapper, West, DJ Khaled and De La Soul  —   collectively tell the story of  ’s digital dominance and disruption in 2016. One thing’s for certain: They don’t want DJ Khaled to win. When the radio    made the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek last March, the online headline read, ”How Snapchat Built A Business By Confusing Olds.” Khaled, then 40, appeared in the accompanying photo looking slightly perplexed himself. Becoming the King of Snapchat is a #majorkey to Khaled’s nomination. With a personality as seismic as his anthems, the radio    gained around six million followers in six months. He posted everything on the social media network from ”major key” affirmations to his misadventures while temporarily lost at sea one night on a jet ski. By fashioning himself into a ubiquitous digital presence, he expanded his fanbase and attracted a younger demographic. It’s translated to real currency in today’s attention economy. Already bigger than life in   he suddenly became recognizable by soccer moms  —   and surely some of the Recording Academy’s voting bloc. It reflects a new industry reality in which music is viewed less as viable product than promotional. In such an environment, the king of   is already the winner. Bless up. If history is any indicator, Drake’s a  . The Grammys love a crossover star. And nobody crossed over in 2016 like the Golden Child. The numbers don’t lie and he racked them up across multiple platforms. In addition to being named the   artist in Spotify history last year  —   with more than 4. 7 billion streams in total  —   Views and ”One Dance (feat. Wizkid  Kyla)” reached No. 1, respectively, on Apple Music’s top albums and songs lists for 2016. Those rankings further magnify  ’s distinction as the most popular genre in the world, according to analytics released by Spotify in 2015. The album cover of Views, featuring Drake sitting atop Toronto’s Canadian National Tower may have turned out to be a photoshop fake job, but the 6 God’s digital reign is real. No one in this category had a crazier year than ’Ye. The   tour rants. The wifey Kim K’s diamond heist. The blue contacts and rainbow sherbet hair dye. The speculation fueled over his mental state. The hospitalization attributed to exhaustion. And, lest we forget, the puzzling Donald Trump photo op. Dude was all over the place. Maybe we should’ve seen it coming, considering the erratic and unprecedented rollout of The Life of Pablo. By design or disaster, Kanye wound up creating a new paradigm for digital albums: the neverending    enabled by access restricted to streaming platforms. Leave it to the producer whose signature sound revolved around manipulated soul samples to stretch the limits of streaming technology. ”Ima fix wolves,” he tweeted the day the album was released exclusively on big bro Jay Z’s Tidal platform. Little did we know at the time that his tinkering  —   whether substituting a new chorus here, or adding a new song there  —   would amount to a listening experience as annoying as it is groundbreaking. Kanye’s   approach to patching together an album well beyond its release date extended the life of the project. ”Life of Pablo is a living breathing changing creative expression. #contemporaryart,” he tweeted a month later. No doubt. As the first artist of any genre to receive a Grammy nomination for a   release, Chance the Rapper has already made history. He’s up for seven awards, including best rap album, though Chance prefers to call Coloring Book a mixtape. It’s more than semantics. The distinction between the two has blurred in recent years as artists such as Drake and Future have released mixtapes that contractually count as studio albums. For too long, the culture allowed industry dictates to distinguish a mixtape of original material from an album simply because a major label wasn’t profiting from the product. But with mixtapes increasingly surpassing the quality and popularity of label releases, thanks in part to their availability via digital distribution channels, the industry is trying to get in where it fits. The funny thing is how Chance, who shows no signs of relinquishing his independence, has become a digital darling. His   exclusive stream on Apple Music made Coloring Book the first   album to crack the Billboard 200. Instead of making money from album downloads, he relies on tours, merchandising and deals with the likes of Apple to generate revenue. He’s designed a new blueprint for artistic control while simultaneously being the populist favorite. The Recording Academy literally rewrote its rulebook for him, so his chance of winning is pretty strong. De La Soul’s first new album release in 12 years has the honor of being the first digitally crowdfunded   album to earn a Grammy nod. The group raised $600, 000 via Kickstarter, six times more than its original asking price. The oldest act in the category, De La’s inclusion is ironic for altogether different reasons. This is the same group whose classic back catalog remains in limbo, unavailable on digital platforms, due to the prohibitive costs associated with their classic   LPs. De La’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, contains more than 60 samples, and those that were cleared were done so via agreements that predate digital streaming. Making them legal for today’s market could require costly renegotiations with copyright holders that Warner Music, current owner of De La’s back catalog, has declined to pursue. To add another wrinkle, the group produced And the Anonymous Nobody by recording 200 hours of material from their road band, Rhythm Roots Allstars, then sampling it to construct backing tracks. You’d almost have to be a De La fan to appreciate the unintended wit. Oddly enough, the wild card in this category isn’t a digital disruptor at all, but an artist whose release pretty much followed the traditional model. Easily among the top rap albums of 2016, Schoolboy Q’s Blank Face LP is also a breakout release for Q, an MC whose evolution has been woefully overlooked in part because his TDE labelmate, Kendrick Lamar, has emerged as the most important rapper of his generation. But being ”the yin to Kendrick’s yang,” as Pitchfork called him upon the release of his latest LP, comes across in superb fashion on Blankface. He’s a   gangsta with a sense of humor and   honesty. In a sense, a win for Schoolboy could be viewed as a win for the entire vanguard of   underrepresented artists who found ways to circumvent the mainstream in 2016  —   from Detroit’s trippy outlier Danny Brown to Atlanta’s rising   21 Savage to Chance the Rapper collaborator and Chicago ingenue Noname. Then again, I’d be less surprised if Schoolboy decided to play hooky from the Grammys altogether."